elder sisters.
The great Campanile at Florence, though it be inlaid with glowing
marbles, and fair sculptures, and perfect in its beauty, wants the
gilded, skyward-pointing pinnacle of its topmost pyramid; and so it
stands incomplete. And thus faith and love need for their crowning and
completion the topmost grace that looks up to the sky, and is sure of a
mansion there.

Brethren, our Christianity is wofully imperfect unless faith and love
find their acme, their outstretching completion, in this Christian hope.
Do you seek to complete your faith and love by a living hope full of
immortality?

III. Thirdly, notice how this hope is an all-important element in the
Christian life.

The Apostle asks for it as the best thing that can befall these Ephesian
Christians, as the one thing that they need to make them strong and good
and blessed. There are many other aspects of desire for them which
appear in other parts of this letter. But here all Christian progress is
regarded as being held in solution and included in vigorous hope.

Why is the activity of hope thus important for Christian life? Because
it stimulates effort, calms sorrows, takes the fascination out of
temptations, supplies a new aim for life and a new measure for the
things of time and sense.

If we lived, as we ought to live, in the habitual apprehension of the
great future awaiting all real Christians, would it not change the whole
aspect of life? The world is very big when it is looked at from any
point upon its surface; but suppose it could be looked at from the
central sun, how large would it appear then? We can shift our station in
like fashion, and then we get the true measure at once of the
insignificance and of the greatness of life. This world means nothing
worthy, except as an introduction to another. Not that thereby there
will follow in any wise man contempt for the present, for the very same
reference to the future which dwarfs the greatnesses and dwindles the
sorrows, and almost extinguishes the dazzling lights of this present,
does also lift it to its true significance and importance. It is the
vestibule of that future, and that future is conditioned throughout by
the results of the few years that we live here. An apprenticeship may be
a very poor matter, looked at in itself; and the boy may say What is the
use of my working at all these trivial things? but, since it is
apprenticeship, it is worth while to attend to every trifle in its
co