ngs here that I wish to
say a word about--the patchwork building, the testing fire, the fate
of the builders.

I. First, the patchwork structure.

'If any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones,
wood, hay, stubble.' In the original application of the metaphor,
Paul is thinking of all these teachers in that church at Corinth as
being engaged in building the one structure--I venture to deflect
here, and to regard each of us as rearing our own structure of life
and character on the foundation of the preached and accepted Christ.

Now, what the Apostle says is that these builders were, some of them,
laying valuable things like gold and silver and costly stones--by
which he does not mean jewels, but marbles, alabasters, polished
porphyry or granite, and the like; sumptuous building materials,
which were employed in great palaces or temples--and that some of
them were bringing timber, hay, stubble, reeds gathered from the
marshes or the like, and filling in with such trash as that. That is
a picture of what a great many Christian people are doing in their
own lives--the same man building one course of squared and solid and
precious 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