is dead.

Faith breeds Hope. _There_ is the difference between earthly hopes
and Christian people's hopes. Our hopes, apart from the revelation of
God in Jesus Christ, are but the balancing of probabilities, and the
scale is often dragged down by the clutch of eager desires. But all
is baseless and uncertain, unless our hopes are the outcome of our
faith. Which, being translated into other words, is just this, that
the one basis on which men can rest--ay! even for the immediate
future, and the contingencies of life, as well as for the solemnities
and certainties of heaven--any legitimate and substantial hope is
trust in Jesus Christ, His word, His love, His power, and for the
heavenly future, in His Resurrection and present glory. A man who
believes these things, and only that man, has a rock foundation on
which he can build his hope.

Faith, in like manner, is the parent of Love. Paul and John, diverse
as they are in the whole cast of their minds, the one being
speculative and the other mystical, the one argumentative and the
other simply gazing and telling what he sees, are precisely agreed in
regard to this matter. For, to the Apostle of Love, the foundation of
all human love towards God is, 'We have known and believed the love
that God hath to us,' and 'We love Him because He first loved us,'
and to Paul the first step is the trusting reception of the love of
God, 'commended to us' by the fact that 'whilst we were yet sinners
Christ died for us,' and from that necessarily flows, if the faith be
genuine, the love that answers the sacrifice and obeys the Beloved.
So faith, hope, love, these three are a trinity in unity, and it
abideth. That is the main point of our last text. Let me say a word
or two about it.

I have said that the words have often been misunderstood as if the
'now' referred only to the present order of things, in which faith
and hope are supposed to find their only appropriate sphere. But that
is clearly not the Apostle's meaning here, for many reasons with
which I need not trouble you. The abiding of all three is eternal
abiding, and there is a heavenly as well as an earthly form of faith
and hope as well as of love. Just look at these points for a moment.

'Faith abides,' says Paul, yonder, as here. Now, there is a common
saying, which I suppose ninety out of a hundred people think comes
out of the Bible, about faith being lost in sight. There is no such
teaching in Scripture. True, in one as