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But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.—1Co_13:13.
2. But even more remarkable than the sublime poetry of this chapter is the concluding verse: “Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” In this verse St. Paul has found an absolutely complete and satisfactory formula for the Christian character. Faith, hope, and love, with love in the place of honour—is not this Christianity in a nutshell? Within a few years after the Ascension, St. Paul has not only penetrated to the very heart of Christ’s teaching, but has given us the kernel of the whole Gospel in one of those illuminating phrases which are a necessity for every great movement. So at least the Church has always felt. The three emblematic figures of the “theological virtues,” as they were called, have been favourite themes of Christian art and Christian eloquence all over the world. What the cardinal virtues, Justice, Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance were to pagan antiquity; what Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were to the French Revolution; what the Rights of Man were to the founders of the American Republic; what the three stages in the spiritual ascent—Purification, Illumination, Union with God—have been to mystics of all ages and countries, that Faith, Hope, and Love have been and are to the Christian. The imitation of Christ means the life of Faith, the life of Hope, the life of Love.
Greek philosophy had proclaimed four cardinal virtues—justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude. Christian philosophy, following St. Paul, has taught during nineteen centuries that there are three specifically Christian graces—they are more than virtues—three primary and fundamental spiritual dispositions, which must dominate and permeate all true Christian character—Faith and Hope and Love.
This is one of the greatest of the great texts of the Bible. Let us take it in six parts—
Faith.
Hope.
Love.
These Three.
These Three Abide.
The Greatest of these Three.
2. What is the antithesis of faith? Is it Reason? Do I believe some things because I am convinced by evidence that they are true, and other things because the Church tells me to believe them, or because it is a meritorious act to force myself to believe them? Is faith an act of submission to authority? Is there any truth in the answer of the child, who, according to the story, said, “Faith means believing what you know to be untrue”? Look out some of the places where faith is mentioned in the New Testament, and see whether it is ever opposed to Reason. You will find that it never is: it is opposed to sight. Faith is not the acceptance of certain historical propositions on insufficient evidence. It is trust in God and goodness.
It is the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest and highest hypothesis that we can conceive. It is the spirit of Athanasius when he stood “against the world”; of Luther when he said, “God help me, I can do no otherwise”; of Job when he said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him”; of the three children in the furnace when they said, “He will deliver us out of thy hand, O King. But if not, we will not serve thy gods.” It is the spirit which has given courage to all the martyrs to face death. Faith is the confidence that somehow or other the right must triumph, that God is stronger than Satan.
I resolved that at any rate I would act as if the Bible were true; that if it were not, at all events I should be no worse off than I was before; that I would believe in Christ, and take Him for my Master in whatever I did; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible was quite as difficult as to believe it; that there were mysteries either way; and that the best mystery was that which gave me Christ for a Master. And when I had done this I fell asleep directly. When I rose in the morning the cold and cough were gone; and though I was still unwell, I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never known before, at least to the same extent; and the next day I was quite well, and everything has seemed to go right with me ever since, all discouragement and difficulties vanishing even in the smallest things.1 [Note: Letter from Ruskin to his father in E. T. Cook’s Life of Ruskin, i. 271.]
(1) Faith is trust in the saving power of Christ.—“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” would seem to be the simplest of all directions. Many, in Apostolic times, hesitated to believe, but none hesitated as to what belief was. A heathen or pagan never asks a missionary what is meant by faith. The very simplicity of the act prevents its definition. Like time and space, the more we think about faith, the less we understand it. It must be felt, not analysed. It cannot be analysed. Many a Christian life has been mournfully chequered by dark and cheerless seasons, from the habit of thinking about faith instead of the object of faith, about the acts of the mind instead of the truths of God, the manner of believing instead of the testimony to be believed. Faith leads the soul to act on what it credits. It includes not only the belief of what is true, and the desire of what is good, but the choice of what is right. We may believe many things which have no possible connection with our conduct. Many of the propositions of Scripture are not the proper objects of trust, though they are of belief. We believe on the ground of evidence, we trust on the ground of character. We believe a truth, we trust a person. I might believe and not trust, but I cannot trust and not believe. So the specific act of faith which unites to Christ terminates upon His person, an existing, living, loving personality. It is not a doctrine concerning Christ that saves me, but trust in the saving power of Christ. It is not a specific theory of faith, but the practical grasp of faith, that saves. Salvation is not the formation of a right creed in my understanding; it is the quickening of a spiritual life in my soul.
Faith is that strong buoyant confidence in God and in His love which gives energy and spirit to do right without doubt or despondency. Where God sees that, He sees the spring and fountain out of which all good springs: He sees, in short, the very life of Christ begun, and He reckons that to be righteousness; just as a small perennial fountain in Gloucestershire is the Thames, though it is as yet scarcely large enough to float a schoolboy’s boat; and just as you call a small seedling not bigger than a little almond peeping above the ground, an oak; for the word “justify” means not to be made righteous, but to reckon or account righteous.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 335.]
I am not sure that we are much the better for our attempted definitions of Faith. Baxter connects it with the doctrine of the mystical union; Lampe defines it as a willingness to be saved by Christ; Halyburton and Owen as a cordial acceptance of the offer; Sandeman as simple belief in simple testimony. Well, a man is sometimes very little the better for a definition, and all these perplex as well as enlighten. But “none perish that Him trust”—none perish that Him trust.2 [Note: “Rabbi” Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 414.]
(2) Faith is also trust in God as a Father.—If there is a word more expressive of Christian character than any other, it is this one: trust—trust in God. It is the secret source of all peace and serenity. It will comfort and sustain when nothing else can. It gives the child of God the delightful assurance that all his trials are disguised blessings, the appointment of a Father’s wisdom, and the infliction of a Father’s love. And death itself becomes the security and enlargement of life, a training for that holy intimacy with Himself which is to constitute the blessedness of the heavenly world. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” The bringing of good out of evil is His grand prerogative. He permits the evil in order to produce the good. The Christian’s character is formed more from his trials than from his enjoyments. The picture would have no beauty or effect without shade.
Christ’s faith in His Father was as conspicuous as His faith in the mission He had to accomplish, of which He said on the cross, “It is finished!” His vindication He left entirely in His Father’s hands, when He yielded up His spirit, in a complete surrender of self, saying, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!” I am not forgetting that He was the everlasting Word, the only begotten of the Father, when I speak thus, but I wish to remind you that He really became man—having limited Himself, having “emptied” Himself, as St. Paul said, that He might become the true Brother of humanity, the Son of Man, sharing with us, in everything save sin, the necessity and the blessedness of faith.1 [Note: A. Rowland, The Exchanged Crowns, 33.]
The faith of our time has had to pass through fiery furnaces of tribulation. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible Church. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible Book. It has surrendered, at the bidding of science, that latest voice of God—the Garden of Eden, and the world made in six days, and the dream of man’s primal innocence. It presumes no longer to penetrate dark mysteries. It cannot reconcile Foreknowledge and Free Will. It cannot reconcile the apparent cruelty of nature with the lovingness of God. It understands neither heaven nor hell. It has learnt to trust, humbly and without reserve, in Christ. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” That surely is the truest faith of all the ages, to have lived in an atmosphere of unbelief, to have faced and endured all the assaults of modern doubt, and still to trust “in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, by honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report, as dying, and behold we live, as chastened and not killed”—still, with deeper intensity than ever, to believe in God and Christ and Eternal Life.
I little see, I little know,
Yet can I fear no ill;
He who hath guided me till now
Will be my leader still.
No burden yet was on me laid
Of trouble or of care,
But He my trembling step hath stayed,
And given me strength to bear.
I came not hither of my will
Or wisdom of mine own:
That Higher Power upholds me still,
And still must bear me on.
I knew not of this wondrous earth,
Nor dreamed what blessings lay
Beyond the gates of human birth
To glad my future way.
And what beyond this life may be
As little I divine—
What love may wait to welcome me,
What fellowships be mine.
I know not what beyond may lie,
But look, in humble faith,
Into a larger life to die,
And find new birth in death.
He will not leave my soul forlorn;
I still must find Him true,
Whose mercies have been new each morn
And every evening new.
Upon His providence I lean,
As lean in faith I must:
The lesson of my life hath been
A heart of grateful trust.
And so my onward way I fare
With happy heart and calm,
And mingle with my daily care
The music of my Psalms 1 [Note: Frederick Lucian Hosmer.]
(3) It is enough to name one further aspect of faith: Faith is spiritual insight.—This is the way in which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews regards faith. He says it is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” These words impress upon our minds the thought that, corresponding to all the longings which possess the Christian soul, to all the desires and yearnings which spring up within the soul that is earnestly striving to attain to the Christlike and Divine—corresponding to all these are glorious realities; that the up-springing desires shall not be in vain; that the soul which remains steadfast in hope, which clings with brave perseverance to the hopeful yearnings which from time to time unfold themselves to consciousness within its inward recesses, begins by-and-by to feel by anticipation the very substance of what it has hoped for within its grasp, by-and-by attains to the power of seeing before it in mystic vision the glorious spiritual realities, the thoughts of which presented themselves at first only as dimly discerned but irrepressible desires. Faith then is spiritual insight. It has been called the eye of the soul. It is more than this; it is the soul seeing, the soul beholding, the things of heaven; the soul looking upon the things not seen by the bodily eye—looking upon the glories of the spiritual world, upon the wonders of that invisible world which is ever around us, ever underlying the natural world.
By the aid of that mental insight, which, because it is directed towards matters of a scientific import, has been called scientific imagination, men have been able to have within their minds a vivid representation of the marvellous vibratory movements of the mysterious ether, and their rapid transmission in one vast tide of light through the infinite space around us. By the aid of the same power of imagination, that other swiftly-acting vibratory motion which has only in recent times become obedient to man’s control, that vibratory motion which enables us with magic speed to send tidings even to countries separated from us by ocean abysses and by wide-spreading continents,—by the aid of the same imaginative power, the mind is able to discern the vibrations of the all-pervading ether with which we associate the term electricity. God who thus endows that part of our inner being which we call the mind with marvellous powers, also endows that which we speak of as the soul—of which the mind is indeed but a faculty—with corresponding powers. Within all souls longing after a fuller knowledge of Divine things God is ever breathing the breath of a diviner life; and as this sacred breath—this Holy Spirit—abides with us to animate us, our enkindled spiritual imaginations discern more and more of the mystic glories of heaven towards which the longings of our souls have been directed. This spiritual imagination which enables us to see as in a vision the substantial realities which the soul has been possessed with longings for; which enables the soul to have a vivid conviction that it has entered upon the life of reconciliation with God, which enables it to discern the transcendent glory of the future life of ever-advancing union with the Divine, which enables it to discern the underlying import of such words as Atonement and Sacrament, to recognize the oneness of the life of the redeemed on earth and in heaven with the great life of God, to behold the unity which binds things seen with things unseen, the correspondence which exists between things natural and things spiritual,—this spiritual imagination which has such potency within us, is the Divine gift of faith which is defined for us in the Epistle to the Hebrews in such suggestive words.1 [Note: H. N. Grimley.]
Canst thou discern—beneath all outward seeming,
The hidden meaning, oft concealed from sight?
The secrets wherewith nature’s heart is teeming,
The deep soul-vision of a clearer light?
Say, dost thou understand the whisper’d token,
The promise breath’d from every leaf and flower?
And dost thou hear the word ere it be spoken,
And apprehend love’s presence by its power?
Canst thou discover in the lives around thee,
How small events to mighty issues lead?
And does the storm’s voice nevermore astound thee,
Since every God-sent message thou canst read?
Then, Heaven-gifted thou, to whom is broken
Th’ eternal revelation, calm and clear—
As they to whom, long since the words were spoken,
“He that hath ears to hear”—yea, let him hear.1 [Note: Una, In Life’s Garden, 93.]
So far from being always considered a virtue, Hope has been stigmatized as a dangerous deceiver or as a luxury not to be indulged in by the weak. “Hope,” says the Athenian in Thucydides, “the procuress of peril, cannot indeed destroy, though she may harm, those of her employers who have a reserve to fall back upon: but to those who risk their all upon the issue of her services—and a costly servant she assuredly is—she unmasks herself only in the moment of their ruin, when her victims have no resource left to defend themselves against her recognized treachery.” Poets in the same strain cry shame upon this delusive phantom, and protest that they are—
—tired of waiting for this chymick gold,
Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.
“Hope,” says Owen Feltham, “is the bladder a man will take wherewith to learn to swim; then he goes beyond return, and is lost.” And Lee,—
Hope is the fawning traitor of the mind,
Which, while it cozens with a coloured friendship,
Robs us of our best virtue,—resolution.
The twentieth century is as sad as Marcus Aurelius. Our music is sad. Our poetry—when we get any—is sad. Our drama, when it is serious, is half-morbid. Our greatest writers of fiction are pessimists, and deem a good ending, not only bad art, but false to fact. Our preachers—Heaven pardon them!—seem somehow to have lost fire and hope, and preach as though Christ were indeed in the ship, but asleep. Our philosophy has culminated in the insane ravings against God and man of Nietzsche, or, for the more reverent, in the pathetic Epicureanism of Omar—
One moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste,
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—oh, make haste.1 [Note: W. Hudson Shaw.]
2. But it is not really strange that St. Paul should raise hope to a Christian temper of the first order. St. Paul was a student of Scripture and of the history of his people and of religion in the world. And what is on the surface of the Bible is the way in which from first to last it is one unbroken, persistent call to hope—to look from the past and the present to the future. Its contents, we know, are manifold and various; the subjects which it treats are widely different, and it is different in different parts of it in its way of treating them; it is the record of enormous changes, of a great progressive advance in God’s dispensations and of man’s light and character, of the long and wonderful education of the Law and the Prophets; its story of uninterrupted tendency is strangely chequered in fact; bright and dark succeed one another with the most unexpected turns—lofty faith and the meanest disloyalty, great achievement and unexpected failure, lessons of the purest goodness and most heartfelt devotion with the falls and sins of saints, blessing and chastisement, the patience of God, and the incorrigible provocations of His people. In spite of all that is wonderful and glorious in it, it sounds like the most disastrous and unpromising of stories; and yet that is not its result. For amid the worst and most miserable conditions there is one element which is never allowed to disappear—the strength of a tenacious and unconquerable hope. Hope, never destroyed, however overthrown, never obscured even amid the storm and dust of ruin, is the prominent characteristic of the Old Testament. All leads back to hope, hope of the loftiest and most assured kind, even after the most fatal defeats, of changes which seem beyond remedy. The last word is always hope.
The whole Bible, from first to last, is one unbroken, persistent call to hope. Some of the most wonderful and soul-stirring words of revelation are those in which hope is spoken of. “The God of hope”—“We are saved by hope”—“Jesus Christ who is our hope”—“Christ in you, the hope of glory”—“Begotten again into a living hope”—these are expressions which only familiarity could deprive of their commanding power.
We call St. Paul the Apostle of Faith, and rightly. Equally the great teacher who, in a sudden moment of unique inspiration, recalling what Jesus was when He lived on earth, gave us the 13th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, was the Apostle of Love. But just as truly, perhaps even more emphatically, was St. Paul, above all things else, an Apostle of Hope. It is impossible to mistake it; he was himself the very embodiment of the Christian grace he taught. He never defined it, but his whole life illustrated what he meant. Save in his argumentative passages, it is his characteristic word always when exhorting, trying his hardest to help. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.” “Sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope.” “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not vain in the Lord.” That is the note which peals like a trumpet through all the Pauline Epistles.1 [Note: W. Hudson Shaw.]
3. Even the common sense of mankind tells us that life would be but a poor shrunken thing without hope; and even the poet who reviles its “chymick gold,” marvels at the fascination which it still imparts to the future in spite of our monotonous and oft-repeated experience of the flat unprofitable past—
Strange cozenage! Who would live past days again?
Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain.
Surely the common sense of the world is right. While recognizing that hope may be an evil if it makes us careless or indolent, trustful to chance or to luck or to interpositions of Providence rather than to our own energies and skill, we cannot fail to see that hopelessness is a still greater evil, paralysing energy and neutralizing skill. No business in life, however purely intellectual, can dispense with hope as a stimulus to activity. That impulse which the immediate pressure of pleasure or pain gives to irrational animals, hope gives to human beings, who are endowed with the faculty or necessity of looking forward. Who could toil on through threescore years or more in hopelessness? “Work without hope,” says Coleridge, “draws nectar in a sieve”; and, indeed, what possibility is there that any human being, however richly endowed with genius, should ever produce the durable results that come from harmonious and continuous effort, or give birth to anything but the perishable expressions of a mere spasmodic outburst, if he had no durable hope of anything in heaven or earth?
Hope is the minister of strength. When I think of the virtue called Hope two pictures come to my mind. One is the work of a great living painter: it is a piece of symbolism, a gracious, frail, pathetic figure, the eyes blinded with a veil, the head bent and turned on one side with the intentness of a listener to catch the music sounded on the one unbroken chord of her lyre, on which all strings but this are gone. A touchingly beautiful conception; but this is human hope, not Divine. The other picture is the very familiar one which may have met your eye on many a church window—a figure not pathetic, weak, forlorn, but strong and brave as Fortitude; and in her hand not the lyre of broken strings, but the stout shaft and the iron grappling hooks of her mighty anchor; the anchor which entereth into that within the veil, the deeps of the world unseen, and from thence, whatever storm may swing their surface, holds the soul fast.1 [Note: J. H. Skrine, The Heart’s Counsel, 118.]
To the quenchless hope in their souls all the strong heroes of the past, from Leonidas to King Alfred, from Alfred to Hildebrand, from Hildebrand to Cromwell and Lord Chatham and Washington and Mazzini, have owed their power. Without it, Religion, facing the stubborn mass of humanity’s sin, is paralysed. To the Christian the shield of faith is no whit more essential than the helmet of hope. Only to men of undying hope, able contagiously to kindle courageousness in their fellows, will the dead weight of the insensate evil of this universe ever yield. There will be no great Day of the Lord until such leaders arise.
Then sound again the golden horn with promise ever new,
The princely doe will ne’er be caught by those that slack pursue,—
Yes! sound again the horn of Hope, the golden horn!
Answer it, flutes and pipes, from valleys still and lorn;
Warders from your high towers, with trumps of silver scorn,
And harps in maidens’ bowers, with strings from deep hearts torn,
All answer to the horn of Hope, the golden horn!
4. Hope elevates and strengthens and inspires. This is why it is one of the great elements of the religious temper; this is why it ranks with faith and love. It is one of the great and necessary springs of full religious action. There may be a faith almost without hope; a faith which still believes, though it can see nothing; a faith which refuses to be comforted, which will not let the distant picture of better things rise before it, but yet trusts, even in the darkness, to God’s truth and goodness. It is the deep and awful faith of him who said, “Though he slay me yet will I trust in him”; of the cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the touching and childlike confidence of the prophet—“Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls; yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” But the human spirit can hardly stand long the strain of a hopeless faith; one or other of the elements will assert its supremacy. And hope is the energy and effort of faith; the strong self-awakening from the spells of discouragement and listlessness and despair.
What gives its moral value to hope, what makes it a virtue and a duty, is that in its higher forms it is a real act and striving of the will and the moral nature; and if any one thinks that this is an easy process he has yet much to learn of the secrets of his own heart. It is an act, often a difficult act, of choice and will, like the highest forms of courage. It is a refusal to be borne down and cowed and depressed by evil; a refusal, because it is not right, to indulge in the melancholy pleasure, no unreal one, of looking on the dark side of things. It is so that hope plays so great a part in the spiritual life; that it fights with such power on the side of God.
Millions of men are digging and toiling twelve hours each day; and God hath sent forth hope to emancipate them from drudgery. The man digging with his pick hath a far-away look as he toils. Hope is drawing pictures of a cottage with vines over the doorway, with some one standing at the gate, a sweet voice singing over the cradle. Hope makes this home his; it rests the labourer and saves him from despair. Multitudes working the stithy and deep mines sweeten their labour and exalt their toil by aspiring thoughts. Thinking of his little ones at home, the miner says: “My children shall not be as their father was; my drudgery is not for self, but for love’s sake; the sweat of my brow is oil in the lamp of love; I will light it to-night on the sacred altar of home.” Here is the secret of the rise and reign of the people. This explains all man’s progress in knowledge and culture. As the fruits and flowers rise rank upon rank in response to the advancing summer, so all that is most refined and exalted in man’s mind or heart bursts forth in new ideals, reforms, revolutions, in response to the revelation of that personal presence from whom all hope and aspiration incessantly proceed.1 [Note: N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 285.]
5. What is the use, it is asked, of bidding us hope without giving us first some certain or probable reality to hope about? The faculty of hope is like the faculty of reason so far as this, that both must have some foundation of facts whereon to work. Give us a permanent and reasonable object of hope and we shall be only too glad to hope; but without such an object we must be content to be hopeless. We cannot allow ourselves to be fooled, even though the fooling may lead us along a path of happiness. Better the hopeless path of truth than the fool’s paradise of comfortable delusions.
(1) The whole universe, when illuminated by the light that streams upon it from the Cross of Christ, furnishes us with a durable object of hope in the Fatherhood of the Maker of the world, who, in the course of many ages, is conforming man to the Divine image. The hope of the ultimate perfection of all things, based upon the sense of the Divine Fatherhood, is the source of all healthy activity in men. In the strength of this hope we can look all evil in the face without blenching, and beneath the abyss of sin discern the vaster abyss of the Divine love.
(2) But what shall we say to those who tell us that about the future we may reason but have no right to hope? Our reply will be that we cannot reason about the future without taking into account the evidence that the world was made by a good and wise Being who has given us many faculties tending to happiness and righteousness, which faculties He cannot have intended to fust in us unused; and among the highest of these faculties stands hope. Furthermore we may point out that healthy natural hope, though it may work through illusions, does not delude. There is no deception in the Divine Providence which leads the human soul from the cradle to the grave under the guidance of unfulfilled hopes. Hope, like faith, may be literally, but it is not spiritually, deceptive: the spirits of heaven are not like the fiends—
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope.
Of the word of God’s promises we may assert the direct opposite. That word is never “kept to our ear” and never “broken to our hope.” Just as the faith or trust of the child in the father (who to him is as a God) is not a delusion but a truth enwrapped in illusion, so it is with the natural hopes of childhood and of every age; with the aspirations of a generous youth and the ambitions of a virtuous man. These neither “fool us when young” nor “beggar us when old”; but, on the contrary, each bright cloud of hope, breaking as the traveller is allured onward by it from one stage to another in his lifelong upward journey, reveals a brighter cloud within, to break in its turn and to disclose a still brighter interior splendour, till at last those heights are reached where all clouds shall vanish away, and the mind shall be prepared to receive the direct rays of the Sun of righteousness.
The characteristic of waning life is said to be disenchantment. Old men in general are inclined to check the zeal and damp the ardour of their younger followers. A shrewd observer of life has said that youth is an illusion, manhood a struggle, old age a regret. “How many young men,” says a great idealist, “have I not hailed at the commencement of their career, glowing with enthusiasm, and full of the poetry of great enterprises, whom I see to-day precocious old men, with the wrinkles of cold calculation on their brow; calling themselves free from illusion when they are only disheartened; and practical when they are only commonplace.” But believing men experience no disillusionment. The leaves of hope never wither on souls that are rooted in God. Joseph when dying looks forward with calm and perfect confidence, knowing that glorious things, and ever more glorious, must be, because God is. “What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of the Creator?” God lives though a hundred Josephs die. The two characteristics of the Hebrew mind were the upward and the forward look, the one directed to God in the present, the other to His coming in increasing power and grace in the future. Optimism was the distinction of the Hebrews. “In the absence of Hope and of an ideal of progress, we strike upon one great difference between the classical Greeks and the Hebrews.” Among the ancient races the Hebrew was like a watcher standing on a high mountain top, scanning the horizon and catching the first beams of coming day, while others were still hidden in darkness. The very heart-cry of the Hebrew race is heard in such words as these—
My soul looketh for the Lord
More than watchmen look for the morning;
Yea, more than watchmen for the morning.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 65.]
6. Our hope is for others and for ourselves.
(1) It is for ourselves here and now.—There must often be much to distress and alarm us in the course of things which interest us now—evils which seem without remedy, defeats which seem final, perplexities through which we cannot see our way, dark and gloomy clouds rising in menace over our familiar world. To hope seems to us then like deluding ourselves; we call it optimism, and instinctive dislike to pain, a determination not to see the cruel truth. And yet how often has it appeared in the upshot of things that if in the darkest times any had been bold enough to hope he would have been amply justified?
What must have been the feelings of Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries, when, just as Christianity seemed to have won its way into the Roman Empire, they saw the fierce northern barbarians break into it, and the heathen triumph over religion and civil order? Which would then have seemed the judgment of sober good sense—the despondency which saw only the frightful mischief, or the bold hope which saw in the barbarians the seed of a great Christendom? Yet, who would have been right and who wrong?
“It has come,” wrote the soberest and also the loftiest of Christian thinkers in the last century, “I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.” The ominous symptom has certainly not grown less ominous; but could even the calm and large mind of Bishop Butler have embraced the thought that with this, not diminished, perhaps aggravated, there might also come a steady growth of energy and fervour and deepening practical purpose in the Church and religious men, such as he had certainly not seen, and could not look for?
Hope about ourselves should be encouraged. It is no proof of devoutness to be always shedding penitential tears, or to be so sensible of our own weaknesses as to be despondent about our future. Victory is generally the guerdon of those who expect it, confident in the Tightness of their cause, and the help of omnipotence on the side of right. When King Ramirez, in the year 909, vowed to deliver Castile from the shameful tribute imposed by the Moors of one hundred virgins delivered annually, he collected his troops and openly defied their King Abdelraman.
The king called God to witness, that come there weal or woe,
Thenceforth no maiden tribute from out Castile should go,—
“At least I will do battle on God our Saviour’s foe,
And die beneath my banner before I see it so.”
He fought with courage but without hope of victory, and after a furious conflict was defeated on the plain of Clavijo. But that night (the legend says), while he was sleeping, St. Jago appeared to him in vision, and promised him the victory. Next morning he called his officers about him, and told them his dream; inspired them also with hope of heavenly aid; and that day the enemy was overwhelmed by the Christian warriors, and ever since the war-cry of Spain has been “Santiago.”1 [Note: A. Rowland.]
The worst of all the woes that trouble faithful hearts is despair of ever conquering our sins, of ever becoming what the Lord Christ would have us be. The modern man, Sir Oliver Lodge tells us, is not troubling much about his sins. I do not know about that. This I am sure of, that earnest Christians trouble about nothing so much. While we are young, while we are yet in the glad spring-time, the hope of victory is ever present. When we have entered upon the dull, dusty paths of middle age, there comes a horrible weariness of the conflict. Disappointment, disillusionment of ourselves, drag us down. Like the Celtic race, we are always setting forth to the war, always to return vanquished. Year by year our hearts grow harder and seem to ossify. The old sins we loathe are with us still; new sins that we never dreamt of assault us. Character seems not to advance, but to retrograde, and the enthusiastic impulses of youth have fled. What shall save us now, in the second critical period of life, but the grace of Christian hope, which is not temperament, is not human quality at all, but a blessed boon from God? By that gladdening spirit alone shall despair be quelled, demons exorcized, the old energy of youth recovered, the battle renewed.1 [Note: W. Hudson Shaw.]
Nowhere, perhaps, is Hope in relation to one’s own future more beautifully illustrated than in the noontide scene in Pippa Passes. Phene, a Greek girl, has become the wife of Jules, a French sculptor. The union is the result of a cruel joke practised upon him by some students who owed him a grudge; and the sculptor finds, when it is too late, that the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her remorse at seeing what man she had deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her. And this is what she says—
You creature with the eyes!
If I could look for ever up to them,
As now you let me,—I believe, all sin,
All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,
Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth
Whence all that’s low comes, and there touch and stay
—Never to overtake the rest of me.
All that, unspotted, reaches up to you,
Drawn by those eyes! What rises is myself,
Not me the shame and suffering; but they sink,
Are left, I rise above them. Keep me so,
Above the world!
Both he and she are saved.2 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 119.]
(2) It is for ourselves in the hereafter.—For it is simply the most literal fact that God has set before us, in another state of being, the most wonderful future, which is within the certain reach of every single one of us: as much, as certainly, within our reach, as anything that we know of, which we could obtain tomorrow. This is the plain, clear, certain promise, without which Christianity is a dream and a delusion. The life and destiny of each individual man runs up to this; this is what he was made for; for this he has been taught, and has received God’s grace, and has been tried, and has played his part in the years of time. It is the barest of commonplaces; and yet to any one who has tried to open his mind to its reality and certainty, it must have come with a strange and overpowering force—new on every fresh occasion, like nothing else in the world. For it is one thing to look forward to some great general event, the triumph of the saints of God, the final glory of the great company of the redeemed; one thing to look at all this from the outside, as a spectator by the power of imagination and thought. It is quite another, when it comes into your mind that you yourself in the far-off ages, you yourself, the very person now on earth, are intended to have your place—your certain and definite place—in all that triumph, in all that blessedness, in all that glory; and yet surely, to any one that will, this is the prospect; this, and nothing less.
Just come from heaven, how bright and fair
The soft locks of the baby’s hair,
As if the unshut gates still shed
The shining halo round his head!
Just entering heaven, what sacred snows
Upon the old man’s brow repose!
For there the opening gates have strown
The glory from the great white throne.1 [Note: Harriet Prescott Spofford.]
(3) It is for others.—That ye may abound in hope, says St. Paul,—hope for ourselves, hope for our neighbour, hope for the world. Be the sin of our heart what it may, and seventy times seven the falls of the past, in Christ we know that sin shall have no more dominion over us. Be the sin of our neighbour what it may, love hopeth all things, and without love we are nothing. Be the sin of the world what it may, we know who came to take it away. His arm is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither is His ear heavy, that it cannot hear the great and bitter cry that cometh up from earth to heaven. We may give up hope when the Saviour of the world confesses Himself defeated, and all-ruling Love retires for ever baffled from the battlefield of human wickedness: but until then Christ calls us to set our hope on Him, and to bear witness of it to the world.
In the England of John Wesley, numbers of men were his peers in faith. Butler, Toplady, Romaine, John Newton, had as firm a grip on what faith can reach as he, and said words as noble for it. But Wesley had more hopefulness in his little finger than any other man of them had in his whole body. And so it was, that, wherever Wesley went, men caught the contagion of his great hope, and then ran tirelessly as long as they lived, kindling over all the world. Macaulay does well to say that no man can write a history of England in the last century, who shall fail to take into account Wesley’s vast influence in the common English life.1 [Note: R. Collyer, The Life That Now Is, 68.]
It is to be regretted that Edna Lyall’s religious stories are being neglected. They are full, not only of artistic power, but likewise of rich Christian instruction. In one she describes one of her characters in this significant fashion: “Carlo had the rare and enviable gift of seeing people as they might have been under happier circumstances, and the still rarer gift of treating them as such.” The life of Christ was full of this enviable hopefulness. Read how He dealt with sinners, and you will rejoice to find that His compassion dwelt upon them in their sin.2 [Note: J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 117.]
Dr. Westcott has told us—what those who are acquainted with the poet’s works will recognize as a statement of fact—that Browning “has dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms of action and passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes, and he has brought back for us, from this universal survey, a conviction of hope.” As a single specimen of this, we may refer to the scene described in the brief poem bearing the title, “Apparent Failure.” It is a picture of the Morgue in Paris, into which the poet entered to gaze upon the ghastly spectacles that there presented themselves—the bodies of men who hated life, or whose ideals were shattered, or whose hearts were broken. And, after plucking up courage to look fearlessly upon them all, trying to conceive what such a sight represented, how each victim came to meet with his terrible fate, he sums up his reflections thus—
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can‘t end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.3 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 121.]
Nothing suggests better what Christian love is than Giotto’s drawing of “Charity” in Padua. It is a corrective to all that misconception of love which left room for such a phrase as “cold as charity.” This is how Ruskin describes the drawing: “Usually Charity is nursing children or giving money. Giotto thinks there is little charity in nursing children: bears and wolves do that for their little ones; and less still in giving money. His Charity stands trampling upon bags of gold—has no use for them. She gives only corn and flowers (with her right hand); and God’s angel (to whom she looks) gives her, not even these—but a Heart.”1 [Note: R. J. Drummond, Faith’s Certainties, 240.]
The great religions of the world are distinguishable from each other by some supreme characteristic. Thus, the genius of Hinduism is mysticism, that of Buddhism is asceticism, that of Parseeism is dualism, that of Mohammedanism is fanaticism, that of Confucianism is secularism,—and that of our own faith is altruism, or love. No other inference than this is possible from the teachings of the New Testament. There God is represented as sending His Son to the earth because He loved, and He in this way “commends” His love; and then St. John, seeking to sum up His nature in a single word, exclaims: “God is love!”2 [Note: G. C. Lorimer, The Modern Crisis in Religion, 233.]
2. Note three things in the very conception of love.
(1) It is a personal relation.—The word may, indeed, be used loosely of our mere liking for inanimate or impersonal objects; it may be degraded to express an animal passion. But all such uses of the word are either abuses of its meaning or are figurative. As the modern poet of chivalry has exquisitely expressed it: “True love’s the gift which God has given to man alone beneath the heaven;” it is “the tie, which heart to heart, and mind to mind, in body and in soul can bind.” The discriminating genius of the Greek language has marked the absolute difference of this love from the lower forms of passion by assigning special words to each; and there are some who have regretted that no similar distinction has been maintained in our own language. But, we may perhaps be permitted to think, there is another point of view from which the absence of any such verbal distinction may appear prompted by a true instinct in a Christian nation. It was necessary for a Greek to recognize sensual passion as one form of human relationship. But the Christian best expresses the lofty ideal which is ever before his eyes, and best exemplifies that charity which thinketh no evil and which believeth all things, by refusing to contemplate men and women as united by any lower tie than that of love, or by refusing to contemplate our lower nature except in the light shed upon it by the higher.
(2) Love is the highest relation which one personal being can assume towards another.—It seems necessary to insist upon this characteristic in it, because its true nature is often obscured by its association with mere abstractions. It is not with humanity but with human beings that love is concerned; and such mere intellectual abstractions are useful only so far as they assist us in placing ourselves in that individual relation to individuals in which love finds its existence and its sphere of action. That which the Apostle has in view in his glowing description of this virtue is not a vague emotion of the heart, but the self-sacrifice, the devotion, the patience which are evoked in one soul by the presence of another.
The degree in which this gracious virtue of love can be evoked in our nature must depend upon the personal relations in which we are placed. The relation, perhaps, may be sometimes and in some measure an ideal one; but the vision of a person must be brought before the soul, if its highest faculties are to be aroused and its noblest emotions drawn forth. We all know, and it is the privilege of a generous youth to feel with peculiar vividness, what an ennobling effect is produced upon our nature by love, in the true sense of the word, thus aroused towards a kindred soul; while we also know and feel how intimately and essentially this influence is dependent on the personal character of the relation. It was the favourite theme of our greatest poets in the most splendid period of our literature, and perhaps of our national life; and in Spenser’s lofty verse the vision of love and beauty, and the vision of heavenly love and beauty, are so closely associated that they seem to merge into one another. But poets of less spiritual flight, and more concerned with the ordinary passions of human nature, have similarly depicted their heroes as rising to their noblest heights under the inspiration of this generous passion. When St. Paul discerns in the true relation of husband and wife a picture of the relation of Christ to His Church, he justifies and sanctifies these transcripts from nature, and welds together in essential union the most human and the most Divine aspect of love. Where, indeed, even in the light of the Gospel, shall be found more touching illustrations of some of the excellencies which the Apostle ascribes to charity, than in the personal affections of a gracious family life? The love which suffers long and is kind, which envies not, which seeks not her own, which is not easily provoked, which thinks no evil, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things,—is not this the love of mothers and of wives, the devotion of true sons and husbands? What an astonishing power there is in such love and such devotion to suppress the selfishness in a man or a woman, and to arouse all the faculties of our nature in the service of the person to whom we are devoted!1 [Note: Dean Wace.]
(3) It needs a perfect Person to satisfy its desires.—For the question arises, whether all these stirrings of heart towards men like ourselves, all these quickenings of the moral and spiritual pulse can be more than the first awakenings of the human soul towards its true destiny—that of communion and union with a perfect Person. With respect to all these emotions, even the truest and most beautiful, when viewed independently of higher relations, in how lamentable a degree is illusion blended with them! Those illusions are often the mockery, the cruel and unworthy mockery, of maturer years; and they are not less often the bitter disappointments of tender and faithful hearts. But suppose a love open to human nature which should be subject to no such illusion; imagine a Person revealed to men and women on whom they could lavish the inexhaustible stores of their affection, their admiration, their devotion, and be sure that all, and more than all, would fall short of what was due, and be a feeble response to the infinite reality: and what might not then be expected to be the influence produced upon our nature? We have the answer in this chapter, which was, in fact, the response elicited from the soul of St. Paul by the vision of the Lord Jesus Christ, by the love of the Saviour for him and his responsive love for the Saviour.
Perfection, or at least blessedness, in some form or other, has been proved by experience to be the ineradicable desire of the soul of man. That desire may, indeed, be dulled for a time, or chilled by despair. But such an acquiescence in imperfection brings with it, like the disappointed philosophy of the ancient world, a decay of energy, an abandonment of hope, in every sphere of life, and relaxes the spring of all noble thoughts and emotions. “Be ye perfect” is a command which is implied in all others, and is one of their main animating motives; and, in offering the means for this perfection, the Gospel possesses one of its deepest claims upon our spirits.1 [Note: Dean Wace.]
Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all,
Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold,
Rend each man’s temple veil and bid it fall,
That we may know that Thou hast been of old;
Gather us in.
Gather us in: we worship only Thee;
In varied names we stretch a common hand
In diverse forms a common soul we see;
In many ships we seek one spirit-land;
Gather us in.
Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow light;
Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven
Thou art the fulness of our partial sight,
We are not perfect till we find the seven;
Gather us in.
3. To whom, then, is our love directed?
(1) It is love to God in Christ.—The immediate and supreme object of love is the ever-blessed God. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” This is the first commandment. And with God as the centre of the heart, all the faculties and all the powers have unbounded scope for their operation.
I spoke to H—about the worship of the Virgin, and he thought one reason for its prevalence is, that it puts before men the more affectionate side of truth; and he deplored the want of a more large appeal to the affections in Protestantism, saying that we worship Christ, but none of us love Him. I was silent, but the result of a scrutiny into my own mind was that, with an exception, I scarcely love any one, or anything else, and that not because of any reference to His love for me, which somehow or other never enters into my mind, but solely in consequence of what He is and was, according, at least, to my conception of Him and His mind and heart. I do not know that this consciousness pleased me, because it presented itself rather as a deficiency than as a power—a lack of human sympathy, the existence of a continually increasing number of repellent poles in my constitution, which isolate me from my species, and make my antipathies more marked than my sympathies. Whereas St. John’s conception of genuine love for Him was that of an affection trained in love for beings who exhibit the same Humanity which was in Him, in weaker images, in the various relationships of life. “If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” Through the visible as a school we rise up to the appreciation of the invisible. Now my nature forces me to reverse the order, or rather to skip the first steps, for I certainly have some sympathy—dreamy, perhaps useless—with the invisible—invisible personality, justice, right; but there they end, and almost never go on, or go back, to the visible and human. Those lines you have often quoted, of Burns—
I saw thee eye the general weal
With boundless love—
express a feeling which I can only imagine, not realize, except by a sort of analogy which is dreamy.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 341.]
The very blessed in Paradise, beholding the infinite Beauty of God, would faint and fail from longing to love Him more if His most Holy Will did not fill them with His own sweet Rest. But they love His sovereign Will so entirely that theirs is wholly merged in it, and they rest content in His Content, willing to submit to the limit Love puts to love. Were it not so, their love would be alike delicious and poignant—delicious in the possession of so great a gift, poignant in the intensity of desire for more. Thus God in His Wisdom sends perpetual shafts into the hearts of those who love Him, to teach them that they do not love Him nearly so much as He deserves to be loved. And be sure that the man who does not crave to love God more does not as yet love Him well enough. There is no “enough”; and he who would stop short in what he has attained, has attained but little, be sure.1 [Note: St. Francis de Sales.]
(2) It is love to man.—We cannot love God without loving man. The love of God is the love of man expanded and purified. To love man is to love God. The testimony of St. John, the disciple of love, is decisive on this point. His love to God was unearthly, pure, spiritual; his religion had melted into love, and here is his account: “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” According to him, it is through the visible that we appreciate the invisible, through the love of our brother that we grow into the love of God. At the same time, true love for man must flow primarily from love to God. The love of God is the root, the love of man the fruit; the love of God is the fountain, the love of man is the stream in which it flows. Both are parts of one whole, links of one chain, threads of one cord which binds us to God, descending from Him to us, and lifting us up to His very being, which is love.2 [Note: J. Davies.]
I read the other day of a girl, a convert from heathenism in the Sandwich Islands, where Father Damien lived. She had a class of little children, and she wished to know which of them continued heathen and which had accepted Christianity. In her simplicity, uncontaminated by conventionalities and traditions which mislead us, she said to each child in her class, “Do you love your enemies?” If the child answered, “Yes,” the unsophisticated teacher said, “Then you are a Christian; stand here.” If the child answered, “No,” she said, with equal decision, “Then you are a heathen; stand on the other side.” Thus did the girl in the Sandwich I