We live in times that are difficult in the Church and the world, in that they are collapsing in a certain sense. In such times, it is very important that we maintain the theological virtue of hope. People are tempted to think that God has abandoned His Church or abandoned the world, or to think that the grace of God is not working any more, that this world is too far gone. That would be to fall into the sin of despair. Today, however, I would like to speak about the situation in which there is too much hope, when hope goes too far. That is when we trust that some good thing is going to come to us, when in fact we have no reasonable grounds for doing so. For instance, if we thought that God would give us Heaven even if we were in the state of mortal sin, that would be a false hope. Such a false or immoderate hope is referred to as the sin of presumption.
