Everything that has been can be only as it was, and everything that is can be only as it is; the possible is always relegated to the future, the sole domain of liberty, wherein imagination, the creative and liberating energy, the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large.

Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does it nourish itself.  And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant cycle of illusions and disillusions.  And continually it transforms its frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh hopes.  From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes.  And humanity is like a young girl full of longings, hungering for life and thirsting for love, who weaves her days with dreams, and hopes, hopes ever, hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from the beginning, from before the dawn of her remotest memory, from before her cradle-days, shall live with her and for her into the illimitable future, beyond the stretch of her furthest hopes, beyond the grave itself.  And for this poor lovelorn humanity, as for the girl ever awaiting her lover, there is no kinder wish than that when the winter of life shall come it may find the sweet dreams of its spring changed into memories sweeter still, and memories that shall burgeon into new hopes.  In the days when our summer is over, what a flow of calm felicity, of resignation to destiny, must come from remembering hopes which have never been realized and which, because they have never been realized, preserve their pristine purity.

Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping; and love of God, our faith in God, is, above all, hope in Him.  For God dies not, and he who hopes in God shall live for ever.  And our fundamental hope, the root and stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.

And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of faith.  Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague, chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing to believe.  But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in what we hope for, we believe in hope.  We remember the past, we know the present, we only believe in the future.  To believe what we have not seen is to believe what we shall see.  Faith, then, I repeat once again, is faith in hope; we believe what we hope for.

Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope to receive life to come; love makes us believe in that which the dream of hope creates for us.