a little wider, and see whether it will stand. Down it goes! Now I will prop it up. Surely, I can make this dead thing stand. But, no: it has a tendency to fall, and down it goes! Have I not seen a sinner try to set up the corpse of his own righteousness, and make it stand? At last he has been obliged to say what the fool said in the old classic, "It wants something inside"; and so it does: for until there is life within, it will not stand. Even so, our righteousness has no true vitality, no life within, and it will not stand. Or, to use another illustration: it is like a man trying to patch up an old house. You find such in country villages; a place which nobody has ever repaired for fifty years. I do not know if there is any landlord; but if there is, he would like to forgot that he has such property. The main beam is nearly cracked through. The lath and plaster have gone long ago, and the birds go in and out the best parlour whenever they like; and the whole thing is tumbling down. A man buys it, and he says, "Now, you know, it is a pity to pull this house down; I think I will repair it." So he puts in a beam there, just under the roof; and he puts a strut here, and another timber there; and, by the time he has spent as much as would have built a house, he has got a very handsome ruin left, and nothing more. I think it was Charles the First who used to swear, "God mend me." Somebody said it would be an easier job to make a new one of him; and I believe it. When men say, "God mend me," they had better say, "God make me new." So, as to your righteousness; if you have a lot of it, and it is very good; if you have been christened, or baptized, if you like, and confirmed, and have always gone to your place of worship, and are so good that you wonder you can live in such a wicked world as this; if you have all that righteousness, the best thing to do with it is, to get rid of it; for it will ruin your soul. But this is what men do,—they try "to set up" their own righteousness. And then the text says that they "go about" to do this: "Going about to establish their own righteousness." That is to say, they set about it with great zeal. Some of you that know the Lord can recollect how you thought you would do it. Why, at first, when you started as a young man, you were never going to do any wrong. You were going to have a perfect righteousness of your own. You had an ugly temper, however, and it broke out indeed. "Well," you said, "I shall never do so again." You came down to breakfast, and you were as bad- tempered as ever; so you said, "Never mind, I will set it up now. I shall be a teetotaler. That will be a grand thing." So it was; but, somehow or other, down tumbled your righteousness again! Then you went to a place of worship. You said, "I will always be there." You began to think that you would grow into a saint; but you did not. Down tumbled your righteousness! Ever it went; and you, all the while, tried zealously to set it up. "Going about" implies great earnestness: when a man says, "I am going about a thing", he means that he is going to take his coat off—going to work in his shirt-sleeves. He is going to toil at it for many hours. I recollect how I set to work in my shirt-sleeves to make a righteousness of my own; and I did very nicely indeed while it was dark. But when a little light from the cross broke in, I began to see the filthiness of it. And you, my friend, think yourself very beautiful when you cannot see yourself. But let the looking-glass be held before you, you would begin to see the spots of filth that defile the very best of your righteousness. Ah me! how foul the righteousness of men is; and yet they go about to set up their own righteousness. To "go about" to establish a righteousness means, in the next place, that men have varied ways of doing it. Shall I tell you what I frequently meet with? I have talked with a person, and said, "Can you trust in your own works?" "Oh, no, sir, I can never do that." "Well, can you come to Christ, and take the righteousness of God?" "Well, sir, no; I do not feel enough my