o believe!" And God, the
divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may
believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly
hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we
hope, and we only hope what we believe.

It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so
comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope. The
father gave us life and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask
the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ was he who, with
the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father his
Father and ours, if the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling
of the Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race
sublimated its hunger for eternity.

It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that this hope, is
more than anything else an esthetic feeling. Possibly the esthetic
feeling enters into it, but without completely satisfying it.

We seek in art an image of eternalization. If for a brief moment our
spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the
beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its distress,
it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the
divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of momentaneity. Just
as truth is the goal of rational knowledge, so beauty is the goal of
hope, which is perhaps in its essence irrational.

Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another
everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time,
returns to eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and
in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow. The scenes of
life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side
of time the film is one and indivisible.

Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single
tremor of energy is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted
and persists. And can it be that any form, however fugitive it may be,
is lost? We must needs believe--believe and hope!--that it is not, but
that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated, and that there is
some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one
another, all the images that pass through time are received. Every
impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it
may be so deep or so weak t