in, and are deduced from, the Incarnation and the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  We have not learned them all yet.  They have not all been applied to national and individual life yet.  I plead for no narrow exclusiveness, but for one consistent with the widest application of Christian principles to all life.  Paul determined to know nothing but Jesus, and to know everything in Jesus, and Jesus in everything.  Do not begin your building at the second-floor windows.  Put in your foundations first, and be sure that they are well laid.  Let the Sacrifice of Christ, in its application to the individual and his sins, be ever the basis of all that you say.  And then, when that foundation is laid, exhibit, to your heart’s content, the applications of Christianity and its social aspects.  But be sure that the beginning of them all is the work of Christ for the individual sinful soul, and the acceptance of that work by personal faith.

Dear friends, ours has been a long and happy union but it is a very solemn one.  My responsibilities are great; yours are not small.  Let me beseech you to ask yourselves if, with all your kindness to the messenger, you have given heed to the message.  Have you passed beyond the voice that speaks, to Him of whom it speaks?  Have you taken the truth—­veiled and weakened as I know it has been by my words, but yet in them—­for what it is, the word of the living God?  My occupancy of this pulpit must in the nature of things, before long, come to a close, but the message which I have brought to you will survive all changes in the voice that speaks here.  ’All flesh is grass ... the Word of the Lord endureth for ever.’  And, closing these forty years, during a long part of which some of you have listened most lovingly and most forbearingly, I leave with you this, which I venture to quote, though it is my Master’s word about Himself, ’I judge you not; the word which I have spoken unto you, the same shall judge you in the last day.’

GOD’S FELLOW-WORKERS

   ’Labourers together with God.’—­1 COR. iii. 9.

The characteristic Greek tendency to factions was threatening to rend the Corinthian Church, and each faction was swearing by a favourite teacher.  Paul and his companion, Apollos, had been taken as the figureheads of two of these parties, and so he sets himself in the context, first of all to show that neither of the two was of any real importance in regard to the Church’s life.  They were like a couple of gardeners, one of whom did the planting, and the other the watering; but neither the man that put the little plant into the ground, nor the man that came after him with a watering-pot, had anything to do with originating the mystery of the life by which the plant grew.  That was God’s work, and the pair that had planted and watered were nothing.  So what was the use of fighting which of two nothings was the greater?