11
January, 1939
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
Consider the Evidence! A Lawyer’s Message to His Colleagues
By I. H. LINTON Washington, D. C.
as though, having fully examined, we lightly esteemed them, is to assume an ap palling amount of responsibility. “The things related by the evangelists are certainly of the most momentous char acter, affecting the principles of our con duct here and our happiness forever. The religion of Jesus Christ aims at nothing less than the utter overthrow of all other sys tems of religion in the world; denouncing them as inadequate to the wants of man, false in their foundations and dangerous in their tendency. It not only solicits the grave attention ,of all to whom its doctrines are presented, but it demands their cordial be lief, as a matter of vital concernment. These are no ordinary claims; and it seems hardly possible for a rational being to regard them with even a subdued interest [italics mine], much less to treat them with indif ference and contempt. If not true, they are little else than the pretensions of a bold imposture which, not satisfied with having already enslaved millions of the human race, seeks to continue its encroachments upon human liberty until all nations shall be sub jugated under its iron rule. But, if they are well-founded and just, they can be no less than the high requirements of Heaven, ad dressed by the voice of God to the reason and understanding of men, concerning things deeply affecting his relations to his- sovereign and essential to the formation of his character and, of course, to his destiny both for this life and for the life to come. Such was the estimate of religion, even the religion of pagan Rome, by one of the great est lawyers of antiquity, when he argued that it was either nothing at all or was everything. 'Aut unduque religione tolle, aut usquaquaque conserva’ (Cicero, Philip 11, No. 43). “With this view of the importance of the subject, and in the hope that the present work may in some degree aid or at least incite others to a more successful pursuit of this interesting study, it is submitted to your kind regard by “Your obedient servant, “Simon Greenleaf.” To attempt to list the other great lawyers who shared Greenleaf’s faith would be to name the most illustrious members of our profession: such men as John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Erskine, Lord George Lyttleton, Daniel Webster, Sir Robert An derson of Scotland Yard, and Blackstone, or men like Brewer, Harlan, White and other members of our Supreme Court. Many of these men, like Greenleaf, wrote volumes setting forth the reasons for their convictions; all of them held them as a re sult of assiduous study, some of them shift ing from infidelity to faith as a result of that study.
PART I I N ADDRESSING an appeal to my fellow lawyers to give themselves the benefit of their own professional serv ices in examining, at least once before they die, the evidence and reasoning in support of the opinions expressed both orally and in writing by many of the most famous members of our learned profession that a thing proven beyond a reasonable doubt is the claim of the Christian religion and the Holy Bible to be in deed and in fact the one religion and book with the inspiration and sanction of God behind them, I can do no better than to quote Simon Greenleaf’s dedication to his fellow lawyers of his great, but now almost forgotten work, The Testimony of the Evangelists. And to aid us in giving due weight to the solemn appeal Greenleaf makes to us in this matter, we should remember that of him Chief Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court of the United States, said " . . . he is the highest authority cited in our courts”; and that the New York Observer remarked, when his Testimony of the Evangelists was published, that its author was “an able and profound lawyer . . . the honored head of the most distinguished and prosperous school of English law in the world,” and that the London Law Journal declared that it was no mean honor to America to have produced Greenleaf, one of the two “first writers and best esteemed legal authorities of this country,” from whose work on evi dence “more light has shone from the New World than from all the lawyers who adorn the courts of Europe.” Should not any of us who hold a view different from that of Greenleaf in regard to the divine inspiration of the Bible and the deity of Christ be able to justify that dissenting opinion by an assurance of abil ity or industry greater than his in consid ering this matter? But if “as I will dare be sworn” as a result of twenty-five years ex perience, the fact is, that not an unbelieving lawyer amongst us has ever read even a single one of the great briefs or works on the “Christian Evidences” (though doubt less familiar with Paine or Ingersoll), how can any man with a trace of humanity in him remain quiet when confronted by the spectacle of his fellow men “taking a chance on the world to come” when he knows that, dying without having diligently sought and definitely accepted the pardon freely offered and only to be found through the death, merits, and name of Jesus Christ, they have no more chance of finding happiness in the life to come than of finding living condi tions at the bottom of the ocean? Such ex pressions of certainty sound dogmatic to any one who has not had his mind and spirit startled and amazed at the proofs which support Christian faith. But to one
* The author is a member of the Bar of the District of Columbia and of the Supreme Court of the United States who is still in active practice after some thirty years of the diligent and profound study of the rules and laws of evi dence. In the following and other articles as well as in his book, A LAWYER AND THE BIBLE, he has called attention to proofs of the Bible’s truth and inspiration whose conclusive nature has, he asserts, never even been denied by any lawyer to whom he has ever presented them. who has, Greenleaf’s following words seem inadequate to express the urgency with which every saved man feels impelled to beseech his brother to seek eternal safety and salvation without an instant’s delay. A Subject of Supreme Importance In giving his Testimony of the Evangel ists to the bar, Greenleaf writes: “To the Members of the Legal Profes sion: “Gentlemen: “The subject of the following work I hope will not be deemed so foreign to our professional pursuits as to render it im proper for me to dedicate it, as I now re spectfully do, to you. If a close examina tion of the evidence of Christianity may be expected of one class of men more than another, it would seem incumbent upon us who make the law of evidence one of our peculiar studies. Our profession leads us to explore the mazes of falsehood, to detect its artifices, to pierce its thickest veils, to follow and expose its sophistries, to com pare the statements of different witnesses with severity, to discover truth and separate it from error. Our fellow men are well aware of this, and probably they act upon this knowledge more generally and with more profound repose than we are in the habit of considering. The influence, too, of the legal profession upon the community is unquestionably great, conversant as it daily is, with all classes and grades of men, in their domestic and social relations, and in all the affairs of life from the cradle to the grave. This influence we are con stantly exerting for good or ill; and hence to refuse to acquaint ourselves with the evi dences of the Christian religion, or to act
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