Ver. 12. _Hopeless and Godless._--The soul that has no God has no hope. The character of the God we love and worship will determine the character of our hope. 1. The heathen religion was the _seeking_ religion. Their search arose out of a deeply felt want. They felt the need of something they did not possess; and the finest intellects the world has ever known bravely and anxiously devoted all their colossal powers to the task of fathoming the mysteries of life. The hope of discovery buoyed them up and urged them onwards; but their united endeavours brought them only to the borderland of the unseen and the unknown, where they caught but glimmerings of a truth that ever receded into the great beyond. "The world by wisdom knew not God," and therefore had no hope. 2. The Hebrew religion was the _hoping_ religion. Favoured with a revelation of the only true God, their hope expanded with every advancing step of the progressive revelation. Their hope was based on _faith,_ as all true hope must be--faith in the promises of God. They had the promise of a _Deliverer_ whose wisdom should excel that of Moses and Solomon, and whose power should surpass that of Joshua and of his heroic successors in the most brilliant period of their military career; and, through the centuries of prosperity and decline, of scattering and captivity, and amid unparalleled sufferings which would have extinguished any other nation, hope fastened and fed upon the promises till the true Messiah came, whom St. Paul justly described as "the Hope of Israel, the Hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers." 3. The _Christian_ religion is the _complement_ and _perfection_ of all previously existing systems; it is the grand realisation of what the heathen sought, and the Hebrew hoped for. It is in Jesus we have the clearest, fullest, and most authoritative revelation of God, and it is in Him, and in Him alone, that the loftiest hope of man finds its restful and all-sufficient realisation. The apostle Paul refers to Jesus specifically as our Hope--"Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is our Hope" (1 Tim. i. 1). 4. In the light of this great and indubitable truth the words of our text may be clearly and unmistakably interpreted, and they assume a terrible significance. _To be without Christ is to be without God and without hope._ (1) Hope is not simply _expectation._ We expect many things we do not hope for. In the natural course of things we expect difficulties, we expect opposition and misrepresentation--"black wounding calumny the whitest virtue strikes"--we expect infirmities and disabilities of age; but we are none of us so fond of trouble for trouble's sake as to hope for any of these things. (2) Hope is not simply _desire._ Our desires are as thick and plentiful as apple blossoms, few of which ever ripen into the fruit they promise. We desire uninterrupted health, we desire wealth--the most dangerous and disappointing of all human wishes--we