but that it is an indispensable element
in all vigorous and life-dominating Christian experience.

I do not need to dwell upon that, except just to suggest that such a
vividness and continuity of calm anticipation of a certain good beyond
the grave is one of the strongest of all motives to the general
robustness and efficacy of a Christian life. People used to say a few
years ago, a great deal more than they do now, that the Christian
expectation of Heaven was apt to weaken energy upon earth, and they used
to sneer at us, and talk about our 'other worldliness' as if it were a
kind of weakness and defect attached to the Christian experience. They
have pretty well given that up now. Anti-Christian sarcasm, like
everything else, has its fashions, and other words of reproach and
contumely have now taken the place of that. The plain fact is that no
man sees the greatness of the present, unless he regards it as being the
vestibule of the future, and that this present life is unintelligible
and insignificant unless beyond it, and led up to by it, and shaped
through it, there lies the eternal life beyond. The low flat plain is
dreary and desolate, featureless and melancholy, when the sky above it
is filled with clouds. But sweep away the cloud-rack, and let the blue
arch itself above the brown moorland, and all glows into lustre, and
every undulation is brought out, and tiny shy forms of beauty are found
in every corner. And so, if you drape Heaven with the clouds and mists
born of indifference and worldliness, the world becomes mean, but if
you dissipate the cloud and unveil heaven, earth is greatened. If the
hope of the grave that is to be brought onto you at the revelation of
Jesus Christ shines out above all the flatness of earth, then life
becomes solemn, noble, worthy of, demanding and rewarding, our most
strenuous efforts. No man can, and no man will, strike such effectual
blows on things present as the man, the strength of whose arm is derived
from the conviction that every stroke of the hammer on things present is
shaping that which will abide with him for ever.

My text not only enjoins this hope as a duty, but also enjoins the
perfection of it as being a thing to be aimed at by all Christian
people. What is the perfection of hope? Two qualities, certainty and
continuity. Certainty; the definition of earthly hope is an anticipation
of good less than certain, and so, in all the operations of this great
faculty, which