classification occurs is part of the distinctive literature of the
Bible. Hence terms are not used carelessly. What is the difference
between the two? "Hope," says David Hume, "is the real riches of human
life; as fear is the real poverty."

Hope is that which is "at the bottom of the vase," as the ancients
said, when "every other thing has gone out of it"--by which, as it has
been suggested, they probably meant the human heart. "While hope
trembles in expectation, faith is quiet in possession. Hope leaps out
towards what will be; faith holds on to what is. Hope idealizes; faith
realizes. Faith sees; hope foresees." [1] In other words, faith is
apt to be content with what it has; hope ventures out to annex the
wider provinces of the imagination. Faith is the prose of our
religious life, hope is its poetry.

Unless you think about it, this will glance off your mind as a
distinction without a difference. It is more than that, in the sense I
am using the distinction. The loss of youth is not so much in the
flight of years, as in the stealing away of our hopes. We may be
justified by faith, but we are saved by hope, in theology and in life.
There are twenty men who have faith in Christ for one man who has hope
that His Spirit will ever incarnate itself in the life of the world.
As we get older, most of us, I am afraid, are only too glad to keep our
faith in great principles, without hoping much for them. The usual
product of experience, and more especially experience gained in
attempting some great reform, is, as Dr. Martineau remarks, "a certain
caution and lowering of hope. When the spent enthusiast looks back
upon the riches of his early hopes, and the poverty of his
achievements, he is tempted to regret the magnitude of his aims, and
advise a zeal too temperate to live through the frosts of inevitable
disappointments."

Nothing more damps the ardour of young people with good stuff in them
than this caution called wisdom, which so often creeps over us as we
advance in years. Then it is so frequently the case that the precepts
that most naturally flow from our lips are the negatives that stifle
hope. "I can no longer afford convictions," said a man to me once, "I
have come to limit myself to opinions; they can be held at less risk,
and changed at less cost." And the disposition to regard both faith
and hope in great things as subject to the same insecure and miserable
tenure, is apt to grow with the g