Hope is to be found as widely as human life itself. Wherever human being sow the fields, marry and found families, make plans and give promises, they show a trust in the future and they live in hope. Christian hope is continuous with this universal hopefulness, and we misunderstand it and wrongly restrict it if we think of it only as a hope beyond this world. Rather, it is a 'total hope'-a hope for this world, encountered and engendered in history, yet also reaching beyond the horizons of the merely natural. Professor Macquarrie discusses some of the principal ideas that have gathered round the Christian understanding of hope, tracing their development from the Old Testament through the New and into the history of Christian theology down to our own time. Among the topics discussed are the belief that history has a goal, the categories of promise and fulfilment, the consciousness of time, and such eschatological ideas as the kingdom of God the resurrection of the dead, and the second coming of Christ. In a final chapter, an attempt is made to restate the traditional hope in the context of our modern understanding of the world. The hope expounded both in its cosmic dimension as a hope for the world, and as a hope for individuals. In this restatement, appeal is made to modern dynamic views of man, to philosophies of emergent evolution and to the new understandings of time associated with modern physics. On the difficult question of the destiny of the concepts of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, and argues for a third possibility.