1. The books of history and memory should not only record the events of the past, but also guide and inspire their readers to face the problems of the future. Unless this or that story is told in the proper spirit and interpreted by a heroic faith, it may have a depressing and paralysing effect. Dante has said that “there is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery” (Inferno, v. 121 f.), and Chaucer:
For, of fortunes sharp adversitee,
The worst kinde of infortune is this,
A man to han ben in prosperitee
And it remembren, when it passed is.
Haggai makes it evident that he was surrounded by garrulous old men who lived in the past, and whose reminiscences were damping the ardour and relaxing the moral fibre of the man of the new time. “Who is left among you,” he asks, “that saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not in your eyes as nothing?” From these questions we may perhaps infer with Ewald that Haggai was one of those who had seen the Temple “in its former glory,” and that his prophetic work began in extreme old age. This supposition agrees well with the shortness of the period covered by his book, and with the fact that Zechariah, who began to prophesy in the same autumn, afterwards appears as the leading prophet in Jerusalem.
2. If that was so, Haggai was a sanguine as well as an eloquent old man. His memory carried him back to the time when, as a child, he had seen the splendid Temple of Solomon in all its glory. But he chants no pathetic dirge about “a sorrow's crown of sorrow.” On the contrary, he has the rapture of the forward view. He knows that the best is yet to be. The things that are behind merely suggest to him the greater things that are before. Let the dead past bury its dead. Let the mind cease from brooding, and give itself to hoping and aspiring. How the old man rings the changes upon his one essential theme, which he knows to be God's message: “Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work: for I am with you, saith the Lord of hosts.”
3. Thus the optimist of Jerusalem confronted the pessimists of his time. His was not the shallow, light-hearted optimism which forgets or ignores the deep miseries of the world. It was the optimism which is “very sure of God,” seeing His hand in the past and the present, trusting Him for the future, and “greeting the unseen with a cheer.” He was not a laudator temporis acti, but a herald of the dawn. A desponding or despairing servant of God is a contradiction in terms. A Christian must logically be optimistic about the future-a teleological view of the universe implies optimism on the whole.
It is the element of duty in it that saves optimism from being one of the worst of things and makes it one of the best. There is a cheap and impertinent optimism, which consists in not looking at the facts of life, but nursing a pleasant mood without reference to them. From this Stevenson was singularly free. He prayed to be delivered from all cheap pleasures, and refused to cheat himself into any blindfold light-heartedness. He found some good things actually there, and concentrated on them-a very different matter from the brainless optimism of the blindfolded. His action when no good could be seen, was founded upon a faith that in the depths
This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely and means good,
-a faith which he found experience abundantly to confirm. It is one thing to live in a fool's paradise of our own imagining; it is a very different thing to trust life and to find it reveal its trustworthiness in return for the venture of faith. Whether optimism shall be mere vanity, or whether it shall be the discovery of God, depends almost wholly upon how much it is cherished on the one hand as a form of selfishness, or on the other as a matter of duty. He believed in life because he found that only in that belief could a man be true to himself and serviceable to others. And life justified his faith, for to the strenuous and the unselfish it is always true that “experience worketh hope, and hope maketh not ashamed.”1 [Note: J. Kelman, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, 254.]
