omplete the
circle. But that is not all. The necessity for progress will persist
after death; and all through the duration of immortal being,
goodness, blessedness, holiness, Godlikeness, will, on the one hand,
grow in brighter lustre; and on the other, alienation from God, loss
of the noble elements of the nature, and all the other doleful
darknesses which attend that conception of a lost man, will increase
likewise. And so, two people, sitting side by side here now, may
start from the same level, and by the operation of the one principle
the one may rise, and rise, and rise, till he is lost in God, and so
finds himself, and the other sink, and sink, and sink, into the
obscurity of woe and evil that lies beneath every human life as a
possibility.

III. And now, lastly, notice the determining attitude to the Cross
which settles the class to which we belong.

Paul, in my text, is explaining his reason for not preaching the
Gospel with what he calls 'the words of man's wisdom,' and he says,
in effect, 'It would be of no use if I did, because what settles
whether the Cross shall look "foolishness" to a man or not is the
man's whole moral condition, and what settles whether a man shall
find it to be "the power of God" or not is whether he has passed into
the region of those that are being saved.'

So there are two thoughts suggested which sound as if they were
illogically combined, but which yet are both true. It is true that
men perish, or are saved, because the Cross is to them respectively
'foolishness' or 'the power of God'; and the other thing is also
true, that the Cross is to them 'foolishness,' or 'the power of God'
because, respectively, they are perishing or being saved. That is not
putting the cart before the horse, but both aspects of the truth are
true.

If you see nothing in Jesus Christ, and His death for us all, except
'foolishness,' something unfit to do you any good, and unnecessary to
be taken into account in your lives--oh, my friends! _that_ is the
condemnation of your eyes, and not of the thing you look at. If a
man, gazing on the sun at twelve o'clock on a June day, says to me,
'It is not bright,' the only thing I have to say to him is, 'Friend,
you had better go to an oculist.' And if to us the Cross is
'foolishness,' it is because already a process of 'perishing' has
gone so far that it has attacked our capacity of recognising the
wisdom and love of God when we see them.

But, on the other h