clear, there he achieved his richest and greatest victory, by hope. And so we comfort our hearts here to-day. "Yes," we say to memories of which we are reminded in our searching hours, "the evil and unworthy imaginings and desires cling to us still, but it will not be forever. Some day, no matter how often I have failed, if I live in hope, it will come to me, the clean thing that the Lord said should be mine."
And last of all, there is nothing adequate for us in the way of actually moulding men and doing that with life which we were set here to do unless we can go to the work in the spirit in which our Lord and Saint Paul entered it. If I have no hope for another man, I cannot awaken any hope in him for himself. Unless I believe in him, how can he believe? The glory of Christ was that, though He knew just what was in man, and saw all the weaknesses and the slavery and the impurity and the unwholesomeness, though He saw all this in man, He shut His eyes to it deliberately and believed in the better capacities and possibilities that were there and that He by His grace and His power could plant and nurture and bring out until all that old baseness that had been the man was not the man any more, and all this new purity that had not been the man was the man, and Simon was turned at last out of his putty into rock and stone.
I do not know whether the apostles were con-
