It is easy to see that this is the natural result of faith.  The very act of confident reliance on another for all my safety and well-being has a charm to make me restful, so long as my reliance is not put to shame.  There is no more blessed emotion than the tranquil happiness which, in the measure of its trust, fills every trustful soul.  Even when its objects are poor, fallible, weak, ignorant dying men and women, trust brings a breath of more than earthly peace into the heart.  But when it grasps the omnipotent, all-wise, immortal Christ, there are no bounds but its own capacity to the blessedness which it brings into the soul, because there is none to the all-sufficient grace of which it lays hold.

Observe again how accurately the Apostle defines for us the conditions on which Christian experience will be joyful and tranquil.  It is ‘in believing,’ not in certain other exercises of mind, that these blessings are to be realised.  And the forgetfulness of that plain fact leads to many good people’s religion being very much more gloomy and disturbed than God meant it to be.  For a large part of it consists in sadly testing their spiritual state, and gazing at their failures and imperfections.  There is nothing cheerful or tranquillising in grubbing among the evils of your own heart, and it is quite possible to do that too much and too exclusively.  If your favourite subject of contemplation in your religious thinking is yourself, no wonder that you do not get much joy and peace out of that.  If you do, it will be of a false kind.  If you are thinking more about your own imperfections than about Christ’s pardon, more about the defects of your own love to Him than about the perfection of His love to you, if instead of practising faith you are absorbed in self-examination, and instead of saying to yourself, ’I know how foul and unworthy I am, but I look away from myself to my Saviour,’ you are bewailing your sins and doubting whether you are a Christian, you need not expect God’s angels of joy and peace to nestle in your heart.  It is ‘in believing,’ and not in other forms of religious contemplation, however needful these may in their places be, that these fair twin sisters come to us and make their abode with us.

Then, the second step in this tracing of the origin of the hope which has the brighter source is the consideration that the joy and peace which spring from faith, in their turn produce that confident anticipation of future and progressive good.

Herein lies the distinguishing blessedness of the Christian joy and peace, in that they carry in themselves the pledge of their own eternity.  Here, and here only, the mad boast which is doomed to be so miserably falsified when applied to earthly gladness is simple truth.  Here ‘to-morrow shall be as this day and much more abundant.’  Such joy has nothing in itself which betokens exhaustion, as all the less pure joys of earth have.  It is manifestly not born for death, as are they.  It