nd peace.' Unscrew the pipe, and in an instant
the water ceases to flow. Touch the button and switch off, and out
goes the light. Some Christian people fancy they can live upon past
faith. You will get no present joy and peace out of past faith. The
rain of this day twelve months will not moisten the parched ground of
to-day. Yesterday's religion was all used up yesterday. And if you
would have a continuous flow of joy and peace through your lives,
keep up a uniform habit and attitude of trust in God. You will get it
then; you will get it in no other way.

III. Lastly, note the hope which springs from this experience of joy
and peace.

'The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that
ye may abound in hope.' Here, again, the Apostle does not trouble
himself to define the object of the hope. In this, as in the former
clause, his attention is fixed upon the emotion, not upon that
towards which it goes out. And just as there was no need to say in
whom it was that the Christian man was to believe, so there is no
room to define what it is that the Christian man has a right to hope
for. For his hope is intended to cover all the future, the next
moment, or to-morrow, or the dimmest distance where time has ceased
to be, and eternity stands unmoved. The attitude of the Christian
mind ought to be a cheery optimism, an unconquerable hope. 'The best
has yet to be' is the true Christian thought in contemplating the
future for myself, for my dear ones, for God's Church, and for God's
universe.

And the truest basis on which that hope can rest is the experience
granted to us, on condition of our faith, of a present, abundant
possession of the joy and peace which God gives. The gladder you are
to-day, if the gladness comes from the right source, the surer you
may be that that gladness will never end. That is not what befalls
men who live by earthly joys. For the more poignant, precious, and,
as we faithlessly think, indispensable some of these are to us, the
more into their sweetest sweetness creeps the dread thought: 'This is
too good to last; this must pass.' We never need to think that about
the peace and joy that come to us through believing. For they, in
their sweetness, prophesy perpetuity. I need not dwell upon the
thought that the firmest, most personally precious convictions of an
eternity of future blessedness, rise and fall in a Christian
consciousness with the purity and the depth of its own experience