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Many of us have watched that fascinating but awful sight — the progress of a great fire. We have marked how the devouring element masters first one and then another department of the building which is its victim; but especially we have noted what it consumes and what it is forced to spare, the resistless force with which it sweeps through and shrivels up all the slighter materials, and only pauses before the solid barriers of stone or iron, thus trying before our very eyes the builders' work of what sort it is. Now of whom was the apostle thinking when he wrote the warning words about the spiritual builder who employed wood, and hay, and stubble in his work? The eager adherents of Apollos had been powerfully impressed by the brilliant Alexandrian, by his knowledge of what was being said and thought in the Greek world; by his skill in setting out what he had to say to the very best advantage; they were, after the manner of disciples, more eager to imitate their master's methods than careful to be true to the end he had in view. "Take care," St. Paul seems to say to the young men who were trading on the great name and authority of Apollos — "take care what you are doing with those souls at Corinth. Are you only interesting and amusing them for a few of the passing days of time, or are you building up in them a faith which will enable them to pass death and eternity? What are the materials of the structures within those souls which you are raising? Are they the gold, the silver, the precious stones of the Apostolic faith? No doubt they are; but do they not also include materials of a different kind — less valuable, less durable — wood, hay, and stubble? If this be so, a time is coming when all the precious and worthless alike will be submitted to a serious test. "The fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." But He who at the end will judge us once for all is now and always judging us, and His perpetual presence among us as our Judge, constantly probing, trying, saving us, is revealed by events and circumstances which have on our souls the effects of fire — they burn up that which is worthless, they leave that which is solid unscathed. There is the searching, testing power of a new and responsible position, of a situation forcing its occupant to make it a critical choice, or to withstand a strong pressure. Such a new position discovers and burns up all that is weak in a man's faith and character. History is strewn with illustrations of this truth. The virtuous, though weak, emperor, who was floated to power on the surf of revolution, is by no means the only man of whom it might be said that all would have judged him capable of ruling others if only he had never been a ruler. How often does early manhood open with so much that seems promising — with intelligence, courage, attention to duty, unselfishness, what looks like high principle — and then the man is put into a position of authority — it is the fire that tests the work which he has done in his character. Suddenly he betrays some one defect which ruins everything: it may be vanity, it may be envy, it may be a shadow of untruthfulness, it may be some lower fierce passion which emerges suddenly as if unbidden from the depths of the soul, and wins over him a fatal mastery. All is good is turned to ill, all is distorted, discoloured; he might have died a young man amid general lamentations that so promising a life had been cut short. He does die as did Nero or Henry Tudor, amid the loudly-expressed or the muttered thanksgiving of his generation that he has left the world. The fact was, that the position in which be found himself exposed him to a pressure which his character could not bear. You remember how the old Tay Bridge, before that fatal winter night, was believed to be equal to its purpose. It needed, no doubt, a mighty impact, a terrific rush of wind from one particular quarter, in order to show that the genius and audacity of men had presumed too largely on the forbearance of the elements. But the moment came. We many of us remember something of the sense of horror which the tragical catastrophe left on the public mind; the gradual disappearance of the last train as it moved on its wonted way on into darkness, the suddenly observed dislocation and flickering of the distant lights, the faint sound as of a crash rising for a moment even over the din of the storm, and then the utter darkness as all, train and bridge, together sank into the gulph of waters beneath, and one moment of supreme and unimaginable agony was followed by the silence of death. And we see these truths at work in associated as well as in individual human life. Any one will recall the names of empires which have appeared to possess the elements of unconquerable strength until they have been subjected to the test of new conditions — the empire of the Great Alexander, the empire of Attila the Hun, the empire of the first Napoleon. Alexander subdued all the nations which spread from the Adriatic to the Indies. No sooner had he passed away than the unity of his work was shattered by the ambition of three generals. Attila's kingdom at one time reached from the Volga to the Loire; the vast host at his disposal was attended by a bevy of subject kings and chiefs: the emperors of the East and West were both his obsequious tributaries; and the men of his day expressed the terror which his apparently boundless power inspired when they named him "the scourge of God." Yet he had scarcely been discovered dead on his couch after a drunken revel, when his sons, greedy for high place, turned their arms against each other, and so within some fifteen years the Buns had sunk to be the dependents and tributaries of the very race which but now they had ruled. And there is Attila's great counterpart in modern Europe — Napoleon. His vast, motley hosts swept along over much the same ground as Attila's though in an opposite direction. Like Attila's, they passed over ancient and prostrate thrones; like his, too, they went on the errand of an insatiable ambition; but before he died, as we all know, Napoleon's work had been tested with a severity which revealed its weakness, and left behind it nothing but a million of tombs and the dying echoes of a vast catastrophe. And as with States, so with particular branches of the Christian Church. A Church may be, to all appearances, highly favoured; it may have leaders conspicuous for holiness or learning; it may reckon its multitudes of devout communicants, its flourishing missions at home and abroad, and its many works of benevolence and mercy; and yet it may have admitted to its bosom some false principles, whether of faith or morals, which will find it out in the day of trial. In the early centuries no Church was more highly favoured than that of Northern Africa. It had, it is said, almost innumerable Churches, which produced saints and martyrs; its intellectual and practical activity was tested by the long series of Councils of Carthage; it was the first Church, so far as we know, certainly it was earlier than any in Italy, to translate the New Testament Scriptures into the languages of the West; it held its own in debate with the greatest Churches of Europe, and with Rome itself; but the day of trial came on it with the invasion of the Vandals, as lay dying in Hippo. It came again, and more decisively, with the Moslem conquest. There are Churches in the East which have suffered as much as or more than the Church of Northern Africa — Churches which have never ceased suffering, yet which in their weakness are still instinct with life and hope; but the Church of and Augustine perished out right. We may guess at the cause — we cannot determine; it may have been a general lax morality among its people; it may have been a widespread spirit of paradox among its teachers; it may have been some far-reaching weakness or corruption which the day of account will alone reveal. But there is the fact. No Church in primitive Christendom stood higher than the Church of Africa: none has ever so utterly disappeared. Let us of the Church of to-day be not high-minded, but fear; for if prominence and success do not discover what is weak in faith and character, there is an agent who comes to all sooner or later, and who will surely do so — there is the fire, the searching, testing power of deep affliction. Many a creed that will do for the sunny days of life will not serve us in its deep shadows, much less in the valley of the shadow of death. The truths which strengthen and brace character, and enable it to pass unscathed, like the three holy children through the fiery furnace of deep sorrow, are the great certainties which were ever to the front in the apostle's teaching about God and men, about life and death, about sin and redemption, about nature and grace, and, above all, about the boundless power and love of Jesus Christ our Lord and God.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble;

WEB: But if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or stubble;