And our fundamental hope, the root and
stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life.
And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of
faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague,
chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing
to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in
what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the
present, we only believe in the future. To believe what we have not seen
is to believe what we shall see. Faith, then, I repeat once again, is
faith in hope; we believe what we hope for.
Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope to
receive life to come; love makes us believe in that which the dream of
hope creates for us.
Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God's
longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances
to meet our faith and uplifts us. Man aspires to God by faith and cries
to Him: "I believe--give me, Lord, wherein to believe!" And God, the
divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may
believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly
hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we
hope, and we only hope what we believe.
It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so
comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope.
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