The Christian is stimulated to constant activity, not by charity or love of God alone, but by hope; and the hope of possessing God, of being filled with his love, of reposing in the arms of all-sufficing charity, stimulates onward from grace to grace, and from one degree of perfection to another. Though he finds not yet perfect repose, though he is not yet filled, though he has not yet attained, yet he is upheld, buoyed up and onward by the sure promise, the steadfast hope of attaining, of at last finding repose, rest in the bosom of his love and his God. He may feel the clogs of flesh, he may feel that he is absent from his love, and sigh to reach his home and embrace the spouse of his soul, but he grows not weary, faints not, and knows nothing of the _ennui_, that listlessness of spirit, that disgust of life, and disrelish for every pursuit, which he feels who has no object, no hope, and sees not even in the most distant future any chance of finding that fulness and repose which his soul never ceases in this life to crave. In losing sight of God as final cause, in losing the hope of possessing God as the supreme good, in substituting endless progression for endless beatitude, full and complete, I had lost all stimulus to exertion, all motive to exert myself for any thing. Why should I act? What had I to gain? Money I did not want; I had more than I could use. Fame I despised. It was a mere word, born and dying in the very sound that made it. Power, I had it. If I had more, it could procure me nothing more than I already possessed. Pleasures? The richest dishes and the most precious wines palled upon my taste. There remained another kind of pleasure; but we can even grow weary of women, and loathe what the morbid senses continue to crave. Still nothing else remained for me. Yet I had outlived love in any virtuous or innocent sense of the word, and early training, and some remains of self-respect, made any other love far more of a torment than a pleasure.