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I. THE FOUNDATIONS INCLUDE ALMOST ALL THAT WE CALL LIFE, IN A LARGE VIEW. The individual is like an apple-blossom at the top of some tall and spreading monarch of the orchard. The entire tree is to that flower a foundation, out of which the blossom unfolds. The flower cannot change its place, cannot develop into anything but an apple. Its destiny is bounded, its efforts limited to a very narrow place. It is mainly so with a man. He is a consummate flower on the tree of humanity. For his personal development all the foundation facts are inevitable and irrefragable. The physical, intellectual, and moral worlds he cannot alter by the breadth of a hair. He can only build upon them. A century of progress has tended to bewilder some minds into the hope of new foundations. To such men progress seems a thing of changing the bases of life, but it is nothing of the sort. It is simply and only the uncovering of eternal foundations, that we may build more broadly. The widened palaces of civilisation are wider, because we have found more of God's unchangeable foundations. Every improvement, every application of an invention, is made possible by uncovering a little more of the unbreakable rock. Look at social and political changes in the same light. A vast number have been proposed in this century of ours. A few have succeeded, because they struck solid foundation. They rose upon the basal facts in the nature of man and his social and moral conditions. The dreams of idealists and utopians have come to naught, because they had no granite undergirding of eternal law. You might as well try to change the constituents, or their proportions, of water or air, as to attempt to vary by a scruple the moral order of the world. You might as well try to defeat gravitation as try to abolish one jot or tittle of any of the Divine order. Nearly everything is settled. It is ours to find out how it is settled, and to rear our house on that solid ground. We are on a foundation. God's fire, God's waves, God's tempests, will always keep their steady ways: it is ours to make ourselves secure against the fire, the waves, the storm-wind. So is every moral law, every and unchangeable fact in our nature, every invincible barrier in our liberty. We must uncover this bed-rock if we would build securely.

II. ALL FORMS OF UNBELIEF RESOLVE THEMSELVES INTO INCREDULITY RESPECTING FUNDAMENTAL LAW. Men are incredulous about law, because a merciful provision postpones the penalty. "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, the hearts of the children of men are fully set in them to do evil." Nature seems to the careless to be infinitely tolerant of law-breaking. Her process of punishment, like her processes of growth, are slow, and are so concealed that the children of men are snared as birds are snared. If every carelessly caught cold should kill, consumption would not reap its awful harvests. If one glass of liquor caused death, there could be no alcohol habit. In none of these cases is nature tolerant or indifferent; the penalty is delayed just as the maturity of a fruit is delayed, but it comes in "the evil time." We sin by inches and die by inches, because we refuse to see the penalties of vice, gluttony, carelessness, or drunkenness. Because sentence is not executed speedily, men build cities over the ruins wrought by earthquakes; and the sides of Vesuvius bloom with gardens and are green with olives, and villages sleep in the lava paths below; and on our streams towns sleep in fancied security, where floods work periodical desolation. Men caught in the net of their physical sins are apt to have the courage of confession. They admit that they ought to have believed in the fundamental law. But when snared in the evil nets of passion or vice, they are apt to regard their conviction and punishment as an accident or injustice. No man violates one of the Ten Commandments with impunity. The very act of sinning inflicts a punishment.

III. WE MUST BUILD UPON THE ETERNAL FOUNDATIONS. We cannot build at our caprice the foundations themselves. But it is of much moment to remember that our own work becomes fundamental to further work. On God's rock we lay our own foundations. The walls above are imperilled by the weakness of the walls below. Poor materials in the basement crack the roof overhead. The tall towers rock and reel because the undergirding is unsound. There are gifts of speech which Jack the support of the gifts of wisdom. There are capacities for action made useless for lack of capacities for reflection. There are mature manhoods which are inefficient because they are not built upon an industrious youth. There is an old age mourning over a life of neglected opportunities. There are souls that have repented of pleasant vices too late to recover in this world the joys of innocence.

IV. THE INDIVIDUAL MAN HAS MORE CONSPICUOUS NEED OF BUILDING ON WHAT IS NOBLEST IN HIS PAST. This personal past is characterised by what we call the law of habit. The thing once done tends to be done again. The good and the bad in the past have a common interest in this foundation. We cannot unmake the law. We are at each new step influenced by the path we have travelled. It has brought us here; it has set up a tendency to go right on. But our past has good to be selected from. If the immediate last steps were wrong, still our feet have known the other path. Some one may ask what I make of that doctrine of grace which lies so close to my text. I reply that grace is as much and as fully a foundation under moral life as gravitation is a foundation of physical life. We do the men of our generation infinite damage when we speak of grace as though it were a matter of Divine caprice. God helps men who seek His help as truly as He helps men who sow and reap. There is no wait of more contingency in the one case than in the other. Grace is the inspiring name for the Divine co-operation with man.

V. TO SUGGEST THE IMPORTANCE OF MAKING OUR NOBLEST PAST THE MATERIAL FOR BUILDING OUR FUTURE, LET ME CALL YOUR ATTENTION TO OUR PRESENT BUSINESS. In short, we can build. Our building is on God's land and up towards His skies. All that distinguishes our personality comes out of personal aspiration and endeavour. One man's life is a filthy hut, another is a stately palace. The bed-rock below every fixed fact of material or season is the same for both. The builders have made the enormous difference in the results.

(J. Wheeler, D. D.)

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KJV: For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

WEB: For no one can lay any other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ.