Now, this is plain, but it is also perilous. The expedient is here allowed to supersede not merely the patriotic, but also the truthful. If the object aimed at, which may be to screen successful villany, or shelter even a murderer from punishment, can be accomplished--all is reckoned fair. Truth may be compromised; honest witnesses browbeaten or bewildered; and the beautiful transparency of one upright man's intercourse with another turned into mockery, or treated with derision. Lawyers not a few have proved, by their offences against truth and the sacred obligations of man to man, that it is only too congenial to their liking thus to trample truth in the dust. They feign "pity, indignation, moral approbation, or disgust or contempt, when they neither feel anything of the kind, nor believe the case to be one that justly calls for such feelings; they are led also occasionally to entrap or mislead, to revile, insult, and calumniate persons whom they may, in their heart, believe to be respectable persons and honest witnesses," and such putting of bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter, must involve a woe. It cannot fail to warp the conscience and becloud the mind; and the man who does not feel the danger of such ways, is already their dupe or their victim. One has pertinently asked the learned and the noble who patronize these outrages against truth, while yet they profess to be Christians, how they can reconcile the two. There is a religion which says that 'lying lips are an abomination to the Lord;' and how can men, it is asked, avoid the solemn scriptural denunciation, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter; ... who justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him."[34] LORD BACON. Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of the injurious effects of such habits upon the heart and mind is found in the case of Lord Chancellor Bacon-- "The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." This is not the place to tell of his learning, his world-wide fame, his greatness as a philosopher who revolutionized science, and certainly introduced a new era in the history of man. His eloquence as a pleader, and the stately majesty of his thinking, place Bacon high among "the starry lights of genius." He is in philosophy what Shakespeare or Milton is among poets.