So limited, so mistaken, is the human outlook on life.  They had but to await another night’s passing and all would be changed.  But in the meantime the position of the disciples was pitiful.  They were in that state of dull, hopeless discouragement that is one of the most painful of human states.  It is a state to which we who are Christians do from time to time fall victims with much less excuse.  We are hopeless, we say and feel.  We look at the future, at the problems with which we are fronted, and we see no ray of light, no suggestion of a solution.  We have been robbed of what we most valued and life looks wholly blank to us.  For those others there was this of excuse,—­they did not know Jesus risen, they did not know the power of the resurrection life.  For us there is no such excuse because we have a sure basis of hope in our knowledge of the meaning of the Lord.

Hope is one of the great trilogy of Christian Virtues, the gift to Christians of God the Holy Ghost.  As Christians we have the virtue of hope, the question is whether we will excercise it or no.  It is one of the many fruits of our being in a state of grace.  Many blunder when they think of hope in that they confound it with an optimistic feeling about the future.  We hear of hopeful persons and we know that by the description is meant persons who are confident “that everything will be all right,” when there seems no ground at all for thinking so.  They have a “buoyant temperament,” by which I suppose is meant a temperament which soars above facts.  That not very intelligent attitude has nothing to do with the Christian virtue of hope.  Hope is born of our relation to God.  It is the conviction:  “God is on my side; I will not fear what man can do unto me.”  It is the serene and untroubled trust of one who knows that he is safe in the hands of God, and that his life is really ordered by the will and Providence of God.

This virtue, had they possessed it, would have carried the disciples through the crisis of our Lord’s death.  They had had sufficient experience of Him to know that they might utterly rely on Him in all the circumstances of their lives.  He had always sustained them and carried them through all crises.  They had often been puzzled by Him, no doubt; they had felt helpless to fathom much of His teaching, but they had slowly arrived at certain conclusions about Him which He Himself had confirmed.  On that day at Caesarea Phillipi they had reached the conclusion of His Messiahship, a slumbering conviction had broken into flame and light in the great confession of S. Peter.  The meaning of Messiahship was a part of their national religious tradition; and although in some important respects mistaken, they yet, one would think, have been led to perfect trust in our Lord when they acknowledged His Messianic claims.  But death?  They could not get over the apparent finality of death.  But, again, perhaps we are not very far beyond this in our understanding of it.  To us still death seems very final.