Hope is humble, trustful, vulnerable.
Optimism is arrogant, brash, complacent. Hope has known the pang of suffering and the chill of despair. Only one who has cried de profundis can really appreciate the meaning of hope. What drives some to atheism is not a genuinely biblical hope but an insensitive optimism masquerading as such hope'. Perhaps John Macquarrie could have extended this idea to God's being with us in all our times and testings - when we abound, and when we are abased.