In to-day's changing tides of thought, when the old faiths seem slipping away, when we wonder why we have lost the simple faith of our own youth or our father's, looking for some firm ground for our feet, we do well to set them down on nothing but facts, to discriminate among the sands of time and the alluvial deposits of tradition till we find the rock of truth.
But facing the facts we find everywhere one writ large, over all one great principle of unchanging law, one great purpose moving through all nature and all history, and what we once only dared to hope and dream, that back of all there throbs infinite love and there rules infinite wisdom, now is attested by the impressive array of the witnesses of science.
Truth always is safe. The holiest error must be born of hell. We can make no mistake in refusing to go beyond truth, and we will find that she leads to the ordering of life according to eternal laws, to the doing of duties and finding of sweet joys as old as the hills and as unchanging; she will lead in the paths of rightness.
Some day our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion; shall know things as they are and be what we should be.
THE REAL FOUNDATION
A good many thousand sermons have been preached on the parable of the houses built on sand and on rock, probably nearly all of them with the intent to prove that the way to build the life on a rock foundation is to pass through the experience known as conversion, obtain saving faith and join the church. This is typical of a popular way of interpreting the scriptures: First, determine what you wish them to mean and then make them mean that. The purpose being to persuade people to join the church, then by hook or crook that duty must be discovered in every divine precept.
But this is simply to ignore the plain words of the great Teacher. It would be impossible to clarify His statement: "If any man hears and does the things I have been teaching he is like one who builds on a rock." One thing marks the rock founded life, the doing of Christly deeds. The course of conduct, the kind of character He has just outlined in the sermon on the mount gives the established staple character.
The enduring life is not built on dreams. Many people think that their lives are rock founded because they have a nebulous admiration for the moral teachings of Jesus. On the whole they admire the sermon on the mount; having taken the trouble to say as much as this they sit back with the comfortable feeling that they have set themselves right with the universe, that the Almighty will be delighted with their indorsement.
One of the most dangerous hypocrites is the easy-going, thoughtless being who fancies that the indorsement of a duty is equivalent to the doing of it. He evaporates his convictions into compliments instead of crystallizing them into conduct. So far from being built on a rock he floats around like a wisp of hay in a high wind. A butterfly might better hope to drill and quarry out a foundation than he. Besides this, his hypocritical praise of right precepts makes them only offensive to those who might desire to practice them.
Others imagine that an intellectual assent to certain statements concerning the church or the Bible or Jesus is sufficient to fix the life in stability. But the great Teacher does not place the emphasis so much on what men may think of His character or mission, nor even on their honest opinions on the theories of the past and the future, which have delighted mental gymnasts since the world was young, to Him the great differentiating fact touches those dynamic convictions that are determining your conduct this day.