pattern of what we ought to be. We cannot find a fixed and available
model for conduct anywhere so useful, so complete, so capable of
application to all varieties of human life and disposition as we find in
Him, who was not this man or that man, in whom the manly and the
feminine, the gentle and the strong, the public and the private graces
were equally developed. In Christ there is no limitation or taint. In
Christ there is nothing narrow or belonging to a school. This water has
no taste of any of the rocks through which it flowed. You cannot say of
Jesus Christ that He is a Jew or a Gentile, that He is man or woman,
that He is of the ancient age or the modern type, that He is cut after
this pattern or that. All beauty and all grace are in Him, and every man
finds there the example that he needs. So, as the perfect pattern, He is
the foundation for all noble character.

As the one sufficient motive for holy and beauteous living, He is the
foundation. 'If ye love Me, keep My commandments.' That is a new thing
in the world's morality, and that one motive, and that motive alone, has
power, as the spring sunshine has, to draw beauty from out the little
sheaths of green, and to tempt the radiance of the flowers to unfold
their lustre. They that find the reason and the motive for goodness and
purity in Christ's love to them, and their answering love to Christ,
will build a far fairer fabric of a life than any others, let them toil
at the building as they may. So, dear brethren, on this foundation God
has built His mercy to all generations, and on this foundation you and I
may build our safety, our love, our thinkings, our obedience, and rest
secure.

II. Note next the tried preciousness of the foundation.

The language of the text, 'a stone of proof,' as it reads in the