hope or have anything that is real in the experience of love unless it inevitably leads a man on into those things that clearly were in Paul's mind when he spoke not of faith and love only but also of hope. I ask any man's heart if it is possible to divorce hope from love. I suppose in one sense it may be, and that you can speak of a hopeless love. Henry Martyn's heroic and tragic life was the unfolding of a hopeless love. But how different that is from love that is undershot with hope. One looks towards evening to see the children waiting as he comes home. The workman lives in the hope of all that is there of joy and confidence and perfect trust inside his home. Love would be a sorry thing to-day if it were stripped of the hopes that give it its sweetness and its joy.
And it is not only faith and love that root themselves inseparably in hope, and that lose their fragrance and meaning if they do not continue to draw both out of hope, but regarding almost everything else that is dearest and most precious to us in life, does it not spring from this same great treasury? In one of the chapters of the Epistle to the Romans we find Paul again and again, in his efforts to bring his message out to those to whom he writes, describing God in different terms of speech. He begins by speaking of Him as the God of comfort, the God of patience, and then he goes on to speak of Him
