as the God of hope. "Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope." And then he closes by speaking of the God of peace who is to order all hearts. Quite evidently in his thought these things all run together, as again he writes: "Be ye sober. Walk as children of light. Put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation." Joy and gladness and confidence and trust and hope,—all are rooted each in the other in his own mind and experience. The best that we have got in life springs from the fountains of hope.
We do not wonder, accordingly, that the old religious experience and the richer Christian experience, when it came, conceived and spoke of God as the God of love and the God of hope. They never spoke of Him as the God of faith. The old Hebrew idea of Him was as the ground-rock of their hope. "O hope of Israel," was their cry. The lovely thing is that that burst from the lips of the man who mourned for his nation: "O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble." "Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God." God Himself when He comes to let Himself be richly known to men makes on them the impression of a great and joyous and glad and eager and boundless hope.
And when we turn away from such clews as
