things unto Himself, should first of all be
discerned to operate in changing the body of our humiliation into the
body of His glory.

But equally natural was it that no merely corporeal transformation
should suffice to meet the deep longings of Christian souls which had
learned to entertain the wondrous thought of likeness to God as the
certain result of the vision of Him, and so believers 'wait for the hope
of righteousness by faith.' The moral likeness to God, the perfecting of
our nature into His image, will not always be the issue of struggle and
restraint, but in its highest form will follow on sight, even as here
and now it is to be won by faith, and is more surely attained by waiting
than by effort.

The highest form which the object of our hope takes is, the Hope of the
Glory of God. This goes furthest; there is nothing beyond this. The eyes
that have been wearied by looking at many fading gleams and seen them
die away, may look undazzled into the central brightness, and we may be
sure that even we shall walk there like the men in the furnace,
unconsumed, purging our sight at the fountain of radiance, and being
ourselves glorious with the image of God. This is the crown of glory
which He has promised to them that love Him. Nothing less than this is
what our hope has to entertain, and that not as a possibility, but as a
certainty. The language of Christian hope is not perhaps this may be,
but verily it shall be. To embrace its transcendent certainties with a
tremulous faith broken by much unbelief, is sin.

II. The grounds on which the hope of the Gospel rests.

The grounds of our earthly hopes are for the most part possibilities,
or, at the best, probabilities turned by our wishes into certainties. We
moor our ships to floating islands which we resolve to think continents.
So our earthly hopes vary indefinitely in firmness and substance. They
are sometimes but wishes turned confident, and can never rise higher
than their source, or be more certain than it is. At the best they are
building on sand. At the surest there is an element of risk in them. One
singer indeed may take for his theme 'The pleasures of Hope,' but
another answers by singing of 'The fallacies of Hope.' Earth-born hopes
carry no anchor and have always a latent dread looking out of their blue
eyes.

But it is possible for us to dig down to and build on rock, to have a
future as certain as our past, to escape in our anticipations from the
re