ical enterprise. Or a woman may
find herself a prostitute or a pet wife, a mere kept instrument of
indulgence. These are lives of prey, these are lives of futility; the
light of God will not tolerate such lives. Here religion can bring
nothing but a severance from the old way of life altogether, a break and
a struggle towards use and service and dignity.

But even here it does not follow that because a life has been wrong
the new life that begins must be far as the poles asunder from the old.
Every sort of experience that has ever come to a human being is in the
self that he brings to God, and there is no reason why a knowledge
of evil ways should not determine the path of duty. No one can better
devise protections against vices than those who have practised them;
none know temptations better than those who have fallen. If a man has
followed an evil trade, it becomes him to use his knowledge of the
tricks of that trade to help end it. He knows the charities it may claim
and the remedies it needs. . . .

A very interesting case to discuss in relation to this question of
adjustment is that of the barrister. A practising barrister under
contemporary conditions does indeed give most typically the opportunity
for examining the relation of an ordinary self-respecting worldly life,
to life under the dispensation of God discovered. A barrister is
usually a man of some energy and ambition, his honour is moulded by
the traditions of an ancient and antiquated profession, instinctively
self-preserving and yet with a real desire for consistency and respect.
As a profession it has been greedy and defensively conservative, but it
has never been shameless nor has it ever broken faith with its own large
and selfish, but quite definite, propositions. It has never for instance
had the shamelessness of such a traditionless and undisciplined class
as the early factory organisers. It has never had the dull incoherent
wickedness of the sort of men who exploit drunkenness and the turf. It
offends within limits. Barristers can be, and are, disbarred. But it is
now a profession extraordinarily out of date; its code of honour derives
from a time of cruder and lower conceptions of human relationship. It
apprehends the State as a mere "ring" kept about private disputations;
it has not begun to move towards the modern conception of the collective
enterprise as the determining criterion of human conduct. It sees its
business as a mere play upon the