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earnest rejoicmg. I rejoice in your escaping while it is yet time, and following the right hand path to any pure and Christian calling, which to my mind that of an advocate, according to the common practice of the bar, cannot be. For advocacy does seem to me inconsistent with a strony perception of truth, and to be absolutely intolerable, unless where the mind sits loose, as it were, from any conclusions, and merely loves the exercise of making any thing wear the semblance of truth which it chooses for the time being to patronise.”
It is impossible for a mind imbued with a love of truth to witness the contentions for victory, exhibited in our courts of justice, without acknowledging with painful regret, that the highest intellectual powers are too often enlisted in the cause of the lowest moral degradation ; and if we remove ourselves to a distance of time, and divest our minds of the influence of daily observation, which has reconciled us in some measure, to the growth and maturity of a system which pays homage to precedent, at the expense of reason, and which distorts the line of truth by the interposition of unprofitable subtleties, employed with the force of one of the mechanical powers to wrest the whole machine of justice from its centre, we cannot but deeply lament that this sacred cause, which is the only true cement of society, and the aspiration of all good men, should be rendered the object of secondary worship only—the first being devoted to the cause of victory.
For one, I rejoice to think that the mind and the habits of the medical man, are differently constituted. Truth is his field of action, good his aim, the world his study. With all our differences and contention, we have one common end
