spiritual powers must be roused to action and disciplined to use.  The simplest illustration of this is the difficulty experienced by the enthusiastic beginner in holding the attention fixed on spiritual acts such as the various forms of prayer.  In all such attempts at spiritual activity there will be the constant drag of old habits, the recurrence of states of mind and imagination that had become habitual.  These hindrances can be overcome, but only by steady and rather tedious labour.  They call for the display of the virtue of patience which is not one of the virtues characteristic of spiritual immaturity.  Hence reaction and the feeling that one is not getting on, the feeling that we have quite possibly made a mistake about the whole matter.

This is the place for the exercise of hope; and hope will come if we look away from our not very encouraging acquirement to the ground that we have for expecting any acquirement at all.  If we ask:  “Why hope?” we shall see that our basis of hope is not in ourselves at all but in God.  We hope because of the promises of God, because of His will for us as revealed in His Son.  “He loved us and gave Himself for us”; and that giving will not be in vain.  “He gave Himself for me,” I tell myself, “and therefore I am justified in my expectation of spiritual success.”  So one tries to learn from the present failure as it seems; so one repents and pushes on; so one learns that it is through tenacity of purpose that one attains results.

And again:  I am sustained by hope because I see that the results that I covet are not imaginary.  They exist.  I see them in operation all about me.  I learn of them as I study the lives of other Christians past and present.  They are reality not theory, fact not dream.  And what has been so richly and abundantly the outcome of spiritual living in others must be within my own reach.  The results they attained were not miraculous gifts, but they were the working of God the Holy Spirit in lives yielded to Him and co-operating with Him.

Once more:  is it not true that after a period of honest labour I do find results?  Perhaps not all that I would like but all that I am justified in expecting from the energy I have spent?  I do not believe that any one can look back over a year’s honest labour and not see that the labour has born fruit.

In any case the fact that we do not see just what we are looking for does not mean that no spiritual work is going on.  It may seem that our Lord is silent and that to our cries there is no voice nor any that answers; but that may mean that we are looking in the wrong place or listening for the wrong word.  The disciples looked that the outcome of our Lord’s life should be that the Kingdom should be restored to Israel; and when they turned away from the tomb in Joseph’s Garden they felt that what they had looked for and prayed for was hopeless of accomplishment.  But the important point was not their vision of the