he corner-stone here is the foundation-stone and not 'the
head-stone of the corner.' Jesus Christ is both. He is the first and
the last; the Alpha and Omega. In accordance with the whole context, in
which the prevailing idea is that which always fired Paul's imagination,
viz. that of reconciling Jew and Gentile in one new man, it is best to
suppose a reference here to the union of Jew and Gentile. The stone laid
beneath the two walls which diverge at right angles from each other
binds both together and gives strength and cohesion to the whole. In the
previous context the same idea is set forth that Christ 'preached peace
to them that were afar off (Gentiles) and to them that were nigh
(Jews).' By His death He broke down another wall, the middle wall of
partition between them, and did so by abolishing 'the law of
commandments contained in ordinances.' The old distinction between Jew
and Gentile, which was accentuated by the Jew's rigid observance of
ordinances and which often led to bitter hatred on both sides, was swept
away in that strange new thing, a community of believers drawn together
in Jesus Christ. The former antagonistic 'twain' had become one in a
third order of man, the Christian man. The Jew Christian and the Gentile
Christian became brethren because they had received one new life, and
they who had common feelings of faith and love to the same Saviour, a
common character drawn from Him, and a common destiny open to them by
their common relation to Jesus, could never cherish the old emotions of
racial hate.

When we, in this day, try to picture to ourselves that strange new
thing, the love which bound the early Christians together and buried as
beneath a rushing flood the formidable walls of separation between them,
we may well penitently ask ourselves how it comes that Jesus seems to
have so much less power to triumph over the divisive forces that part us
from those who should be our hearts' brothers. In our modern life there
are no such gulfs of separation from one another as were filled up
unconsciously in the experience of the first believers, but the narrower
chinks seem to remain in their ugliness between those who profess a
common faith in one Lord, and who are all ready to assert that they are
built on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, and that Jesus
Christ is from them the chief corner-stone.

If in reality He is so to us, and He is so if we have been builded upon
Him through our faith,