dies down, or the sails that were flat as a board belly out a little, or you are caught in some current, and round goes the bowsprit on another tack altogether.  How many of us are pursuing the objects which we pursued five-and-twenty years ago, if we have numbered so many years?  What has become of aims that were everything to us then?  We have won some of them, and they have turned out not half as good as we thought they would be.  The hare is never so big when it is in the bag as when it is hurrying across the fields.  We have missed some of them, and we scarcely remember that we once wanted them.  We have outlived a great many, and they lie away behind us, hull down on the horizon, and we are making for some other point that, in like manner, if we reach it, will be left behind and be lost.  There is nothing that lasts but God and Christ, and the people that build their lives upon them.

I press upon all your hearts that one simple thought—­what an absurdity it is for us to choose for our life’s object anything that is shorter-lived than ourselves!—­and how long-lived you are you know.  They tell us that sand makes a very good foundation under certain circumstances.  I believe it does, but what if the water gets in?  What about it then?  But in regard to all these transitory aims and short-lived purposes on which some of you are building your lives, there is a certainty that the water will come in some day.  So, friend, dig deeper down, even to the Eternal Rock.  That is the only foundation on which an immortal man or woman like you is wise to build your life.  Are you doing it?

II.  Let me say a word, in the next place, about the two houses.

The one is built upon the rock.  That just means, of course—­and I need not enlarge upon that—­a life which is based upon, and shaped after, the commandments of Jesus Christ, His Pattern and Example.  And that life will stand.  Now, of course, the ideal would be that the whole of His sayings should enter into the whole of our lives, that no commandment of that dear Lord should be left unobeyed, and that no action of ours should be unaffected by His known will.  That is the ideal, and for us the task of wisdom is daily to draw nearer and nearer to that ideal, and to bring the whole of our lives more and more under the sway and sanctifying influence of the whole sum of Christ’s precepts.  Of course, on the other side, the life that is built on the sand is the life which is not thus regulated by Christ’s will and known commandments.

But I desire rather to bring out, in a word or two, some of the lessons that may be gathered from this general metaphor of a man’s life as a house.  And the first that I would suggest is this:—­Have you ever thought of your life as being a whole, with a definite moral characteristic stamped upon it?  I look upon the men and women that I come across in the world, and I cannot help seeing that a great many of them have never got into their heads the idea that