p. 250 | Tradition by Dudley Marvin Canright

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 17, 1875

Tradition.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

OPPOSED as we are every step by the influence of tradition, as all reformers have been, it is encouraging to hear now and then, protests against this great evil from those high in religious authority, though they themselves are still more or less blinded by its influence. The following from Rev. S. W. Culver in the Examiner and Chronicle, a leading Baptist paper, is good upon this point:—

"TRADITIONISM.

"Our Saviour met this tendency among the Jews as an element of hostility to his work, gathering to itself whatever of passion or prejudice could be leagued in its support. It followed him with jealous opposition throughout his earthly ministry, and was the chief inspiration of that malignity that clamored so loudly for his crucifixion. The Pharisees and Jewish doctors made more of their Talmud and their Cabala, than they did of the inspired oracles themselves. The result was that many matters manifestly of divine command were set aside, and observances of merely human invention and prescription were practiced with the utmost scrupulosity. As a consequence, the priestly ritual was enlarged, and ceremonies were multiplied, while the spirit and life of godliness declined; till the instances in which there lingered yet some remnant of the old fidelity, and the spirit of true devotion, were exceptions to the general rule.

"One would have thought our Saviour's indignant denunciations of this evil tendency would have been sufficient to prevent any irruption of it into the Christian church. Nevertheless, spite of divine warning and protest thus distinctly announced, the church enjoyed but a brief season of peace and freedom, from its blighting influence.

"Its influence continued to increase in breadth and power, till during the Middle Ages it came to exercise an all but universal ascendency. It is seen at the period of the Reformation impeding the work, and then modifying what it could not wholly prevent; with wily art implanting its leaven of unrighteousness in the churches founded by the reformers, and thus finding a new lease of life in the ranks of Protestantism, we find it at the present time boasting its hoary antiquity and utterly fabulous Apostolical succession, training its neophytes by rubric and ritual, teaching them to worship with breviary and prayer-book, and ever warring as of old, against the supremacy of the word of God.

"It will hardly be disputed by any one who looks at the subject intelligently that this is one of the worst, if not the very worst, of the foes with which Christianity has had to contend. And yet it cannot require much scrutiny to detect the falsehood in this acted lie, this organic mockery of a sound Christianity. What, after all, is this so much vaunted tradition? It is a stream whose waters flow down to us through many a filthy pool, a stream reddened with the blood of ages of persecution, and poisoned with moral degeneracy and spiritual death. Its prescriptive formularies, what are they but just the implements of priestly assumption by which they affect control of the consciences of men, and lord it with a high hand over God's heritage?

"Tradition is traceable in every case, either to an uncertain origin as little reliable as the most shadowy myth, or else to a source that is manifestly and entirely human. In every case, the effect is to turn away the attention and regard from the word of God, and just in proportion as it is received as authority in religious practice and worship, to set that word aside and substitute human for divine authority. The rebuke of the Saviour is as applicable to the traditionism of the nineteenth century as to that of the first, as applicable in America as in Judea—'Ye make the word of God of none effect.' 'Why do ye transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?' "

D. M. C.