rules of a game between man and man, or
between men and men. They haggle, they dispute, they inflict and suffer
wrongs, they evade dues, and are liable or entitled to penalties and
compensations. The primary business of the law is held to be decision in
these wrangles, and as wrangling is subject to artistic elaboration, the
business of the barrister is the business of a professional wrangler; he
is a bravo in wig and gown who fights the duels of ordinary men because
they are incapable, very largely on account of the complexities of legal
procedure, of fighting for themselves. His business is never to explore
any fundamental right in the matter. His business is to say all that can
be said for his client, and to conceal or minimise whatever can be said
against his client. The successful promoted advocate, who in Britain
and the United States of America is the judge, and whose habits and
interests all incline him to disregard the realities of the case in
favour of the points in the forensic game, then adjudicates upon the
contest. . . .

Now this condition of things is clearly incompatible with the modern
conception of the world as becoming a divine kingdom. When the world is
openly and confessedly the kingdom of God, the law court will exist only
to adjust the differing views of men as to the manner of their service
to God; the only right of action one man will have against another will
be that he has been prevented or hampered or distressed by the other in
serving God. The idea of the law court will have changed entirely from a
place of dispute, exaction and vengeance, to a place of adjustment. The
individual or some state organisation will plead ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON
GOOD either against some state official or state regulation, or against
the actions or inaction of another individual. This is the only sort of
legal proceedings compatible with the broad beliefs of the new faith.
. . . Every religion that becomes ascendant, in so far as it is not
otherworldly, must necessarily set its stamp upon the methods and
administration of the law. That this was not the case with Christianity
is one of the many contributory aspects that lead one to the conviction
that it was not Christianity that took possession of the Roman empire,
but an imperial adventurer who took possession of an all too complaisant
Christianity.

Reverting now from these generalisations to the problem of the religious
from which they arose, it will have bec