professional wrangler; he is a bravo in wig and gown who fights the
duels of ordinary men because they are incapable, very largely on
account of the complexities of legal procedure, of fighting for
themselves. His business is never to explore any fundamental right
in the matter. His business is to say all that can be said for his
client, and to conceal or minimise whatever can be said against his
client. The successful promoted advocate, who in Britain and the
United States of America is the judge, and whose habits and
interests all incline him to disregard the realities of the case in
favour of the points in the forensic game, then adjudicates upon the
contest… .
Now this condition of things is clearly incompatible with the modern
conception of the world as becoming a divine kingdom. When the
world is openly and confessedly the kingdom of God, the law court
will exist only to adjust the differing views of men as to the
manner of their service to God; the only right of action one man
will have against another will be that he has been prevented or
hampered or distressed by the other in serving God. The idea of the
law court will have changed entirely from a place of dispute,
exaction and vengeance, to a place of adjustment. The individual or
some state organisation will plead ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON GOOD
either against some state official or state regulation, or against
the actions or inaction of another individual. This is the only
sort of legal proceedings compatible with the broad beliefs of the
new faith… . Every religion that becomes ascendant, in so far
as it is not otherworldly, must necessarily set its stamp upon the
methods and administration of the law. That this was not the case
with Christianity is one of the many contributory aspects that lead
one to the conviction that it was not Christianity that took
possession of the Roman empire, but an imperial adventurer who took
possession of an all too complaisant Christianity.
Reverting now from these generalisations to the problem of the
religious from which they arose, it will have become evident that
the essential work of anyone who is conversant with the existing
practice and literature of the law and whose natural abilities are
forensic, will lie in the direction of reconstructing the theory and
practice of the law in harmony with modern conceptions, of making
that theory and practice clear and plain to ordinary men, of
reforming the abuses of the profession by working for the separation
of bar and judiciary, for the amalgamation of the solicitors and the
barristers, and the like needed reforms. These are matters that
will probably only be properly set right by a quickening of
conscience among lawyers themselves. Of no class of men is the help
and service so necessary to the practical establishment of God’s
kingdom, as of men learned and experienced in the law. And there is
no reason why for the present an advocate should not continue to
plead in the courts, provided he does his utmost only to handle
cases in which he believes he can serve the right. Few righteous
cases are ill-served by a frank disposition on the part of lawyer
and client to put everything before the court. Thereby of course
there arises a difficult case of conscience. What if a lawyer,
believing his client to be in the right, discovers him to be in the
wrong? He cannot throw up the case unless he has been scandalously
deceived, because so he would betray the confidence his client has
put in him to “see him through.” He has a right to “give himself
away,” but not to “give away” his client in this fashion. If he has
a chance of a private consultation I think he ought to do his best
to make his client admit the truth of the case and give in, but
failing this he has no right to be virtuous on behalf of another.
No man may play God to another; he may remonstrate, but that is the
limit of his right. He must respect a confidence, even if it is
purely implicit and involuntary. I admit that here the barrister is
in a cleft stick, and that he must see the business through
according to the confidence his client has put in him—and
afterwards be as sorry as he may be if an injustice ensues. And
also I would suggest a lawyer may with a fairly good conscience
defend a guilty man as if he were innocent, to save him from
unjustly heavy penalties… .
This comparatively full discussion of the barrister’s problem has
been embarked upon because it does bring in, in a very typical
fashion, just those uncertainties and imperfections that abound in
real life. Religious conviction gives us a general direction, but
it stands aside from many of these entangled struggles in the jungle
of conscience. Practice is often easier than a rule. In practice a
lawyer will know far more accurately than a hypothetical case can
indicate, how far he is bound to see his client through, and how far
he may play the keeper of his client’s conscience. And nearly every
day there happens instances where the most subtle casuistry will
fail and the finger of conscience point unhesitatingly. One may
have worried long in the preparation and preliminaries of the issue,
one may bring the case at last into the final court of conscience in
an apparently hopeless tangle. Then suddenly comes decision.
The procedure of that silent, lit, and empty court in which a man
states his case to God, is very simple and perfect. The excuses and
the special pleading shrivel and vanish. In a little while the case
lies bare and plain.
8. THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE
The question of oaths of allegiance, acts of acquiescence in
existing governments, and the like, is one that arises at once with
the acceptance of God as the supreme and real King of the Earth. At
the worst Caesar is a usurper, a satrap claiming to be sovereign; at
the best he is provisional. Modern casuistry makes no great trouble
for the believing public official. The chief business of any
believer is to do the work for which he is best fitted, and since
all state affairs are to become the affairs of God’s kingdom it is
of primary importance that they should come into the hands of God’s
servants. It is scarcely less necessary to a believing man with
administrative gifts that he should be in the public administration,
than that he should breathe and eat. And whatever oath or the like
to usurper church or usurper king has been set up to bar access to
service, is an oath imposed under duress. If it cannot be avoided
it must be taken rather than that a man should become unserviceable.
All such oaths are unfair and foolish things. They exclude no
scoundrels; they are appeals to superstition. Whenever an
opportunity occurs for the abolition of an oath, the servant of God
will seize it, but where the oath is unavoidable he will take it.
The service of God is not to achieve a delicate consistency of
statement; it is to do as much as one can of God’s work.
9. THE PRIEST AND THE CREED
It may be doubted if this line of reasoning regarding the official
and his oath can be extended to excuse the priest or pledged
minister of religion who finds that faith in the true God has ousted
his formal beliefs.
This has been a frequent and subtle moral problem in the
intellectual life of the last hundred years. It has been
increasingly difficult for any class of reading, talking, and
discussing people such as are the bulk of the priesthoods of the
Christian churches to escape hearing and reading the accumulated
criticism of the Trinitarian theology and of the popularly accepted
story of man’s fall and salvation. Some have no doubt defeated this
universal and insidious critical attack entirely, and honestly
established themselves in a right-down acceptance of the articles
and disciplines to which they have subscribed and of the creeds they
profess and repeat. Some have recanted and abandoned their
positions in the priesthood. But a great number have neither
resisted the bacillus of criticism nor left the churches to which
they are attached. They have adopted compromises, they have
qualified their creeds with modifying footnotes of essential
repudiation; they have decided that plain statements are metaphors
and have undercut, transposed, and inverted the most vital points of
the vulgarly accepted beliefs. One may find within the Anglican
communion, Arians, Unitarians, Atheists, disbelievers in
immortality, attenuators of miracles; there is scarcely a doubt or a
cavil that has not found a lodgment within the ample charity of the
English Establishment. I have been interested to hear one
distinguished Canon deplore that “they” did not identify the Logos