Sermons at Rugby | Page 9

eyes were blinded, and their hearts hardened against every new
revelation.
Thus they stand before Christ, blocking His path, the very embodiment
of that power which closes the soul against those inspiring and
purifying influences that come from direct communion with God. They
block the Saviour's path, because this personal communion is just what
He represents to us--the direct revelation of the Spirit of God in man.
He comes to reveal the Father to each of us, and to make us feel the
presence of the Divine creative Spirit in every separate human life; and
till we feel this personal illumination we have not realised the
manifestation of the Son of God. But the Pharisee with his continual
reference to tradition, his multiplication of external observances, and
elaborate ritual, his reliance upon usage and external authority, knows
little or nothing of the personal illumination by the direct influence of
the Spirit of God upon our spirit. Hence this absolute and fundamental
contrast between Jesus and the Pharisees. They represent two opposing
principles in life. And it is this that gives such intensity to the words He
addressed to them: "Ye have made the word of God of none effect
through your traditions"; and it is a universal warning--never out of
date.
If the spirit of traditional usage and influence holds the citadel of a
man's life, the spirit of Christian progress cannot gain an entrance.
That is the lesson which the Saviour presses upon our attention by His
denunciation of the Pharisaic usage, habit, and attitude, and it is hardly
possible to overestimate the importance of the lesson, because 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 estimate 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