tradition (tradishon)

[ The covenant is God's justifying instrument, as signifying his donative consent; and baptism is the instrument of it, by solemn investiture or tradition. Baxter , Life of Faith, iii. 8. As a private conveyance, Mancipation was extremely clumsy, and I have no doubt it was a great advantage to Roman society when this ancient conveyance was first subordinated to Tradition or simple delivery, and finally superseded by it. Maine, Early Law and Custom, p. 352. 2. The handing down of opinions, doctrines, practices, rites, and customs from ancestors to posterity; the transmi ion of any opinion or practice from forefathers to descendants or from one generation to another, by oral communication, without written memorials. Say what you will against Tradition ; we know the Signification of Words by nothing but Tradition . Selden, Table-Talk, p. 111. It is not true that written history is a mere tradition of falsehoods, a uinptions, and illogical deductions, of what the writers believed rather than of what they knew, and of what they wished to have believed rather than what was true. Stubbs , Medieval and Modern Hist., p. 75. 3. A statement, opinion, or belief, or a body of statements or opinions or beliefs, that has been handed down from age to age by oral communication; knowledge or belief transmitted with out the aid of written memorials. Roselayn is a place where are the Cisterns called Solomon's, supposed, according to the common tradition hereabouts, to have been made by that great King, as a part of his recompence to King Hiram. Maundrell , Aleppo to Jerusalem, p. 50. Nobody can make a tradition ; it takes a century to make it. Hawthorne , Septimius Felton, p. 111. 4. (a) In theol., that body of doctrine and discipline supposed to have been revealed or commanded by God, but not committed to writing, and therefore not incorporated in the Scriptures. According to the Pharisees, when Moses was on Mount Sinai two sets of laws were delivered to him by God, one of which was recorded, while the other was handed down from father to son, and miraculously kept uncorrupted to their day. These are the traditions referred to in Mat. xv. 2 and other parallel pa ages. Roman Catholic theologians maintain that much of Christ's oral teaching not committed to writing by the immediate disciples has been preserved in the church, and that this instruction, together with that subsequently afforded to the church by the direct teaching of the Holy Spirit-all of which is to be found in the writings of the fathers, the decrees of councils, and the decretals of the Popes-constitutes a body of tradition as truly divine, and therefore as truly authoritative, as the Scriptures themselves ( L. Abbott, Dict. IMG:content-0699.png:[blocks in formation]