This picturing of a human world more to the mind of God than this
present world and the discovery and realisation of one’s own place and
work in and for that kingdom of God, is the natural next phase in the
development of the believer. He will set about revising and adjusting
his scheme of life, his ways of living, his habits and his relationships
in the light of his new convictions.
Most men and women who come to God will have already a certain
righteousness in their lives; these things happen like a thunderclap
only in strange exceptional cases, and the same movements of the mind
that have brought them to God will already have brought their lives into
a certain rightness of direction and conduct. Yet occasionally there
will be someone to whom the self-examination that follows conversion
will reveal an entirely wrong and evil way of living. It may be that the
light has come to some rich idler doing nothing but follow a pleasurable
routine. Or to someone following some highly profitable and amusing,
but socially useless or socially mischievous occupation. One may be an
advocate at the disposal of any man’s purpose, or an actor or actress
ready to fall in with any theatrical enterprise. Or a woman may
find herself a prostitute or a pet wife, a mere kept instrument of
indulgence. These are lives of prey, these are lives of futility; the
light of God will not tolerate such lives. Here religion can bring
nothing but a severance from the old way of life altogether, a break and
a struggle towards use and service and dignity.
But even here it does not follow that because a life has been wrong
the new life that begins must be far as the poles asunder from the old.
Every sort of experience that has ever come to a human being is in the
self that he brings to God, and there is no reason why a knowledge
of evil ways should not determine the path of duty. No one can better
devise protections against vices than those who have practised them;
none know temptations better than those who have fallen. If a man has
followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use his knowledge of the
tricks of that trade to help end it. He knows the charities it may claim
and the remedies it needs. . . .
A very interesting case to discuss in relation to this question of
adjustment is that of the barrister. A practising barrister under
contemporary conditions does indeed give most typically the opportunity
for examining the relation of an ordinary self-respecting worldly life,
to life under the dispensation of God discovered. A barrister is
usually a man of some energy and ambition, his honour is moulded by
the traditions of an ancient and antiquated profession, instinctively
self-preserving and yet with a real desire for consistency and respect.
As a profession it has been greedy and defensively conservative, but it
has never been shameless nor has it ever broken faith with its own large
and selfish, but quite definite, propositions. It has never for instance
had the shamelessness of such a traditionless and undisciplined class
as the early factory organisers. It has never had the dull incoherent
wickedness of the sort of men who exploit drunkenness and the turf. It
offends within limits. Barristers can be, and are, disbarred. But it is
now a profession extraordinarily out of date; its code of honour derives
from a time of cruder and lower conceptions of human relationship. It
apprehends the State as a mere “ring” kept about private disputations;
it has not begun to move towards the modern conception of the collective
enterprise as the determining criterion of human conduct. It sees its
business as a mere play upon the rules of a game between man and man, or
between men and men. They haggle, they dispute, they inflict and suffer
wrongs, they evade dues, and are liable or entitled to penalties and
compensations. The primary business of the law is held to be decision in
these wrangles, and as wrangling is subject to artistic elaboration, the
business of the barrister is the business of a 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.