me.’  When the first wave breaks over the ship, as she clears the heads and heels over before the full power of the open sea, inexperienced landsmen think they are all going to the bottom, but they soon learn that there is a long way between rolling and foundering, and get to watch the highest waves towering above the bows in full confidence that these also will slip quietly beneath the keel as the others have done, and be left harmless astern.

The Apostle, in this very same letter, has another word parallel to this, in which he describes the issues of rightly-borne suffering when he says, ’Tribulation worketh perseverance’—­the same word that is used here—­’and perseverance worketh’ the proof in our experience of a sustaining God; and the proof in our experience of a sustaining God works hope.  We know that of ourselves we could not have met tribulation, and therefore the fact that we have been able to meet and overcome it is demonstration of a mightier power than our own, working in us, which we know to be from God, and therefore inexhaustible and ever ready to help.  That is foundation firm enough to build solid fabrics of hope upon, whose bases go down to the centre of all things, the purpose of God, and whose summits, like the upward shooting spire of some cathedral, aspire to, and seem almost to touch, the heavens.

So hope is born of sorrow, when these other things come between.  The darkness gives birth to the light, and every grief blazes up a witness to a future glory.  Each drop that hangs on the wet leaves twinkles into rainbow light that proclaims the sun.  The garish splendours of the prosperous day hide the stars, and through the night of our sorrow there shine, thickly sown and steadfast, the constellations of eternal hopes.  The darker the midnight, the surer, and perhaps the nearer, the coming of the day.  Sorrow has not had its perfect work unless it has led us by the way of courage and perseverance to a stable hope.  Hope has not pierced to the rock, and builds only ‘things that can be shaken,’ unless it rests on sorrows borne by God’s help.

II.  So much then for the genealogy of one form of the Christian hope.  But we have also a hope that is born of the day, the child of sunshine and gladness; and that is set before us in the second of the two verses which we are considering, ’The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.’

So then, ‘the darkness and the light are both alike’ to our hope, in so far as each may become the occasion for its exercise.  It is not only to be the sweet juice expressed from our hearts by the winepress of calamities, but that which flows of itself from hearts ripened and mellowed under the sunshine of God-given blessedness.