im to escape them. Moreover, as
any institution or society grows older, this influence of the part which
is handed on from one generation to another tends to accumulate; so that
the weight of it lies heavier on us in an old place than in a new one,
and it is obvious that there is both loss and gain in this.

A good tradition is a great help and support, giving a strength, or
firmness, or dignity to our life which it would not otherwise have had.

We often see or feel the value of such a tradition as it acts upon the
members of a family, or of a college, or of a regiment, or of a school.

And this influence of a tradition, inasmuch as it has become impersonal,
and rooted in the general life, is apt to be very persistent, so that the
man who establishes a good tradition anywhere begins a good work, which
may go on producing its good results long after he himself is in his
grave.

Many of you must have felt the power of such an influence, handed on to
you as if it were a part of your inheritance, when thinking of a brother,
or father, or other relative or ancestor, who by some distinction of
character, or by some inspiring words or some brave or generous act, has
left you a good example, which seems somehow to belong to you, and to
stir you as with an authoritative call to show yourself worthy of it.

Similarly in a society like this school you can hardly grow up without
sometimes being stirred by the tradition of the noble lives that have
left their mark upon its history.

So a man's good deeds live after him, and become woven as threads of gold
into the traditions of the world.

And we are equally familiar with traditions that are bad, and with their
pestilent influence; for we are constantly made to feel how much of the
good that men endeavour to do is thwarted, 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. Tradition,
in fact, represents to us the accumulated power of past lives as it acts
upon us from the outside, just as what men call heredity represents this
same influence in our own blood.

And we have seen that this power may be, and often is, a real advantage
and support to our life. We feel also that as the Divine light shines
stronger and steadier in human affairs the traditional influence of each
generation ought to become more and more helpful to those that follow.

And yet, you obs