(20-22) Hope — wait — trust. — The Hebrew language was naturally rich in words expressive of that attitude of expectancy which was characteristic of a nation whose golden age was not in the past, but in the future — a nation for which its great ancestor left in his dying words so suitable a motto —
“I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord,”
and which, while itself held back outside the promised land of the hope of immortality, was to be the birth-race of the great and consoling doctrine that alone could satisfy the natural craving expressed by the moralist in the well-known line —
“Man never is, but always to be, blest;”
and by the Christian apostle —
“For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”