m of ignoble life.

"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still."

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 cla