Leave your faculties unused and they become blunted and dulled; leave your higher tastes uncultivated and they die; let your affections feed on anything unworthy and they become debased.
To those who do this it may happen that whilst, so far as years go, they are still in all the freshness of youth, they are already dying that death to all higher capacity which is worse than any decay of our physical organism. Such an early death of higher tastes and faculties, and of hope for the future, is sometimes effected even before schooldays are over. And the mere possibility of such a fate overhanging any of us should stir us like a trumpet-call to take care that we do not surrender our life to any mean influence, and that we are very
zealous for all that concerns the safety of the young.
“I send out my child,” I can imagine the parent of any one of you having said, “to be trained for manhood; I send him to his school that his intellect may be cultivated, his moral purpose made strong, and that all good and pure tastes may be fostered in him; but it is dreadful to think that instead of this he may, by his life and companionship there, be hardened and debased, or even brutalised; he may become dead to the higher life even before he becomes a man.” Seeing, then, that there is this possibility of death even in the midst of life—a possibility, we would fain hope, seldom realised in this school, but still a possibility—shall we not be very careful, men and boys alike, so to do our part in this society, so to shelter the young and strengthen the weak, and to keep the atmosphere of our life a pure atmosphere, that every sensitive soul which comes amongst us may
grow up here through a healthy and wholesome boyhood, and go out to the duties and the calling of his life, strong, unselfish, public-spirited, pure-hearted, and courageous—a Christian gentleman.
IV. THE INFLUENCE OF TRADITION.
“Making the word of God of none effect through your traditions: and many such like things ye do.”—St. Mark vii. 13.
Such was our Lord’s word to the Pharisees; and if we turn to our own life it is difficult if not impossible for us fully to estimate the influence which traditions exercise upon it.
They are so woven into the web of thought and opinion, and daily habits and practices, that none of us can claim 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