that of believing,
into a new standing-ground before God, a new state in which the whole
atmosphere is one of grace or divine favour. We can therefore enjoy a
solid peace in the present based on the sure consideration of the
divine goodwill, and we can make it our boast that we have a
well-grounded hope of future restoration to that highest fruition of
which our nature is capable--fellowship in the divine glory. And while
we enjoy these present privileges of ours, let us show that we really
value them by making {178} the outward hardships which accompany them a
matter of boasting also. For we know that only such hardships, bravely
encountered, can give to our characters the quality of steadfastness;
and steadfastness through the experience of life makes of us men of
approved moral metal; and this process of probation, in which we are
tried and not found wanting, again generates hope in us--the same hope
in God's love which accompanied the beginning of our justification,
only now confirmed in us by our own experience. And this divine hope
has nothing treacherous about it[1]. It is grounded on what God has
already done. He has already given us His Holy Spirit, and by that
gift poured forth His love into our hearts: He would not have done this
in order to cheat us at the last.

We can indeed test and measure the mind of God toward us by human
comparisons. In our experience of men we might perhaps find some one
brave enough even to die for another, if that other was, I do not say
merely an upright man, but a good and loveable one. But what is the
fact in God's dealings with us? It was {179} when we were sinful and
helpless in our sinfulness--nay rather, when we were living in flat
antagonism to God--that He proved His own pure love toward us by taking
advantage of the divine opportunity to give His Son to die for us. And
He, thus dying on our behalf, won for us by the shedding of His blood a
reconciliation with God, which lay altogether outside anything which
our state naturally suggested. Well then, God would not, so to speak,
have gone out of His way to make this beginning, unless He had intended
to carry the work through, so as finally to save us out from under the
divine wrath, or, in other words, into the divine fellowship.
Certainly, accepted as we have been in virtue of Christ's
blood-shedding, and thus reconciled to God when our natural state was
hostility to Him, we can trust Him, now that He has made us