The advocate's duty to his client, with its resulting risk to the advocate's own conscience, is thus set forth:--
"Justice is found, experimentally, to be most effectually promoted by the opposite efforts of practised and ingenious men presenting to the selection of an impartial judge the best arguments for the establishment and explanation of truth. It becomes, then, under such an arrangement, the decided duty of an advocate to use all the arguments in his power to defend the cause he has adopted, and to leave the effects of those arguments to the judgment of others. However useful this practice may be for the promotion of public justice, it is not without danger to the individual whose practice it becomes. It is apt to produce a profligate indifference to truth in higher occasions of life, where truth cannot for a moment be trifled with, much less callously trampled on, much less suddenly and totally yielded up to the basest of human motives. It is astonishing what unworthy and inadequate notions men are apt to form of the Christian faith. Christianity does not insist upon duties to an individual, and forget the duties which are owing to the great mass of individuals, which we call our country; it does not teach you how to benefit your neighbour, and leave you to inflict the most serious injuries upon all whose interest is bound up with you in the same land. I need not say to this congregation that there is a wrong and a right in public affairs, as there is a wrong and a right in private affairs. I need not prove that in any vote, in any line of conduct which affects the public interest, every Christian is bound, most solemnly and most religiously, to follow the dictates of his conscience. Let it be for, let it be against, let it please, let it displease, no matter with whom it sides, or what it thwarts, it is a solemn duty, on such occasions, to act from the pure dictates of conscience, and to be as faithful to the interests of the great mass of your fellow-creatures, as you would be to the interests of any individual of that mass. Why, then, if there be any truth in these observations, can that man be pure and innocent before God, can he be quite harmless and respectable before men, who in mature age, at a moment's notice, sacrifices to wealth and power all the fixed and firm opinions of his life; who puts his moral principles to sale, and barters his dignity and his soul for the baubles of the world? If these temptations come across you, then remember the memorable words of the text, 'What shall I do to inherit eternal life?'"