Wherever we find the term lawyer used in the pages of the New Testament, with a single exception, it is one of reproach and hearty condemnation. "Then one who was a lawyer asked him a question, tempting him." "Woe unto you lawyers." "Behold a certain lawyer stood up tempting him." "With a certain orator or lawyer, named Tertullus, who informed the governor against Paul." What, then, have we to set in opposition to all this? Can any words of eulogy gainsay the words of God himself? Now, what if we should establish beyond a doubt, that there has been a continued misapplication and misunderstanding of these passages, and that to bring them to bear upon the profession of the law, at this day, is the very height of absurdity. "The word lawyer," says Dr. Doddridge, "suggests to us the modern idea of an office which did not exist among the Jews at this time, and has strangely misled some interpreters. These Jewish lawyers (as our translators call them) were the most considerable species of scribes, who applied themselves peculiarly to study and explain the law." "The lawyers were a superior order of scribes and gave lectures on the law." Scott. What law? The law of Moses, of course. They partook, then, more of what we should call, in our day, the priestly order; and the corruption of such an order would have na have, drawn in admirable terms, the rule and the exceptions. "A lawyer now is nothing more, I speak of ninety-nine in a hundred, at least, to use some of Tully's words, nisi leguleius quidem cautus, et acutus præco actionum, cantor formularum, auceps syllabarum. But there have been lawyers that were orators, philosophers, historians; there have been Bacons and Clarendons. There will be none such any more, till, in some better age, true ambition, or the love of fame, prevails over avarice; and till men find leisure and encouragement to prepare themselves for the exercise of this profession, by climbing up to the vantage ground of science, so my Lord Bacon calls it, instead of grovelling all their lives below in a mean but gainful application to all the little arts of chicane." We quote at second hand from Mr. Christian, and in other instances have taken the same liberty, which we have too much conscience to conceal. "I have seen MSS. referred to," says D'Israeli, "confidently, which could never have met the eye of the writer. "The unlearned," says Mr. George Stevens, in his note upon Burton, "have ever furnished themselves with appropriate scraps of Latin and Greek from this book." * 22 Mat. 35. + 11 Luke 46. 10 Luke 25. § 24 Acts 1. The only Christian lawyer mentioned is in 3 Titus 13. Bring Zenas the lawyer on his journey diligently, that nothing be wanting, etc. turally elicited from our Saviour the most unqualified condemnation. They who seek to extend these passages to purposes never anticipated, have no just or rational employment, we conceive, and derive no authority from their numbers. The council of Melphi, in the fifteenth century, prohibited the practice of law to the clergy,-holding to the idea of its being condemned in Scripture,--but the decree of that council could have had little efficacy, for we find it an early maxim in England, Nullus clericus nisi causidicus. Congreve would be witty on the profession: "Lawyer! I believe there is many a cranny and leak unstopped in your conscience; they say a witch will sail in a sieve, but I believe the devil would never venture aboard your conscience." "As cold as charity in the heart of a lawyer," "bonus jurista, mala christa," were proverbs in olden time. "If y f you go to the law for a nut," says one, "the lawyers will crack it, give each of you half the shell, and chop the kernel themselves." "Whether it was the ever opening hand of a practising lawyer ever ready to grasp a fee, or whether a strong bias and habitual disposition for turning every trust and situation in life to their own private advantage, were the reasons why one of the wisest of our kings with his council, composed of great men, and parliaments themselves, thought it necessary to incapacitate practising lawyers from sitting in the House of Commons; it is certain they were the first set of men expressly excluded." Carte's Hist. Eng. "I speak to the face of many here present, the lawyers, of all the people in the land, are the greatest grievances to my subjects, for when the cause is good to neither party, it yet proves good and profitable to them." King James First's last speech. "Men allured to the trade of law, grounding their purposes not on the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity, but on the promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions and flowing fees." Milton. "But when money will hire you to plead for injustice against your own knowledge, and to use your will to defraud the righteous, I would not have your conscience for your gains, nor your account to make for all the world." Baxter. "These men, He knew, would thrive with their humility, And loud withal, that could not wag Nor scarce lie still without a fee." Ben Jonson. "A lawyer art thou? draw not nigh,— Go, carry to some fitter place The keenness of that practised eye, The hardness of that sallow face." Wordsworth. "What an excellent medley," says old Fuller, "is made, when honesty and ability meet in a man of his profession." "If there be any instance on record, as some there are undoubtedly, of genius and morality united in a lawyer, they are distinguished by their singularity, and operate as exceptions." Junius. These are some of the severe expositions of legal character, which have emanated from sources deservedly high in authority, and exhibit the profession, it is conceded, in no amiable light. That they have a foundation in truth we are not prepared to question; but as to the justice of such sweeping, indiscriminate denunciations, it were but fair to put in a protest, for ignorance, political spleen or private peek, have had no small influence, we may suppose, in their composition. However, it will be for the bar of the present day to determine how far it is assimilated to that of ages past and gone, and whether or not its conscience will be safe in repelling these insinuations and charges, as gross libels against the order. For ourselves, we entitle them such. But, in turning from these unfavorable estimates of lawyers, we have a cheering prospect to contemplate in another quarter. There have been those to appreciate as well as to condemn, and the bright and glorious representations which they have afforded us, will more than balance the dark ones already given. "If, then, the law itself doth merit so highly of all mankind in general, for that it is the fountain of all benefits, what do the professors of the law deserve which draw these benefits out of that fountain, and derive the same unto every particular person? * Doth not this profession, every day, comfort such as are grieved, counsel such as are perplexed, relieve such as are circumvented, prevent the ruin of the improvident, save the innocent, support the impotent, take the prey out of the mouth of the oppressor, protect the orphan, the widow and the stranger? (Would that this glorious tribute were universally just!) * * *For if it be a worthy deed, as doubtless it is, for a man to defend his friends or country with his right hand and his sword only, what an excellent service is it to defend them with his speech, his reason and wisdom." Sir John Davies. "There may be, it is true, in this, as in other departments of knowledge, a few unworthy professors, who study the science of chicane and sophistry, rather than of truth and justice, and who, to gratify the spleen, the dishonesty and wilfullness of their clients, may endeavor to screen the guilty, by an unwarrantable use of those means which were intended to protect the innocent. But the frequent disappointments and constant discountenance they meet with in the Courts of Justice, have confined these men, to the honor of the age be it spoken, both in number and in reputation, to a very despicable compass." Sir Wm. Blackstone. "If you are of studious habits, of a decided disposition of mind, not to be influenced by the subject of your study, and of a devotion to truth not to be overcome by sophistry, if you are firmly established in the principles of religion, and if you are one of those elevated spirits that are raised above the world, above its temptations and its opinions, in that case you may embrace this profession, and look up to a Cicero, a Sulpicius,* a D'Aguesseau, a More, a Bacon, a Clarendon, a Hale, a Mansfield, and an Eldon, as your dignified masters." Broadstone of Honor. "Dr. Johnson thought favorably of the law, and said that the sages thereof, for a long series backwards, have been friends of religion." Boswell. "I must needs say, that the improvement of reason, the diverting men from sensuality and idleness, the maintaining of propriety and justice, and, consequently, the peace and welfare of the kingdom, is very much to be ascribed to the judges and lawyers." Baxter. "The manners of lawyers have been such, in every age, as were the first improved and the last corrupted." Bishop Warburton. The avarice, so frequently displayed in the profession, has met with its not unrighteous reward from the pen of keenest satire. That such a stain should ever have been suffered upon the legal character is lamentable, for how degrading that appetite for gold, which can only open its mouth when a guinea is glittering before it! An old poet well expresses his indignation here: "Conscience and the Kyng into the Court wenten, And not for our Lordes love unloose their lyppe once! How might bet mets (be measured) the mist on Malverne hilles But why so sedulous in bringing up all these charges against The character of Sev. Sulpicius was one of the finest imaginable, if 51 be vilified? Who has ever hesitated, when it served, to magnify the faults of public men, and urge them forward into the full blaze of day with pious zeal? But how comes it, we might ask, that with such a lavish expenditure of censure on lawyers themselves, those who encourage them into iniquity and sustain them in it, are unscathed. What has the community to say to those who stimulate the cupidity of the profession by undue arts? Is it not just to take up the lash now and scourge away awhile upon them? Will the community forbear the punishment? There is, however, a great and significant objection which is made to the legal character, and it has brought, in all ages, the darkest reproach. Let the lawyers escape from it as best they may, for we are unable to defend them longer,— the ranks of the enemy are too strong and their numbers too formidable for this. They are accused of an indiscriminate defence of either side of a question, as they happen to be engaged, without any reference to the merits of the case. This custom has met with unmeasured denunciation, as we shall show by and by, from the mouths of sages in the law, moralists, philosophers, divines, whilst it has, at the same time, been favored with distinguished apologists. In the offset, we might remark, that there is nothing in the world of so pernicious a tendency in blunting and perverting all the powers of perception and of reason, independent of its immoral and irreligious character, as this promiscuous advocacy. "The habit of arguing," says Locke, (Essays 33,) "on either side, against our persuasions, dims the understanding and makes it lose by degrees the faculty of discerning clearly between truth and falsehood." A lamentable instance of this is furnished in the learned Chillingworth, alluded to by Upham,* in a quotation from Clarendon : "Mr. Chillingworth had spent all his younger days in disputations, and had arrived at so great a mastery, that he was inferior to no man in these skirmishes; but he had, with his notable perfection in this exercise, contracted such an irresolution and habit of doubting, that, by degrees, he grew confident of nothing." But when this debasing prostitution of mind is brought into the courts of justice and there hired out to the highest bidder, and when the vilest cause in the world can engage a monopoly of it, well indeed may every friend of law and *Mental Phil. 2. 382. |