stones, and topping them with rubbish.  You will see in the walls of Jerusalem, at the base, five or six courses of those massive blocks which are the wonders of the world yet; well jointed, well laid, well cemented, and then on the top of them a mass of poor stuff, heaped together anyhow; scamped work—­may I use a modern vulgarism?—­’jerry-building.’  You may go to some modern village, on an ancient historic site, and you will find built into the mud walls of the hovels in which the people are living, a marble slab with fair carving on it, or the drum of a great column of veined marble, and on the top of that, timber and clay mixed together.

That is the type of the sort of life that hosts of Christian people are living.  For, mark, all the builders are on the foundation.  Paul is not speaking about mere professed Christians who had no faith at all in them, and no real union with Jesus Christ.  These builders were ‘on the foundation’; they were building on the foundation, there was a principle deep down in their lives—­which really lay at the bottom of their lives—­and yet had not come to such dominating power as to mould and purify and make harmonious with itself the life that was reared upon it.  We all know that that is the condition of many men, that they have what really are the fundamental bases of their lives, in belief and aim and direction; and which yet are not strong enough to master the whole of the life, and to manifest themselves through it.  Especially it is the condition of some Christian people.  They have a real faith, but it is of the feeblest and most rudimentary kind.  They are on the foundation, but their lives are interlaced with the most heterogeneous mixty-maxty of good and evil, of lofty, high, self-sacrificing thoughts and heavenward aspirations, of resolutions never carried out into practice; and side by side with these there shall be meannesses, selfishnesses, tempers, dispositions all contradictory of the former impulses.  One moment they are all fire and love, the next moment ice and selfishness.  One day they are all for God, the next day all for the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Jacob sees the open heavens and the face of God and vows; to-morrow he meets Laban and drops to shifty ways.  Peter leaves all and follows his Master, and in a little while the fervour has gone, and the fire has died down into grey ashes, and a flippant servant-girl’s tongue leads him to say ‘I know not the man.’  ’Gold, silver, precious stones,’ and topping them, ‘wood, hay, stubble!’

The inconsistencies of the Christian life are what my text, in the application that I am venturing to make of it, suggests to us.  Ah, dear friends! we do not need to go to Jacob and Peter; let us look at our own hearts, and if we will honestly examine one day of our lives, I think we shall understand how it is possible for a man, on the foundation, yet to build upon it these worthless and combustible things, ‘wood, hay, stubble.’