Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Judge George Sharswood

The work [Coke upon Littleton] is one which cannot be too highly prized or too earnestly recommended to the diligent study of all who wish to be well grounded in legal principles. For myself, I agree with Mr. Butler in the opinion that he is the best lawyer who best understands Coke upon Littleton.

Let the student often stop and examine himself upon what he has read. It would be an excellent mode of proceeding for him, after having read a lecture or chapter, to lay aside the book and endeavour to commit the substance of it to writing, trusting entirely to his memory for the matter, and using his own language. After having done this, let him reperuse the section, by which he will not only discern what parts have escaped his memory, but the whole will be more certainly impressed upon his mind, and become incorporated with it as if it had been originally his own work. Let him cultivate intercourse with others pursuing the same studies, and converse frequently upon the subject of their reading. The biographer of Lord Keeper North has recorded of him that “he fell into the way of putting cases (as they call it), which much improved him, and he was most sensible of the benefit of discourse: for I have observed him often say that (after his day’s reading) at his night’s congress with his professional friends, whatever the subject was, he made it the subject of discourse in the company: for, said he, I read many things which I am sensible I forgot; but I found, withal, that if I had once talked over what I had read, I never forgot that.”

There is in every moral being a faculty or sense by which he is enabled to distinguish right from wrong. There have been a great number of theories among those who have rejected the doctrine of a moral sense. They have succeeded each man in showing every other theory but his own to be baseless. The reductio ad absurdum of every other system which ingenuity has ever framed would alone seem to leave the advocates of a mora! sense in possession of the field. The appeal, after all, must be made to every man’s consciousness. And why not? Every other faculty is proved in the same way. Let any one attempt to demonstrate that there is in men a natural taste for beauty. He will be met by precisely the same course of argument as that which attacks the existence of the moral sense, or, as it may well be termed, the taste for moral beauty. All men have it not in the same perfection. In some it is undeveloped, in some it is corrupted. Indeed, the same objections may be urged against the perceptions of the palate or of any other natural sense. That some men love the taste of tobacco by no means proves that there is not a natural faculty in all men which distinguishes between the qualities of sweet and bitter.

There is perhaps no profession, after that of the sacred ministry, in which a high-toned morality is more imperatively necessary than that of the law…. High moral principle is his only safe guide; the only torch to light his way amidst darkness and obstruction. It is like the spear of the guardian of Paradise: