XI

CHRIST FUNDAMENTAL

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

I Corinthians iii. Ir

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

ALL schools of architecture agree in one point. However they may differ in theories of construction or schemes of ornamentation, they are at one in the doctrine that the most important part of every building, home or palace, temple or fortress, is the foundation.

Now the apostle Paul translates this truth into the terms of religion. He declares that the essential thing is to have a sure foundation for faith, and character, and life. He declares that such a foundation has been laid in Jesus Christ. And he adds that there is nothing in the universe to take the place of that foundation as a basis for all that is permanent and precious in existence.

The apostle has been dead eighteen hundred years, but that splendid claim still stands. The number of those who have proved it by personal experience has in

creased year by year, and century by century. Men have tried to lay other foundations, but they and their works have vanished. The bonfires have been kindled on a thousand hills, and have burned out. The floods have risen, and fallen, and swept away the frail edifices that have been built upon the sands of time. But the Impregnable Rock remains unshaken, lifting all the lives that have been founded upon it high above the wrecks of ages, clear outlined against the sky, like a crown of towers and a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

Let us try to dig down into the meaning of this text and take the measure of it, as men have measured and admired the great foundations which modern archæology has unearthed below the site of the ancient temple at Jerusalem.

In what sense is Jesus Christ the fundamental reality of human life?

I. Christ is the foundation of a reasonable faith. He underlies all true theology. Without him we cannot "assert eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to man." The moral government of the uni

verse becomes all dark and confused, "a mighty maze and all without a plan," unless we believe in a divine Redeemer. The problem of the existence of evil under the rule of an absolutely good God is insoluble, and, I say it reverently, the moral character of the Supreme Being is a mockery to our conscience, unless we can discover a personal, saving, redeeming revelation of the divine Love in the same world into which the Omnipotent has permitted sin to enter.

"Till God in human flesh I see
My thoughts no comfort find;
The holy, just and sacred Three
Are terrors to my mind."

Now the trouble with men who have made systems of doctrine about God, even when they have believed sincerely in this revelation of God in Christ, is that they have made it supplemental, instead of fundamental, to their thought. They have told us first what God must be, reasoning from their own dim conception of omnipotence and omnipresence and omniscience, They have given their definitions of divine justice and mercy, and laid down the conditions under which they are exercised. They have