When that desire is centered in God and the soul’s salvation, it incontinently becomes hope, for then we have real beatitude before us, and all may obtain it.  It can be true hope only when founded on faith.

Not only is hope easy, natural, necessary, but it is essential to life.  It is the mainspring of all activity.  It keeps all things moving, and without it life would not be worth living.  If men did not think they could get what they are striving after, they would sit down, fold their arms, let the world move, but they wouldn’t.

Especially is Christian hope absolutely necessary for the leading of a Christian life, and no man would take upon himself that burden, if he did not confidently expect a crown of glory beyond, sufficient to repay him for all the things endured here below for conscience’s sake.  Hope is a star that beckons us on to renewed effort, a vision of the goal that animates and invigorates us; it is also a soothing balm to the wounds we receive in the struggle.

To be without this hope is the lowest level to which man may descend.  St. Paul uses the term “men without hope” as the most stinging reproach he could inflict upon the dissolute pagans.

To have abandoned hope is a terrible misfortune—­despair.  This must not be confounded with an involuntary perturbation, a mere instinctive dread, a phantasmagoric illusion that involves no part of the will.  It is not even an excessive fear that goes by the name of pusillanimity.  It is a cool judgment like that of Cain:  “My sin is too great that I should expect forgiveness.”

He who despairs, loses sight of God’s mercy and sees only His stern, rigorous justice.  After hatred of God, this is perhaps the greatest injury man can do to his Master, who is Love.  There has always been more of mercy than of justice in His dealings with men.  We might say of Him that He is all mercy in this world, to be all justice in the next.  Therefore while there is life, there is hope.

The next abomination is to hope, but to place our supreme happiness in that which should not be the object of our hope.  Men live for pleasures, riches, and honors, as though these things were worthy of our highest aspirations, as though they could satisfy the unappeasable appetite of man for happiness.  Greater folly than this can no man be guilty of.  He takes the dross for the pure gold, the phantom for the reality.  Few men theoretically belong to this class; practically it has the vast majority.

The presumptuous are those who hope to obtain the prize and do nothing to deserve it.  He who would hope to fly without wings, to walk without feet, to live without air or food would be less a fool than he who hopes to save his soul without fulfiling the conditions laid down by Him who made us.  There is no wages without service, no reward without merit, no crown without a cross.

This fellow’s mistake is to bank too much on God’s mercy, leaving His justice out of the bargain altogether.  Yet God is one as well as the other, and both equally.  The offense to God consists in making Him a being without any backbone, so to speak, a soft, incapable judge, whose pity degenerates into weakness.  And certainly it is a serious offense.