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.