through your traditions: and many suc

our own life it is difficult if not impossible for us fully

as any institution or society grows older, this influence of the part which is handed on from one generation to another tends to accumulate

giving a strength, or firmness, or dignity to

ion as it acts upon the members of a family, or

life, is apt to be very persistent, so that the man who establishes a good tradition anywhere beg

er, or father, or other relative or ancestor, who by some distinction of character, or by some inspiring words or some brave or generous act,

w up without sometimes being stirred by the tradition of t

m, and become woven as threads of g

warted, counteracted, or destroyed by influences of this sort, and how weak and imitative souls are entangled in the network of traditional influence as in a spider's web. Traditio

. We feel also that as the Divine light shines stronger and steadier in human affairs the tradi

and yet a historian would describe them as in many respects the best elements of Jewish life. They were earnest, patriotic, religious, many of them wise and holy men; but their judgment was held in bondage by the influence of tradition, and in this lies the cardinal defect of their life. They had set up b

ke us feel the presence of the Divine creative Spirit in every separate human life; and till we feel this personal illumination we have not realised the manifestation of the Son of God. But the Pharisee with his continual reference to tradition, his multiplication of external observances, and elaborate ritual, his reliance upon usage and external authority, knows little or nothing of the persona

e holds the citadel of a man's life, the spirit

s hardly possible to overestimate the importance of the lesson, because this same spirit of Pharisaic tradition is constantly laying its

ollow the world with its conventions and laws, or to live in personal communion with God? The tendency of our life will be determined in one direction or the other according as we surrender our w

o guide us in our relation to the

ast or the present; but to move safely among them, we must have learnt and adopted this primal lesson, that no tradition, and

and practices that have come down to us, we

left as their legacy for my use and assistance; but it is my bounden duty to measure them all by the standard of God's unchanging law: by it I will p

you, as he steps into the world, is not merely an inheritor of certain accumulations of life and tradition, which he should follow as a matter of course. He is not born to tread a certain tra

of God; and your first duty, therefore, whenever and in whatever place or circumstances you may chance to be, is not to follow this or that tradition

ety can hope to prosper unless this is recognised, so that evil customs may not corrupt the common life. It is the danger of such corruption that makes the Saviour denounce the traditional habit, and summon His followers to live by the rule of close personal communion with God. Thus the life that goes forward and rises to higher and yet higher levels is always

es of practice, because, as you understand, or, as some one undertakes to persuade you, they have always been so accepted, why, then, you are growing up to be one of that never-ending suc

s that which you live with the light of God's law shining upon it, then, as a matter of course, you wil

l traditions, and all usages, or fashions, or customs as things that should be subordinated, and should not rule us, as things to b