’The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.’  Here, again, the Apostle does not trouble himself to define the object of the hope.  In this, as in the former clause, his attention is fixed upon the emotion, not upon that towards which it goes out.  And just as there was no need to say in whom it was that the Christian man was to believe, so there is no room to define what it is that the Christian man has a right to hope for.  For his hope is intended to cover all the future, the next moment, or to-morrow, or the dimmest distance where time has ceased to be, and eternity stands unmoved.  The attitude of the Christian mind ought to be a cheery optimism, an unconquerable hope.  ’The best has yet to be’ is the true Christian thought in contemplating the future for myself, for my dear ones, for God’s Church, and for God’s universe.

And the truest basis on which that hope can rest is the experience granted to us, on condition of our faith, of a present, abundant possession of the joy and peace which God gives.  The gladder you are to-day, if the gladness comes from the right source, the surer you may be that that gladness will never end.  That is not what befalls men who live by earthly joys.  For the more poignant, precious, and, as we faithlessly think, indispensable some of these are to us, the more into their sweetest sweetness creeps the dread thought:  ’This is too good to last; this must pass.’  We never need to think that about the peace and joy that come to us through believing.  For they, in their sweetness, prophesy perpetuity.  I need not dwell upon the thought that the firmest, most personally precious convictions of an eternity of future blessedness, rise and fall in a Christian consciousness with the purity and the depth of its own experience of the peace and joy of the Gospel.  The more you have of Jesus Christ in your lives and hearts to-day, the surer you will be that whatever death may do, it cannot touch that, and the more ludicrously impossible it will seem that anything that befalls this poor body can touch the bond that knits us to Jesus Christ.  Death can separate us from a great deal.  Its sharp scythe cuts through all other bonds, but its edge is turned when it is tried against the golden chain that binds the believing soul to the Christ in whom he has believed.

So, brethren, there is the ladder—­begin at the bottom step, with faith in Jesus Christ.  That will bring God’s direct action into your spirit, through His Holy Spirit, and that one gift will break up into an endless multiplicity of blessings, just as a beam of light spilt upon the surface of the ocean breaks into diamonds in every wave, and that ‘joy and peace’ will kindle in your hearts a hope fed by the great words of the Lord:  ’Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,’ ‘My joy shall remain in you, and your joy shall be full,’ ‘He that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.’