Now, this is plain, but it is also perilous. The expedient is here allowed to supersede not merely the patriotic, but also the truthful. If the object aimed at, which may be to screen successful villany, or shelter even a murderer from punishment, can be accomplished—all is reckoned fair. Truth may be compromised; honest witnesses browbeaten or bewildered; and the beautiful transparency of one upright man’s intercourse with another turned into mockery, or treated with derision. Lawyers not a few have proved, by their offences against truth and the sacred obligations of man to man, that it is only too congenial to their liking thus to trample truth in the dust. They feign “pity, indignation, moral approbation, or disgust or contempt, when they neither feel anything of the kind, nor believe the case to be one that justly calls for such feelings; they are led also occasionally to entrap or mislead, to revile, insult, and calumniate persons whom they may, in their heart, believe to be respectable persons and honest witnesses,” and such putting of bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter, must involve a woe. INIQUITY
SYSTEMATIZED. It cannot fail to warp the conscience and becloud the mind; and the man who does not feel the danger of such ways, is already their dupe or their victim. One has pertinently asked the learned and the noble who patronize these outrages against truth, while yet they profess to be Christians, how they can reconcile the two. There is a religion which says that ‘lying lips are an abomination to the Lord;’ and how can men, it is asked, avoid the solemn scriptural denunciation, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter; ... who justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him.”[34]
LORD BACON.
LORD
BACON. Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of the injurious effects of such habits upon the heart and mind is found in the case of Lord Chancellor Bacon—
“The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.”
This is not the place to tell of his learning, his world-wide fame, his greatness as a philosopher who revolutionized science, and certainly introduced a new era in the history of man. His eloquence as a pleader, and the stately majesty of his thinking, place Bacon high among “the starry lights of genius.” He is in philosophy what Shakespeare or Milton is among poets.
And yet, that man so gifted and transcendant, was guilty of actions which equal in turpitude aught that is recorded in the history of human weakness. Whether we are to ascribe it to the discipline of his profession, fostering some inborn tendencies to what is disreputable and degrading, we do not tarry to inquire; but looking at the fact which history renders too unquestionable, we have in this illustrious philosopher but unscrupulous man, a painful exhibition of man’s native weakness when the heavenly lamp is shaded or extinguished. Some have explained the low morality of Bacon by supposing that he was an infidel, and some of his reputed works rather favour the supposition.[35] But his productions as a whole forbid us to adopt that solution, and we are consequently left with an example of a most painful kind, to prove the worthlessness of powers the most colossal, of learning and originality unsurpassed, of gifts the most varied and transcendent to keep man in the path of virtue, when the heavenly guide is abandoned. We can only enumerate in a catalogue some of the incidents in the life of Bacon which establish these conclusions.
“MEN OF HIGH DEGREE ARE A LIE.”
At a critical period, he received from the Earl of Essex, when that nobleman was in favour with Queen Elizabeth, a gift of land which was worth at least £1800. Yet against his benefactor, Bacon afterwards enlisted his great powers, to convict him of high-treason; and that merely to purchase the Queen’s favour, and promote the philosopher’s advancement. “Bacon spent the ten days which elapsed between the commitment of Essex to the Tower and his arraignment, shut up in his chambers in Gray’s Inn, studying the law of treason; looking out for parallel cases of an aggravated nature in the history of other countries, and considering how he might paint the unpardonable guilt of the accused in even blacker colours than could be employed by the ferocious Coke, famous for insulting his victims.”[36] “MEN OF
HIGH
DEGREE
ARE A LIE.” The man whom Bacon thus laboured to condemn had heaped favour after favour upon him, and been meanly fawned upon in return, yet during the trial, Lord Campbell says, Bacon “most artfully and inhumanly compared Essex to the Duke of Guise,” and adds, in regard to the Earl after he was condemned, and an interview which Bacon had with the Queen upon the subject, “Why did he not throw himself on his knees before her and pray for a pardon? Because, while it was possible that he might have melted her, it was possible that he might have offended her, and that, a vacancy in the office of Solicitor-General occurring, (for which Bacon was a suitor) he might be again passed over.”
But not contented with having pled for the condemnation of Essex, Bacon, in order to ingratiate himself farther with the Queen, published an attack upon the fallen man, regarding which the great philosopher’s biographer says: “No honourable man would purchase Bacon’s subsequent elevation at the price of being the author of this publication.... The base ingratitude and the slavish meanness manifested by him on this occasion, called forth the general indignation of his contemporaries.... He had before his eyes no just standard of honour, and in the race of ambition, he had lost all sense of the distinctions between right and wrong.”
THE TORTURE.