• Author: Selected
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 9 27 1916
• Tags:
• advice
• hope

HOPE IS NEVER WASTED

Without hope this voyaging sphere on which man lives would be but a derelict, and our lives empty and all but unendurable. For hope is the great rudder to all humanity. Hope wakens in the child even before the sense of reason; it fills youth with golden-hued visions; it lures maturity on to indomitable endeavor, which is greater than mere accomplishment. Nor does it even forsake old age. Like the lamplight streaming through the window pane which brought you safely home when a boy, hope lights the path, evenunattained, it burns unquenchable. It is more intangible than faith, for faith is trust in what is, but hope is confidence in what is to be. Even to write of it without dropping into vague figures is like trying to express the nature of music by means of algebraic symbols. Hope is sometimes the parent of selfish ambition, but it is also the source of all the purest and holiest passions. It fills the heart of the father when he looks at the baby in his arms. And when this child has become a man the same fire burns within as he gazes down upon his son. From generation to generation it passes—inextinguishable. It makes all life like the laboratory of the alchemist, in which what is dross seems juston the point of being transmuted to gold. But, like the alchemist’s toil, hope is never wasted, for—though the phrase is hackneyed it is what makes life worth living.

— Selected.