the exercise of the same faculty in two different directions. Memory
does not always imply hope, we remember sometimes because we do not
hope, and try to gather round ourselves the vanished past because we
know it never again can be a present or a future. But when we are
occupied with an unchanging Friend, whose love is inexhaustible, and
whose arm is unwearied, it is good logic to say: 'It has been,
therefore it shall be.'

With regard to this fleeting life, it is a delusion to say 'to-morrow
shall be as this day, and much more abundant'; but with regard to the
life of the soul that lives in God, that is true, and true for ever.
The past is a specimen of the future. The future for the man who lives
in Christ is but the prolongation, and the heightening into superlative
excellence and beauty, of all that is good in the past and in the
present. As the radiance of some rising sun may cast its bright beams
into the opposite sky, even so the glowing past behind us flings its
purples and its golds and its scarlets on to the else dim curtain of
the future.

Remember that you may hope. A paradox, but a paradox that is a truth in
the case of Christians whose memory is of a God that has loved and
blessed them whose hope is in a God that changes never; whose memory is
charged with 'every good and perfect gift that came down from the
Father of Lights,' whose hope is in that same Father, 'with whom is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning.' So on every stone of
remembrance, every Ebenezer on which is graved: 'Hitherto hath the Lord
helped us,' we can mount a telescope--if I may so say--that will look
into the furthest glories of the heavens, and be sure that the past
will be magnified and perpetuated in the future. Our prayer may
legitimately be; 'Thou hast been my help, leave me not, neither forsake