Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God’s longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances to meet our faith and uplifts us.  Man aspires to God by faith and cries to Him:  “I believe—­give me, Lord, wherein to believe!” And God, the divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may believe in it.  Hope is the reward of faith.  Only he who believes truly hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes.  We only believe what we hope, and we only hope what we believe.

It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope.  The father gave us life and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask the father to preserve our life for us.  And if Christ was he who, with the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father his Father and ours, if the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling of the Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race sublimated its hunger for eternity.

It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that this hope, is more than anything else an esthetic feeling.  Possibly the esthetic feeling enters into it, but without completely satisfying it.

We seek in art an image of eternalization.  If for a brief moment our spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its distress, it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of momentaneity.  Just as truth is the goal of rational knowledge, so beauty is the goal of hope, which is perhaps in its essence irrational.

Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity.  The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow.  The scenes of life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side of time the film is one and indivisible.

Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single tremor of energy is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted and persists.  And can it be that any form, however fugitive it may be, is lost?  We must needs believe—­believe and hope!—­that it is not, but that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated, and that there is some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one another, all the images that pass through time are received.  Every impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it may be so deep or so weak that it is buried in the depths of my subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full consciousness, all these dimly perceived and