pect, faith is the antithesis
of sight. True, Paul does say 'We walk by faith, not by sight.' But
that antithesis refers only to part of faith's significance. In so
far as it is the opposite of sight, of course it will cease to be in
operation when 'we shall know even as we are known' and 'see Him as
He is.' But the essence of faith is not in the absence of the person
trusted, but the emotion of trust which goes out to the person,
present or absent. And in its deepest meaning of absolute dependence
and happy confidence, faith abides through all the glories and the
lustres of the heavens, as it burns amidst the dimnesses and the
darknesses of earth. For ever and ever, on through the irrevoluble
ages of eternity, dependence on God in Christ will be the life of the
glorified, as it was the life of the militant, Church. No millenniums
of possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty and perfectness
and enrichment with the wealth of God, will bring us one inch nearer
to casting off the state of filial dependence which is, and ever will
be, the condition of our receiving them all. Faith 'abides.'

Hope 'abides.' For it is no more a Scriptural idea that hope is lost
in fruition, than it is that faith is lost in sight. Rather that
Future presents itself to us as the continual communication of an
inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable spirits.
In that continual communication there is continual progress. Wherever
there is progress there must be hope. And thus the fair form, which
has so often danced before us elusive, and has led us into bogs and
miry places and then faded away, will move before us through all the
long avenues of an endless progress, and will ever and anon come back
to tell us of the unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, and
to woo us further into the depths of heaven and the fulness of God.
Hope 'abides.'

Love 'abides.' I need not, I suppose, enlarge upon that thought which
nobody denies, that love is the eternal form of the human relation to
God. It, too, like the mercy which it clasps, 'endureth for ever.'

But I may remind you of what the Apostle does not explain in our
text, that it is greater than its linked sisters, because whilst
faith and hope belong only to a creature, and are dependent and
expectant of some good to come to themselves, and correspond to
something which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from
faith and hope not only corresponds to, but resem