ecause
this same spirit of Pharisaic tradition is constantly laying its hand
upon every human institution, and it has contributed to every abuse or
perversion that has taken possession of the Christian Church.

Our life is, in fact, a continuous struggle between the two principles
here represented. Which is to prevail in it, and fix its character--
traditional custom, or personal inspiration? Are we to follow 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 will to the rule of traditional notions and
usages, the power of the external world, or as we seek for direct
illumination of mind, conscience, and spirit at the Divine sources of
truth and light.

Here, then, we have a principle to guide us in our relation to the
traditions amidst which we live.

We do not expect to get away from them; we never dream of escaping from
the influences of the external world, whether of the past or the present;
but to move safely among them, we must have learnt and adopted this
primal lesson, that no tradition, and no external practice or custom, has
any authoritative claim upon us, simply from being established as a
tradition or a custom.

And as we stand amidst all the conventions and practices that have come
down to us, we should be able to say of every one of them--

"Every good tradition, and every wholesome and beneficent usage, I accept
thankfully as part of the inheritance which good, or wise, or brave men
have 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 prove them; I will use them or reject them according as they fit or
fail in this measurement, and I will not be brought under the power of
any of them."

Whether, then, we think of our separate personal life or of our life in
its social relationships, we must think of it in this way if we are to be
in any real sense followers of Christ. Each of 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 track of conduct or behaviour because others have
trodden it before him, following it without thought like the sheep on the
mountain, or like the ants as they travel from one ant-hill to another.

Your es