timate of your life should be fundamentally different from this.
You are primarily a child of God, illumined by direct communion with the
Spirit 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 or usage which may meet you; but to stand up and show that
you are God's child, and therefore a judge of all traditions or customs,
and not their slave.

This is the revelation which Christ declares to us as the one first
requisite of the Christian life. So you see the Christian man's attitude
towards all traditions or customs is that of independence; his thought
and his judgment are as free in regard to them as if they were newly
born. He is, in fact, bound to judge them according to their deserts;
and no society 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 a life of new revelations, a life which is being
illumined and illumined afresh by those flashes of Divine insight, and
strength, and courage, which come to men only as they came to the Lord
Himself in the secret communion of prayer and meditation, and through
that independence of spirit which arises from the sense of God's presence
to guide us and to uphold.

Take your own case. If you are living here simply according to
traditional rules, doing this or that because, as you may be told,
everybody does it; accepting standards of conduct and rules 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 succession of men who are the Pharisees, the
opponents of the Christ, in every generation, who live with tame
conscience in any sort of company, and perpetuate the bad traditions of
the world.

But if you listen to the call of Christ, and have truly learned to feel
that the only real man's life is that which you live with the light of
God's law shining upon it, then, as a matter of course, you will rise
superior to the influence of any tradition or custom, no matter what its
authority may seem to be.

And it will indeed be a happy thing for