Wesley Corpus

Do the generality of Counsellors walk by this rule, and by the rules of justice, mercy, and truth? Do they use their utmost endeavours, do they take all the care which the nature of the thing will allow, to be assured that a cause is just and good before they undertake to defend it? Do they never knowingly defend a bad cause, and so make themselves accomplices in wrong and oppression? Do they never deliver the poor into the hand of his oppressor, and see that such as are in necessity have not right? Are they not often the means of withholding bread from the hungry, and raiment from the naked, even when it is their own, when they have a clear right thereto, by the law both of God and man? Is not this effectually done in many cases by protracting the suit from year to year? I have known a friendly bill preferred in Chancery by the consent of all parties; the manager assuring them, a decree would be procured in two or three months. But although several years are now elapsed, they can see no land yet; nor do I know that we are a jot nearer the conclusion than we were the first day. Now, where is the honesty of this? Is it not picking of pockets, and no better? A Lawyer who does not finish his client’s suit as soon as it can be done, I cannot allow to have more honesty (though he has more prudence) than if he robbed him on the highway. “But whether Lawyers are or no, sure the Nobility and Gentry are all men of reason and religion.” If you think they are all men of religion, you think very differently from your Master, who made no exception of time or nation when he uttered that weighty sentence, “How difficultly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven l’’ And when some who seem to have been of your judgment were greatly astonished at his saying, instead of retracting or soft ening, he adds, “Verily I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” You think differently from St.