rsued 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 wou