Death draws aside the curtain and reveals the terrible future-it launches the poor soul forth into the boundless ocean of eternity, without anything to sustain or guide it. "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment." Death and judgment form a gloomy prospect for man to contemplate. The human heart is, in a measure, conscious that all is not right with it, and hence it is ill at ease at the thought of the future. Until this is known, the mind will never reach beyond the question of mere individual salvation, which, after all, is but selfishness. There is only one thing which can render the soul happy in looking forward into the future, and that is the knowledge of God's redeeming love in giving His Son to be a perfect sacrifice for sin. Faith enabled them to rest with tranquilized spirits upon the record of God, while hope carried them onward into the future, and converted it into the present. But their "faith and hope" were in God, and not in circumstances. “They all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." They died as they had lived, “prisoners of hope." An unbelieving world might scoff and sneer at them, and wonder why they had given up the apparently substantial realities of earth to live and die without anything. Thus was it with all the patriarchs and witnesses whose honored names the Spirit has recorded for our encouragement in Heb. With naught but that he started forth as a pilgrim and a stranger, having no foundation for his hopes that could at all be recognized by "flesh and blood." Abraham had heard a voice which the children of this world could not hear, even the voice of "the God of glory," calling him forth from the midst of his worldly circumstances to be “a prisoner of hope." The Lord had directed his thoughts upward He had called him from earth to heaven-from the earthly Babel to the heavenly Jerusalem-from the base less city of man to the well-founded city of God. But the promise of "the Almighty God" was quite enough for the man of faith. Thus, neither his faith nor his hope could have drawn any nutriment from circumstances, for everything within the range of mortal vision argued against him. He had been promised the whole land of Canaan, where he had not so much as to set his foot on he had been promised a seed like the stars of heaven, or like the sand by the sea shore, when as yet he had no child. The patriarch Abraham was a happy exemplification of all this his “faith and hope " were truly "in God." Circumstances added nothing to him. So the soul finds its root in the eternal record of God, while it sends forth the tendrils of an imperishable hope to grasp tenaciously the faithful, promise of God and we may say, the deeper the root, the stronger the tendril. Thus the soul, in the happy exercise of the above principles, is like a climbing plant which, striking its roots downwards into the soil, sends forth its tendrils along the nearest wall or tree. On the contrary, if faith be strong, hope will be strong also for faith, while it nourishes and strengthens the persuasion, imparts strength and intensity to the expectation. If faith be wavering, hope will be flickering.
If we be not "fully persuaded that what God has promised, He is able also to perform," we shall know but little of the power or energy of hope. Now it will be found that in proportion to the vigor of faith will be the vigor of hope.
Faith rests in holy tranquility, in God's statements about the past hope goes forth in active longings after the future. Faith takes what God has given hope expects what He has promised. THERE are two leading principles in the soul of the Christian, which make God the special object: "These are "faith and hope." There is a marked distinction, and yet an intimate connection, between these two principles.
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