n receive are fused
together in one lustrous and all-comprehensive whole. So all the great
truths of the Gospel and all the blessed emotions of sonship which can
spring up in a human heart are intended to find their practical result
in holy and pure living. For this end God has spoken to us out of the
thick darkness; for this end Christ has come into our darkness; for this
end He has lived; for this end He died; for this end He rose again; for
this end He sends His Spirit and administers the providence of the
world. The purpose of all the Divine activity as regards us men is not
merely to make us happy, but to make us happy in order that we may be
good. He whom what he calls his religion has only saved from the wrath
of God and the fear of hell has not learned the alphabet of religion.
Unless God's promises evoke men's goodness it will be of little avail
that they seem to quicken their hope. Joyful confidence in our sonship
is only warranted in the measure in which we are like our Father. Hope
often deludes and makes men dreamy and unpractical. It generally paints
pictures far lovelier than the realities, and without any of their
shadows; it is too often the stimulus and ally of ignoble lives, and
seldom stirs to heroism or endurance, but its many defects are not due
to itself but to its false choice of objects on which to fix. The hope
which is lifted from trailing along the earth and twining round
creatures and which rises to grasp these promises ought to be, and in
the measure of its reality is the ally of all patient endurance and
noble self-sacrifice. Its vision of coming good is all directed to the
coming Christ, and 'every man that hath this hope in Him, purifieth
himself even as He is pure.'

In Paul's experience there was no contrariety between hope set on Jesus
and fear directed towards God. It is in the fear of God that holiness is
to be perfected. There is a fear which has no torment. Yet more, there
is no love in sons or daughters without fear. The reverential awe with
which God's children draw near to God has in it nothing slavish and no
terror. Their love is not only joyful but lowly. The worshipping gaze
upon His Divine majesty, the reverential and adoring contemplation of
His ineffable holiness, and the poignant consciousness, after all
effort, of the distance between us and Him will bow the hearts that love
Him most in lowliest prostration before Him. These two, hope and fear,
confidence and awe, are l