now any kind of feeling? By having it. The
only way of knowing what is the hope is to hope, and this is only
possible by dint of these eyes of the understanding being enlightened.
For our inward nature, as we have it, and as we use it, without the
touch of that Divine Spirit, is so engrossed with this present that the
far-off blessedness to which my text refers has no chance of entering
there. No man can look at something beside him with one eye, and at
something half a mile off with the other. You have to focus the eye
according to the object; and he who is gazing upon the near is thereby
made blind to that which is afar off. If we go crawling along the low
levels with our eyes upon the dust, then of course we cannot see the
crown above.

We need more than the historical revelation of the light in order to
enlighten the inward nature. There is many a man here now who knows all
about the immortality that is brought to light by Jesus Christ just as
well as the Christian man whose soul is full of the hope of it, and who
yet, for all his knowledge, does not know the hope, because he has not
felt it. You have to get further than to the acceptance intellectually
of the historical facts of a risen and ascended Saviour before there can
be, in your heart, any vital hope of immortality. The inward eye must be
cleared and strengthened, cross lights must be shut out so that we may
direct the single eye of our hearts towards the great objects which
alone are worthy of its fixed contemplation. And we cannot do that
without a divine help, that Spirit of wisdom which will fill our hearts
if we ask for it, which will fix our affections, which will clear our
eyesight, which will withdraw it from seeing vanity as well as give it
reality to see.

But we must observe the conditions. Since this clearness of hope comes
not merely from the acceptance as a truth of the fact of Christ's
Resurrection and Ascension, but comes through the gift of that Divine
Spirit, then to have it you must ask for it. Christian people, do you
ask for it? Do you ever pray--I do not mean in words, but in real
desire--that God would help you to keep steadily before you that great
future to which we are all going so fast? If you do you will get the
answer. Seek for that Spirit; use it, and do not resist its touches. Do
not fix your gaze on the world when God is trying to draw you to fix it
upon Himself. Think more about Jesus Christ, more about God's high
calling,