at work.  The Holy Spirit worketh!  Grace worketh!  Faith worketh!  Love worketh!  Hope worketh!  Prayer worketh!  And there are other allies robed in less attractive garb.  “Tribulation worketh!” “This light affliction worketh.”  “Godly sorrow worketh!” On every side of him the apostle conceives cooperative and friendly powers.  “The mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round about him.”  He exults in the consciousness of abounding resources.  He discovers the friends of God in things which find no place among the scheduled powers of the world.  He finds God’s raw material in the world’s discarded waste.  “Weak things,” “base things,” “things that are despised,” “things that are not,” mere nothings; among these he discovers the operating agents of the mighty God.  Is it any wonder that in this man, possessed of such a wealthy consciousness of multiplied resources, the spirit of a cheery optimism should be enthroned?  With what stout confidence he goes into the fight!  He never mentions the enemy timidly.  He never seeks to underestimate his strength.  Nay, again and again he catalogs all possible antagonisms in a spirit of buoyant and exuberant triumph.  However numerous the enemy, however subtle and aggressive his devices, however towering and well-established the iniquity, however black the gathering clouds, so sensitive is the apostle to the wealthy resources of God that amid it all he remains a sunny optimist, “rejoicing in hope,” laboring in the spirit of a conqueror even when the world was exulting in his supposed discomfiture and defeat.

And, finally, in searching for the springs of this man’s optimism, I place alongside his sense of the reality of redemption and his wealthy consciousness of present resources his impressive sense of the reality of future glory.  Paul gave himself time to think of heaven, of the home of God, of his own home when time should be no more.  He loved to contemplate “the glory that shall be revealed.”  He mused in wistful expectancy of the day “when Christ who is our life shall be manifested,” and when we also “shall be manifested with him in glory.”  He pondered the thought of death as “gain,” as transferring him to conditions in which he would be “at home with the Lord,” “with Christ, which is far better.”  He looked for “the blest hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,” and he contemplated “that great day” as the “henceforth,” which would reveal to him the crown of righteousness and glory.  Is any one prepared to dissociate this contemplation from the apostle’s cheery optimism?  Is not rather the thought of coming glory one of its abiding springs?  Can we safely exile it from our moral and spiritual culture?  I know that this particular contemplation is largely absent from modern religious life, and I know the nature of the recoil in which our present impoverishment began.  “Let us hear less about the mansions of the blest and more about the housing of the poor!” Men revolted against an