And as for us who are in the full flush and possession of all that we have, it is by hope that we draw our comfort for our struggle. As against the background of our defeats and failures, we say to our own hearts: “Well, wait, just wait; my time will come. No matter how much of this there has been, some day my hope will be fulfilled. It is sure that something else than this there will yet be.” William Henry Green became the outstanding Hebrew scholar in America. He was plucked when he entered college in Latin and Greek. At Lafayette College for months and months he found himself beaten on the very battle-field where he stood at last the first man in the land. At Lexington, Virginia, several years ago, I went to the grave of General Lee in the chancel of the chapel of his college and then I went out to the grave of Stonewall Jackson on that little hill. One of his townsmen was telling me the story of Jackson and how by hope he wrested triumph out of his uttermost failure. He had been teaching in the military academy, and had just been about to give up his work because he had no gift of discipline. He could not maintain order in his own classroom, my friend said, and was about to surrender his career as a teacher, because he thought he was incapable there. Then the war broke out, and within twelve months Stonewall Jackson was the most famous disciplinarian on earth. On the very field where the man’s failure had been most clear, there he achieved his richest and greatest victory, by hope. And so we comfort our hearts here to-day. “Yes,” we say to memories of which we are reminded in our searching hours, “the evil and unworthy imaginings and desires cling to us still, but it will not be forever. Some day, no matter how often I have failed, if I live in hope, it will come to me, the clean thing that the Lord said should be mine.” And last of all, there is nothing adequate for us in the way of actually moulding men and doing that with life which we were set here to do unless we can go to the work in the spirit in which our Lord and Saint Paul entered it. If I have no hope for another man, I cannot awaken any hope in him for himself. Unless I believe in him, how can he believe? The glory of Christ was that, though He knew just what was in man, and saw all the weaknesses and the slavery and the impurity and the unwholesomeness, though He saw all this in man, He shut His eyes to it deliberately and believed in the better capacities and possibilities that were there and that He by His grace and His power could plant and nurture and bring out until all that old baseness that had been the man was not the man any more, and all this new purity that had not been the man was the man, and Simon was turned at last out of his putty into rock and stone.