Notes of a Sermon Preached by the Rey. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday Evening, June 1
Text: St. Luke XII 57. judge ye not, that which "And why even of yourselves, right?"
1 T have a book by the Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford. I always congratulate myself in having had the sense to spend a shilling on that little book. It is one of the "Home University' series, by Dent & Ca, The writer is Professor Paul Vinogradoft D.c.t D.AIST and T know not how many other titles of honour. The position he occupies i world of law is a very great one; ds great as any. in the world. I think. the great Blackstone held the same position. And this shining legal authority, who is not only Professor of Jurisprudence, but Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, has written this little book, and entitled it "Common-sense' in Law.
T can imagine, that the reason why many people have not bought it, is, that the title put them off together. 'They have said to themes, as multitudes of people have said, "Common-sense in Law! 'The Law is about the last place where we should expect to find commonsense." 'The iden has been, that a nan cannot expect to sell' a book with a title like that, I remember fan old gentleman in Lancashire, who expressed his opinion of the law quite forcibly, "The law is a hass." That is the common idea of it, "Phe Jaw is. an ass"; a hopeless kind of thing for the ordinary man to handle at all. There is a bitter proverb about the it to effect, that "a man, who his own lawyer has a fool for a client." That is true tech-nicolly, but, as we shall see, not true essentially. There are varieties of phrases conveying the ordinary person's iden of it, We talk of HThe uncertainties of the law" "Think twice before going to law. There is the story of the Scottish Sheriff, who said, that if he were riding 'a horse along Leith Walk, and a man went up to him, saying, that the horse was his, it would be cheaper to let him have the horse, and buy another, than go to law with him about it. That is the nadir of pessimistic criticism of the law, surely. Novelists have, no doubt, unintentionally, given the Taw a bad name for hopeless complications. There is the great case of v. Jarndyce Then there isthe immortal Serjeant Buzfuz. The drama too often makes a plot hang on legal complications. I remember years ago seeing a play, in which 5 the heroine—a young widow—is seen sitting, a sad lonely figure in the middle of the stage with a copy of the Code Napoleon on her lap; the very image of despair. Someone has said, that "it is very difficult to believe, that the average lawyer was ever an innocent babe.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.