Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/105

 And when a man stops for a moment to think, to disengage himself from the unscrutinized conventions, he begins to realize immediately that he has no faith and love unless he makes larger room for hope in his thinking and feeling than has been allowed to us. For there cannot be any faith detached from hope. You can conceive of faith in three different ways. You may think of it in its primary form, in its primary form in the New Testament at least, as personal trust, as the confidence that exists between two personal spirits. But even so, can you think of it without hope? If I have no hope of seeing Him in Whom I trust, of consulting with Him, or serving Him, of entering into a deeper and enlarged fellowship with Him, will not my personal trust soon empty itself of reality? Or, secondly, you may think of faith as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews does, as the "substance of things hoped for"; in which without any flinching, he binds faith up with hope in terms that cannot be severed. And, thirdly, if you go on to the rest of his definition, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," still faith is undetachable from hope; for, as Paul says in another passage, "We are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it." And you cannot detach love from