ial groups particular features of their heritage have
great emotional associations. The living past is composed of
habits, traditions, values, which are vivid and vital issues to
those who practice them. Traditions, customs, or social
methods come to have intrinsic values; they become the center
of deep attachments and strong passion. They are a rich
element of the atmosphere of the present; they are woven into
the intimate fabric of our lives. The awe which we feel in
great cathedrals is historical as well as religious. Those vast
solemn arches are the voices of the past speaking to us. The
moral appeal of tradition appears with beautiful clarity in the
opening chapter of Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.

A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or
displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily
life--that _conscience_, of which the old Roman religion was a formal,
habitual recognition, had become in him a powerful current of feeling
and observance. The old-fashioned, partly Puritanic awe, the power
of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern
peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he
passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had
struck dead an aged laborer in the field: an upright stone, still with
moldering garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that
system of symbolic usages, and they in turn developed in him further,
a great seriousness, an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life
and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship--of such
gifts to men as fire, water, the earth from labor on which they live,
really understood by him as gifts--a sense of religious responsibility
in the reception of them. It was a religion for the most part of fear,
of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long burden of forms.[1]

[Footnote 1: Walter Pater: _Marius the Epicurean_ (A. L. Burt
edition), pp. 3-4.]

To the past, as it is made familiar to us through song, study,
and traditional practice, we may experience a piety amounting
almost to religious devotion. In some individuals and in
some nations, this sense for tradition is very strong.

Every one has felt more or less keenly this sense of being a
link in a great tradition, whether of a college, family, or country.
Sometimes this sense for tradition takes an aesthetic form,
as in the case of ritual, whether social or religious. Old streets,
ivie