He who despairs, loses sight of God's mercy and sees only His stern, rigorous justice. After hatred of God, this is perhaps the greatest injury man can do to his Master, who is Love. There has always been more of mercy than of justice in His dealings with men. We might say of Him that He is all mercy in this world, to be all justice in the next. Therefore while there is life, there is hope. The next abomination is to hope, but to place our supreme happiness in that which should not be the object of our hope. Men live for pleasures, riches, and honors, as though these things were worthy of our highest aspirations, as though they could satisfy the unappeasable appetite of man for happiness. Greater folly than this can no man be guilty of. He takes the dross for the pure gold, the phantom for the reality. Few men theoretically belong to this class; practically it has the vast majority. The presumptuous are those who hope to obtain the prize and do nothing to deserve it. He who would hope to fly without wings, to walk without feet, to live without air or food would be less a fool than he who hopes to save his soul without fulfiling the conditions laid down by Him who made us. There is no wages without service, no reward without merit, no crown without a cross. This fellow's mistake is to bank too much on God's mercy, leaving His justice out of the bargain altogether. Yet God is one as well as the other, and both equally. The offense to God consists in making Him a being without any backbone, so to speak, a soft, incapable judge, whose pity degenerates into weakness. And certainly it is a serious offense. No, hope should be sensible and reasonable. It must keep the middle between two extremes. The measure of our hope should reasonably be the measure of our efforts, for he who wishes the end wishes the means. Of course God will make due allowances for our frailties, but that is His business, not ours; and we have no right to say just how far that mercy will go. Even though we lead the lives of saints, we shall stand in need of much mercy. Prudence tells us to do all things as though it all depended upon us alone; then God will make up for the deficiencies. CHAPTER XXVII. LOVE OF GOD. ONCE upon a time, there lived people who pretended that nothing had existence outside the mind, that objects were merely fictions of the brain; thus, when they gave a name to those objects, it was like sticking a label in the air where they seemed to be. The world is not without folks who have similar ideas concerning charity, to whom it is a name without substance. Scarcely a Christian but will pretend that he has the virtue of charity, and of course one must take his word for it, and leave his actions and conduct out of all consideration. With him, to love God is to say you do, whether you really do or not. This is charity of the "sounding brass and tinkling cymbal" assortment.