nd rising in his heart the consciousness of the love of God.
You will not, if you give only broken momentary sidelong glances; you
will not, if you do not lie still. If you hold up a cup in a shaking
hand beneath a fountain, and often twitch it aside, you will get
little water in it; and unless we 'wait on the Lord,' we shall not
'renew our strength.' You can build a dam as they do in Holland that
will keep out, not only the waters of a river, but the waters of an
ocean, and not a drop will come through the dike. Brethren, we must
keep ourselves in the love of God.

Lastly, we have here--

III. The hope that is established by the love poured out.

I need not dwell at any length upon this point, because, to a large
extent, it has been anticipated in former sermons, but just a word or
two may be permitted me. That love, you may be very sure, is not
going to lose its objects in the dust. The old Psalmist who knew so
much less than we do as to the love of God, and knew nothing of the
whispers of a Divine Spirit within his heart charged with the message
of the love as it was manifested in Jesus Christ, had risen to a
height of confidence, the beauty of the expression of which is often
lost sight of, because we insist upon dealing with it as merely being
a Messianic prophecy, which it is, but not merely: 'Thou wilt not
leave my soul in Sheol, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy beloved' (for
that is the real meaning of the word translated 'thy Holy
One')--'Thou wilt not suffer the child of Thy love to see
corruption.' Death's bony fingers can untie all true lover's knots
but one; and they fumble at that one in vain. God will not lose His
child in the grave.

That love, we may be very sure, will not foster in us hopes that are
to be disappointed. Now, it is a fact that the more a man feels that
God loves him, the less is it possible for him to believe that that
love will ever terminate, or that he shall 'all die.' In the lock of
a canal, as the water pours in, the vessel rises. In our hearts, as
the flood of the full love of God pours in, our hopes are borne up
and up, nearer and nearer to the heavens. Since it is so, we must
find in the fact that the constant and necessary result of communion
with Him here on earth is a conviction of the immortality of that
communion, a very, very strong guarantee for ourselves that the hope
is not in vain. And if you say that that is all merely subjective,
yet I think that the universality of