LECTURE IIIAN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE
If we were asked what we considered to be the supremest motive in life, the motive which does actually exercise the largest control over human conduct, what would our answer be? A generation ago men would have answered glibly enough: “The desire for happiness.” That was then supposed to be the one commanding motive of mankind. But it was not long before the answer seemed unsatisfactory and indefinite, because what brings happiness to one man brings misery to another, or what a man thinks will delight him in the end disappoints and such experiences issue in confusion. It was ethically indiscriminate also. The same motive covered moral contradictions, and men wanted some more consistent answer to the question. Nowadays those who look despondently at life often say in reply: “Avarice,—the desire for wealth.” Or, those who look a little more deeply say it is not money, but the power that money represents that men desire, and that their real motive is to acquire sources of influence and control. Some who look at life more hopefully are likely to reply: “Love orfriendship.” That is the thesis of one of the noblest books of our generation, written by the late Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull, entitled “Friendship, the Master Passion.” Doctor Trumbull told me once that when he first began the work on this theme he spoke about it to his friend Charles Dudley Warner, who said: “Trumbull, you cannot prove that thesis.” After the book was done, Doctor Trumbull took the book to him and asked if he would read it. He read it, gave it back, saying: “Well, Trumbull, you have shown that it is true, after all.” And that is a lovely view to take of life: that the motive that lies deeper than any other, and that really in the actual conduct of men and women is the most controlling, is the motive of unselfish friendship, of love.
But what would you say if instead of any one of these three or other answers that may suggest themselves, some one were to reply: “Not a bit of it. The motive that really controls human life, that does actually and not theoretically play the largest part in determining the conduct of men and women, is—fear.” And before we pass that contention by it may be worth our while to look at it and ask whether, or how far, it is true.
Take it in the matter of dress, for example. Does not fear play a large part there,—either the fear of being unlike everybody else, or the fear of being too much like everybody else? Inevery land, more even in civilized lands than in uncivilized, the element of fear enters into the small external characteristics of our daily living.
And in the matter of opinion. We speak of public opinion as though it were a free and stable and trustworthy thing. But the public opinion of one generation contradicts the public opinion of another generation. The public opinion of one section of the land denies the public opinion of another section, in the same way in which two sections of society in one community think in opposite ways. Why? Not because all the individuals of these particular generations, or sections, or portions of the community really and independently have thought the thing out for themselves, but because, held under the atmospheric constraint of fear, they are unwilling to break away from what is determined for them by the opinions in the midst of which they live. There is a good deal of pacifist opinion and a great deal more of militarist which is not free and personal at all, but simply herd intimidation. And a great deal of race prejudice and international suspicion is nothing but the miasma arising from cowardice or that bullying selfishness which is essentially cowardly.
And a great deal of religion is of the same character. The predominant element in many of the non-Christian religions is fear. It is so in all of the earlier or animistic religions, wheremen live in constant terror of the spirits that haunt the air or the world, and where a large element of their worship is shaped by that dominant principle of their religion, the dread of the unseen and the unexperienced. Even among us is there not a great deal, both of religious orthodoxy and of religious heresy, that is only the child of fear? There is a coercion of sound doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, and a great many men and women belong to their school of religious opinion simply because they are afraid to break away from the companionship in which they have always been or to disagree with the associations which condition them.
Much religious conduct, too, springs only from the fear of one’s environment. One of the saddest things which one meets in going out across the world is the great multitude, especially of young men, who, when they have left Christian lands and the environment and support of Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in all their religious conviction and character. Asia is strewn from one end of it to the other with the wrecks of men who, while they were at home, supposedly were men of religious character and conviction, but who showed when they went away from home that it was not a matter of their own real selves at all. It was just a matter of their timid servility and acceptance of the conditionsimposed upon them from without, so that once they were away from home and free to do as they pleased and had no longer the help and uplift of their surroundings, their environmental religion collapsed and they went in an entirely different way.
And I think if only we would go deep enough in our own lives, and be honest enough with ourselves to gain a clear insight into our motives and impulses, we would discover how large a part fear has played in us,—fear, of course, in all the wide range of its aspects, that shades off on the one side into arrant cowardice and on the other side into a mere hesitancy of character and timidity, but fear nevertheless. Some of us are even now cloaking the things that lie deepest in our hearts, because we are afraid to give expression to them. We go into communities, into circles, into conditions where what has been natural and real to us is unnatural and abnormal, and we hide our colours and conceal our principles. And we do things we ought not to do or we do not do the thing we know we ought to do simply because of fear.
I had an experience a little while ago when this diagnosis was confirmed to me. In a visit to one of our colleges, among the boys who came around to talk quietly was one whom I knew as one of the leading men in the life of the institution. He played on the eleven; he was presidentof his class. He was very timid about talking lest somebody should overhear, but when assured that we had the whole house to ourselves he took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to me.
He said: “Mr. Speer, I wish you would read this.”
I looked at it and saw that it was written in a girl’s handwriting, and said: “No, tell me about it.”
“No,” he said, “please read it. It will tell you a great deal better than I can.”
So I opened his letter and began to read, substantially as follows:
“Dear——:“I know all about your life at —— College, and I want to tell you what I think about you. You and I have known one another all our lives, and we have been good friends; but I think you are a coward and I think that I ought to tell you so.”
“Dear——:
“I know all about your life at —— College, and I want to tell you what I think about you. You and I have known one another all our lives, and we have been good friends; but I think you are a coward and I think that I ought to tell you so.”
I closed his letter and handed it back to him. His lips were quivering and his eyes were moist as he said:
“You can believe that when I got that letter it cut me all up, and the worst of it is that what she says is true.”
His father was a minister; his mother was of the salt of the earth. He had grown up under the best influences of a clean and wholesomeChristian home, and he had slipped those strings. He had thought that it was manly to surrender to the current ideals of the college; that in cutting loose from the influence of his home he was doing a brave and courageous thing. But the girl knew he was doing it because he was a coward and she had the courage to tell him so. And he had come to see it in that light for himself. In his college fraternity and in his own class, men were praising him because he had broken from the old enslavements of home and was living his own life like a man. But he knew that he was nothing but a coward, who
“Held that hope was all a lieAnd faith a form of bigotryAnd love a snare that caught him.Then thought to comfort human tearsWith sundry ill-considered sneersAt things his mother taught him.”
“Held that hope was all a lieAnd faith a form of bigotryAnd love a snare that caught him.Then thought to comfort human tearsWith sundry ill-considered sneersAt things his mother taught him.”
“Held that hope was all a lie
And faith a form of bigotry
And love a snare that caught him.
Then thought to comfort human tears
With sundry ill-considered sneers
At things his mother taught him.”
And he had thought he was doing it because he was courageous, whereas the real motive was that of fear. He was a coward, without courage enough to fly his own flag unflinchingly, to be and do the thing which in his heart, in the very fibres of his being, flesh of his mother’s flesh, he knew was the thing he should be and do.
And if we would really look into our lives we should discover that fear plays a far larger part with us than we ever dreamed. Men and women lie. Why? Simply because they are afraid oftelling the truth and taking the consequences. Nine out of every ten falsehoods—perhaps ninety-nine out of every hundred—are the spawn of fear. And the same thing is true of sin, and of no small measure of unbelief, as well as of no small measure of pretended belief.
Our great need is the discovering of something that will cast fear out of our lives, that will enable us to walk unafraid in the open sunlight of His pathway Who bade men to be afraid of nothing. Think how greatly we need this emancipation from fear in the simple matter of loyalty to principle. There is so much of expediency and compromise and adaptation among us, so great reluctance to ruffle the smooth conventionalities of life, whereas what the world needs is men and women who can see right principle as principle, unconfused and undistorted, and then who, unafraid, will abide in that right principle.
How greatly, too, this is needed in the plain, commonplace matter of duty-doing! All around us much simple work waits to be done by men and women who, first of all, can see it, and then have the courage to do it. The obscure tasks that, after all, are the really great and worthy ones, how few there are to do them! There is a fine passage in Morley’s essay on Rousseau in which he describes what real history is, and how much we make of history that really is not history at all, but simply the spectacular doings ofmen who for the time being were deemed great and who usually were engaged in war, whereas the great bulk of life was not the life of warfare at all. It was the life of peace,—of the quiet agricultural people, of the tradespeople, of the homes, which is not written up in any history at all,—that was the real history of the world. The men and the women who were doing earth’s work were not those who went out to battle or on great expeditions, but those who, day by day, heroically, unflinchingly, and without fear of oblivion, did the real business of the world. There are some familiar lines of Lowell’s in “Under the Old Elm” that put the principle for us:
“The longer on this earth we liveAnd weigh the various qualities of men,Seeing how most are fugitive,Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,The more we feel the high stern-featured beautyOf plain devotedness to duty, steadfast and still,Not fed with mortal praise,But finding amplest recompenseFor life’s ungarlanded expenseIn work done squarely and unwasted days.”
“The longer on this earth we liveAnd weigh the various qualities of men,Seeing how most are fugitive,Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,The more we feel the high stern-featured beautyOf plain devotedness to duty, steadfast and still,Not fed with mortal praise,But finding amplest recompenseFor life’s ungarlanded expenseIn work done squarely and unwasted days.”
“The longer on this earth we live
And weigh the various qualities of men,
Seeing how most are fugitive,
Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,
Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,
The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty
Of plain devotedness to duty, steadfast and still,
Not fed with mortal praise,
But finding amplest recompense
For life’s ungarlanded expense
In work done squarely and unwasted days.”
And take this matter of Christian service that lies before the thought of every earnest young life. Why are so many of us going to be, in the cities and homes from which we came, the same useless driftwood that we have been? Why? Simply because of our want of courage to facethe work that needs to be done there, and to undertake that work without fear that we cannot do it, without fear that God will desert us in attempting to do it, without fear of the irregularity and uniqueness of our being seen engaged in it. Throughout the world Christ waits for men and women to-day, as He waited for them—and so often in vain—while He was here on earth. Who will hear His call now? “Lay aside your fear and trust Me to be with you and to enable you to do the thing. Come and take up My task after Me.”
Some of us would dread to go out to live among the Chinese or Mohammedan peoples, so far away. But we would not dread going out to live in the legation, nor would we dread it much if we were to be employed in some great commercial enterprise. Yet the geography would be precisely the same, and our dangers and friendlessness would be far greater. But we would not fear all that, because others would think it natural and appropriate for us. But this other thing—the missionary call—would be so exceptional, so unusual, so fantastic, even fanatical, that we would fear to do any such dreadful thing! But which life of us is worth mentioning in the same breath with the life of God’s Son Who came into a carpenter’s home in a wretched little Jewish village amid an outcast race, in a bare remote corner of the earth, and lived there amongpeasant folk and farmers, pent up in the charnel house of humanity, and Who was willing to count His equality with God not a prize jealously to be retained, Who emptied Himself and took on Him the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross? The contrast between our life, with all its privileges, to-day and the most squalid African village is invisible over against the contrast between what Christ laid down and what Christ took up for the love He bore us and His world.
And we need greatly this fearlessness in our confession of Him,—that, without concealing Whom we follow and Whose servants we are, we should go out now, openly to avow our discipleship and the vow we have taken of loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ! Think how many betrayals of Him there have been, and how much of putting afresh to shame the Son of God and crucifying Him anew by men and women who had said they were going to follow Him faithfully, just as Simon said he was resolved to do on that very night in which before the cock crew he denied his Lord. Shall we not go out into the coming days with something in us that casts out this fear?
We look with longing and admiration upon such deliverance from fear when we find it in other lives. I was in Edinburgh during the South African war, just after the battle of Maegersfontein,and was staying in the house of friends. There was one little boy in the family named after Prof. Henry Drummond. I had been in the library all the afternoon, the very room in which Sir James Simpson discovered chloroform, and then had gone into the drawing-room for afternoon tea. The boy and his governess were the only other members of the household who came down. He and I fell to talking about the war. I asked him: “What do you think about the war in South Africa?”
“Well,” he said, “I did not think much about it at the beginning; I did not think about it much until a friend of mine was killed.”
“Yes,” I said, “who was the friend?”
“General Wauchope.”
He was, as you know, the commander of the Black Watch, and the Black Watch had been recruited from Edinburgh. The boy told me about the regiment and its fate, and shortly after his story was filled up by an Oxford man who had been in Edinburgh when the tidings of the battle came. He said every shop was closed, and along the streets little knots of men were gathered, and you could see the sobbing of strong men everywhere. There was scarcely a great family in Edinburgh that had not been touched. And yet, at the same time, all through the city there was a subdued sense of moral elevation, as though something had lifted thecharacter and temper of the city. They sorrowed in what had gone out from them; but they rejoiced in the way that it had gone. That regiment had been organized as a Scotch kirk. The chaplain was the minister of the kirk. The officers constituted the kirk’s session. I believe almost every man in the regiment was a member of the kirk, and I was told that as they went down through the streets of Cork to embark for South Africa, although not under orders or restraint, the men walked with arms on one another’s shoulders, singing:
“I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,Or to defend His cause,Maintain the honour of His Word,The glory of His laws.”
“I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,Or to defend His cause,Maintain the honour of His Word,The glory of His laws.”
“I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,
Or to defend His cause,
Maintain the honour of His Word,
The glory of His laws.”
And when they were disembarked at Cape Town and were taking their train to go to the front, they went on board singing the old Gospel soldier’s hymn:
“When the roll is called up yonder,I’ll be there.”
“When the roll is called up yonder,I’ll be there.”
“When the roll is called up yonder,
I’ll be there.”
They were sent right up and almost at once into that fateful battle. General Wauchope knew somebody had blundered, and he said to the men: “Men, do not blame me for this.” And without any fear they went into the ending from which no soldier such as they would draw back, unafraid of anything that might come tothem because unashamed to own their Lord and unfearing to follow Him.
Of such as those are we to be? Or will temptation intimidate us, and the tone of the conversation of the men and women with whom we mingle pull us down and cause us to fold our colours up and lay them away, as the man did whom the sneer of a serving maid caused to deny the Lord Who was dying for him?
Where are we to find that which will drive out this fear? “Perfect love casteth out fear.... He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” From how many of our hearts to-day will the perfect love of Him Whom we call Master and Lord expel all fear? Let it be so now. Not years afterwards, when other things shall have palled upon us, years that shall have brought their dulling influence with them, but now, in all the full strength and richness and glory and eagerness of our lives, let us admit the perfect love that shall cast out fear and send us out the kind of men and women Christ would have us be, to join the great company of men and women and girls and boys who, unfearing,
“... climbed the steep ascent of Heaven,Through peril, toil and pain.O God, to us may grace be givenTo follow in their train!”
“... climbed the steep ascent of Heaven,Through peril, toil and pain.O God, to us may grace be givenTo follow in their train!”
“... climbed the steep ascent of Heaven,
Through peril, toil and pain.
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train!”
Christian character needs this conquest of fear and it needs the love which is one of the deepsprings of such conquest. It needs also in our day an immensely more practical use of the principle of hope, a principle almost totally neglected in theology and made nothing of in our codes of conduct or in our creeds. Paul had a far deeper insight into the human heart and a vastly richer grasp on life. “Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three,” said he.
Paul rendered a large service when he condensed the central ideals and principles of Christianity in this way. The human mind is very fond of formulas. If it had not been for some authoritative, simplifying word like this, we might have gone on to construct all sorts of prescriptions like the threes and sixes and tens and fifteens with which we are so familiar in Buddhism. And yet the service which Paul rendered is not without its dangers, for men are prone to simplify further and to see whether the three cannot be reduced to one, or to arrange the order and proportions of the three, or to contend alone for that which some one of them signifies at the expense of the other two. Paul’s own words should have saved us from such folly, for he said quite clearly that one of these three was the greatest, “And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” And yet his own doctrine elsewhere has been used to correct and to counteract his expressed judgment here, and through the yearswe have had our theologies constructed in disregard of the domination of that one of these three principles which Saint Paul exalts. It has been in terms of faith, and faith given a very definitive construction, that our theological thinking with regard to Christianity has been chiefly done. Little by little however the proportions have changed, and now love, as one of the three great fundamental principles of Christianity, is coming to its own, not as a principle of action only but as a regulative principle also of our thought.
But it is a strange thing that no one has ever arisen, apparently, to say of hope what the intellect of the Church, over against Paul’s judgment, has been prepared to say of faith. He declared that of these three, love is the greatest. The current opinion of Christian thought through the Christian centuries has contended that faith was the greatest. What would men say if some one should arise now to restore the proportions, who would make bold to declare, “Now abideth faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is hope”? Surely the day will come some time when hope will come to its own, when the Christian heart and mind will no longer be content to construe its interpretation of Christianity in terms either of love or of faith, or of love and faith together, but will insist that these three abide—faith and love and hope.
And when a man stops for a moment to think, to disengage himself from the unscrutinized conventions, he begins to realize immediately that he has no faith and love unless he makes larger room for hope in his thinking and feeling than has been allowed to us. For there cannot be any faith detached from hope. You can conceive of faith in three different ways. You may think of it in its primary form, in its primary form in the New Testament at least, as personal trust, as the confidence that exists between two personal spirits. But even so, can you think of it without hope? If I have no hope of seeing Him in Whom I trust, of consulting with Him, or serving Him, of entering into a deeper and enlarged fellowship with Him, will not my personal trust soon empty itself of reality? Or, secondly, you may think of faith as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews does, as the “substance of things hoped for”; in which without any flinching, he binds faith up with hope in terms that cannot be severed. And, thirdly, if you go on to the rest of his definition, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” still faith is undetachable from hope; for, as Paul says in another passage, “We are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” And you cannot detach love fromhope or have anything that is real in the experience of love unless it inevitably leads a man on into those things that clearly were in Paul’s mind when he spoke not of faith and love only but also of hope. I ask any man’s heart if it is possible to divorce hope from love. I suppose in one sense it may be, and that you can speak of a hopeless love. Henry Martyn’s heroic and tragic life was the unfolding of a hopeless love. But how different that is from love that is undershot with hope. One looks towards evening to see the children waiting as he comes home. The workman lives in the hope of all that is there of joy and confidence and perfect trust inside his home. Love would be a sorry thing to-day if it were stripped of the hopes that give it its sweetness and its joy.
And it is not only faith and love that root themselves inseparably in hope, and that lose their fragrance and meaning if they do not continue to draw both out of hope, but regarding almost everything else that is dearest and most precious to us in life, does it not spring from this same great treasury? In one of the chapters of the Epistle to the Romans we find Paul again and again, in his efforts to bring his message out to those to whom he writes, describing God in different terms of speech. He begins by speaking of Him as the God of comfort, the God of patience, and then he goes on to speak of Himas the God of hope. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.” And then he closes by speaking of the God of peace who is to order all hearts. Quite evidently in his thought these things all run together, as again he writes: “Be ye sober. Walk as children of light. Put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation.” Joy and gladness and confidence and trust and hope,—all are rooted each in the other in his own mind and experience. The best that we have got in life springs from the fountains of hope.
We do not wonder, accordingly, that the old religious experience and the richer Christian experience, when it came, conceived and spoke of God as the God of love and the God of hope. They never spoke of Him as the God of faith. The old Hebrew idea of Him was as the ground-rock of their hope. “O hope of Israel,” was their cry. The lovely thing is that that burst from the lips of the man who mourned for his nation: “O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble.” “Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” God Himself when He comes to let Himself be richly known to men makes on them the impression of a great and joyous and glad and eager and boundless hope.
And when we turn away from such clews asthese and look right into the face of life to ask what the powers and services and functionings of hope in the actual life of man and in the life of the world are, we realize that all this exultant hope has its deep grounding in the actual living needs of men. It is by hope—the New Testament is unequivocal about it, and our own experience answers to that word—it is by hope that we are saved. Not in one passage in the New Testament can you find the declaration that we are saved by faith. We are saved “by grace through faith,” but Paul is flat-footed in his declaration that we are saved by hope. And the moment a man looks life square in the face he sees why it should be so. Were it not for hope there could not be any saving that were worth a man’s while. There might be a clearing up of the past; we might secure something like a clean conscience; but there could not be any confidence, any ease, any rest, as over against the tragic problem of life, if a man could not look out into the future—which is really the thing he now has to deal with—with boundless hope. Salvation is just that thing. It is not cleaning up our lives from the point of view of the past, just for the sake of cleaning up our lives; but it is the hope that for the sake of our future God is going to live in us a saving life.
All this is true whether we think of salvation as it comes penetrating our lives and dealingwith such problems as in shame and self-distrust we think of in our hours of recollection and penitence, or whether we think of it as something reaching out into the expanding experience of the future. Either way, salvation is a matter of hope. There is a lovely touch in one of Paul’s epistles where he says: “Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” What do you think of that motive? He does not say, “Seeing that our sin is so black and abhorrent as it is, seeing that the past is so shameful and unworthy as it is, let us cleanse ourselves.” “My brothers,” he said, “seeing we have such promises”—that is, “that the hope is so bright, that there is no ground for despair, that we can believe victory can actually be achieved by us, seeing that we have these hopes, let us cleanse ourselves in growing holiness.”
And then when those first Christian men came to look not only at this present purging of life which should leave it rich and fragrant and glorious but out upon the wide ranges of the untried and the unforeseeable, they still construed salvation in terms of hope. “Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And he that hath this hope in himpurifieth himself, even as he is pure.” It is so because there is in front of us the dear voice calling, the voice that says to every one of us: “Man, let that old past go now. It is done and gone beyond recall. Come out with Me. There is a new road for your feet and Mine, a new tale that is to be unfolded now, a new story, the contradiction of the old. Let the past go now, and come and walk with Me in the limitless hope of the new ways.”
And it is not only by hope, as a simple downright matter of fact, that men are saved and held fast to the Saviour; it is by hope also that men are nerved and empowered. In the hour of darkness, it is what lights all the darkness and makes it possible for men to bear. “Yes,” we say to ourselves in the hour of pain, “I know; but I can stand it, for after this comes something that is different from this.” That is what the honest doctor says to us when he deals with us. “Now hold steady for a moment. I am going to cut and it will hurt dreadfully. But just wait. Beyond the pain lies freedom from pain.” And we say, “Yes, doctor, cut. I can stand it.” In a moment the anguish is over. We endure in that hope. Has it not always been so? For a little while the mother bears her anguish and her pain for the joy and hope that a child is born into the world. For a little while Jesus bore the loneliness and the anguish of His grief and theshadow and the pain and the disgrace of His Cross, because, looking over it, He saw the glory that awaited Him and the world, and He endured all this, this anguish of the Cross, for the joy that was set beyond. “Therefore,” says Paul, “we rejoice in tribulation, in being flailed, in being pressed down as grapes in the wine-press, in being put through discipline and strain, we rejoice in all that, because we know that tribulation worketh steadfastness, steadfastness experience, and experience hope, and hope maketh not ashamed.”
And you know the paradox, and the glory of it, is that the darker you make the shadows the more triumphantly hope laughs in the midst of them. The more difficult you make the night, the more hopeful and enticing is the sure confidence of the dawn that is not far away. Our word, “Cheer up! The worst is yet to come,” is as deep a Christian word as was ever yet spoken. Be glad, because darker things lie just ahead and then light beyond. Thank God that you are counted worthy for tribulations like these; for these are what wash white a man’s robes and make him fit to walk after the Lamb whithersoever He goes, in company with the men whose lips have never known a lie.
All this is put finely for us in “The Ballad of the White Horse,” the best piece of work Chesterton has done. They were as dark days asever had been in English history. Tide after tide of invasion from Norse and Dane had come pouring in. Again and again Alfred had called his men and gone out and fought, and each time in vain. Now, as he sits on his little island in the Thames among the reeds, the news comes to him that the Danes are on their way for a fresh invasion of his land. He kneels in prayer and asks the Virgin Mother whether he ought to go out yet once more. Again and again, he tells her, he has gone out in hope, and each time in the confidence that victory would be his, and each time he has come back defeated, his men killed, and his people to sink lower after each despair than the time before. And yet, as he prays to her he says that if she will give him one word of assurance, he will go again. But only this, as she stands by his side, will she say,
“I tell you naught for your comfort,Yea, naught for your desire,Save that the sky grows darker yet,And the sea rises higher.”
“I tell you naught for your comfort,Yea, naught for your desire,Save that the sky grows darker yet,And the sea rises higher.”
“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.”
And there that day among the reeds under the promise only that the night was going to be blacker than he had ever known, that storms fiercer than he had ever breasted were coming, Alfred rises up to do what he had never done under the old assurance of easy victory,
“Up over windy wastes and upWent Alfred over the shaws,Shaken of the joy of giants,The joy without a cause.”
“Up over windy wastes and upWent Alfred over the shaws,Shaken of the joy of giants,The joy without a cause.”
“Up over windy wastes and up
Went Alfred over the shaws,
Shaken of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause.”
And as his men saw him coming, they thought it was with the old vain word of a sure victory, and they were about to tell him in advance that if he came with such a message they would follow him no more. But not now was Alfred’s word the easy word. No, but—
“This is the word of Mary,The word of the world’s desire;‘No more of comfort shall you getSave that the sky grows darker yet,And the sea rises higher.’”
“This is the word of Mary,The word of the world’s desire;‘No more of comfort shall you getSave that the sky grows darker yet,And the sea rises higher.’”
“This is the word of Mary,
The word of the world’s desire;
‘No more of comfort shall you get
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.’”
And in front of that darkening sky and that rising sea his men rose up to go with him, and this time, from the darkest night they had ever known, came the bright morning of their lasting victory. Thank God, we are not called out on any soft errand under the incitement of bright choices, but challenged by great difficulties, black nights and rising storms, to work in the hope of that which is invisible and which lies beyond. It is by hope, and hope that lies behind impenetrable clouds, that men are nerved and empowered. It is because the world is so black and dark to-day that we walk out into it smiling in its face, knowing that behind all this the morning the moresurely waits, the morning in which the men believe who have faith and love and hope.
And it is by hope that our comforts are drawn down into our lives when the darkest of all days come, and everything is quiet about the house and the little feet that had run to and fro are still. We say, “Yes, a little while and then those angel faces will smile, that I have loved and lost and love.” What would we do in those hours if it were not for the sure hope? Saint Paul lays his own heart open to all his friends in one of his epistles: “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.”
And as for us who are in the full flush andpossession of all that we have, it is by hope that we draw our comfort for our struggle. As against the background of our defeats and failures, we say to our own hearts: “Well, wait, just wait; my time will come. No matter how much of this there has been, some day my hope will be fulfilled. It is sure that something else than this there will yet be.” William Henry Green became the outstanding Hebrew scholar in America. He was plucked when he entered college in Latin and Greek. At Lafayette College for months and months he found himself beaten on the very battle-field where he stood at last the first man in the land. At Lexington, Virginia, several years ago, I went to the grave of General Lee in the chancel of the chapel of his college and then I went out to the grave of Stonewall Jackson on that little hill. One of his townsmen was telling me the story of Jackson and how by hope he wrested triumph out of his uttermost failure. He had been teaching in the military academy, and had just been about to give up his work because he had no gift of discipline. He could not maintain order in his own classroom, my friend said, and was about to surrender his career as a teacher, because he thought he was incapable there. Then the war broke out, and within twelve months Stonewall Jackson was the most famous disciplinarian on earth. On the very field where the man’s failure had been mostclear, there he achieved his richest and greatest victory, by hope. And so we comfort our hearts here to-day. “Yes,” we say to memories of which we are reminded in our searching hours, “the evil and unworthy imaginings and desires cling to us still, but it will not be forever. Some day, no matter how often I have failed, if I live in hope, it will come to me, the clean thing that the Lord said should be mine.”
And last of all, there is nothing adequate for us in the way of actually moulding men and doing that with life which we were set here to do unless we can go to the work in the spirit in which our Lord and Saint Paul entered it. If I have no hope for another man, I cannot awaken any hope in him for himself. Unless I believe in him, how can he believe? The glory of Christ was that, though He knew just what was in man, and saw all the weaknesses and the slavery and the impurity and the unwholesomeness, though He saw all this in man, He shut His eyes to it deliberately and believed in the better capacities and possibilities that were there and that He by His grace and His power could plant and nurture and bring out until all that old baseness that had been the man was not the man any more, and all this new purity that had not been the man was the man, and Simon was turned at last out of his putty into rock and stone.
I do not know whether the apostles were consciousor not of what was happening to them. Maybe they did not appreciate their Master, but one likes to think that they must have done so, and that often they would go off by themselves and one would say: “Andrew, is He not just great? Did you ever meet any one like that before? Did you see what He did this morning? He just shut His eyes completely to that meanness that He saw in me, and that I saw the moment I let it out, too, and He pretended that He never saw it at all, and He believed in me when He knew and I knew there was nothing there to believe in. Is He not wonderful? He will make a man of me yet.” And to this day He is still doing just what He was doing then. In this place now He is doing just that thing. He is shutting His eyes to what we do not want Him to see and opening them to what only He can see in us. And His law must be our law.
I can put it in a little story that a friend of some of us, George Truett, told to a little group some years ago in a western city. “I am fond,” he said, “of recalling the first soul it was ever given me to win to Jesus. I was a lad barely grown and a teacher in the mountains of Carolina. One morning, as we were ready for prayers in the chapel, there hobbled down the aisle to the front seat a boy of about sixteen years old. He was an eager, lonely-looking lad. I read the Scriptures and prayed and then sent the teachers to theirclasses. But my little cripple lad stayed. I supposed that he was a beggar. And I said to myself, ‘Surely this boy deserves alms. His condition betokens his need.’ So I went to him at recess and said, ‘My lad, what do you want?’ He looked me eagerly in the face and said: ‘Mr. Truett, I want to go to school. Oh, sir, I want to be somebody in the world. I will always be a cripple. The doctors have told me that, but,’ he said, ‘I want to be somebody.’
“He had won me. He told me of their poverty, and that was taken care of. I watched that lad for weeks and weeks. How bright his mind was! How eager he was to know! One day I called him into my office and said to him: ‘My boy, I want you to tell me something more about yourself.’ He told me how, a few months before, his father had been killed in the great cotton mill where he worked, and the few dollars he had saved up were soon gone. They tried to do their best in the county where they were, but found it difficult; so his mother said one day: ‘Let us move to the next county, where they do not know us. Perhaps we can do better where we are not known.’ So they moved and now he had come into my school. He said, ‘I want to help mother, and I want to be somebody in the world; so I made my appeal to you to come to your school.’ It was time in a moment for the bell to ring for books. I laid myhand on the head of the little fellow and said to him: ‘Jim, I am for you, my boy. I believe in you thoroughly, and I want you to know that I love you, my boy.’ And when I said that last word, the little pinched face looked up into my face almost in a lightning flash, and he said: ‘Mr. Truett, did you say you loved me? Did you say that?’ I said, ‘I said that, Jim.’ And then with a great sob he said: ‘I did not know anybody loved me but mother and the two little girls. Mr. Truett, if you love me, I am going to be a man yet, by the help of God.’ And when a few Friday nights afterwards I was leading the boys in their chapel meeting, as was the custom, I heard the boy’s crutches over in the corner. There Jim sat, in a chair away from the other boys to protect his leg. And a little later he got up, sobbing and laughing at the same time, and said, ‘Mr. Truett, I have found the Saviour, and that time you told me you loved me started me towards Him.’” And then our friend added, “Brothers, working men in the shops and everywhere are dying for love. Your grammar may be broken, your plans may be imperfect, your machinery may be crude, your organization may be rough; but if you love men and pour your hearts out to them honestly and directly, there will be a response that will fill your hearts with joy and heaven with praises.”
And the need and functions of hope should beviewed in no narrow personal way. We want to-day men who have a large and courageous faith in God for the nation and the world. Of recent years a mood of pessimism has spread through America. In one sense it represents a wholesome reaction from the spirit of braggadocio and spreadeagleism of an earlier day. So far it is wholesome. We need to be sobered and made modest and quiet in our national spirit. But it is a bad thing when a nation loses the zest of a great consciousness and a brave patriotism, and thinks meanly of what God can do with it. Our nation needs now not a timid and fearful sense of its impotence and incapacity, but a realization that, whatever its difficulties and defects, God has a mission for us which only we can fulfill for Him. For this mission those men must be the nation’s soul of hope and expectation who know that our greatest duty and service lie ahead of us and are waiting to be grasped by men whose hearts face the untried without fear.
And now shall we have this hope that nothing can slay? Do we want it? Well, it is so near to us that we do not need to reach out after it. You know where it is, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “The Lord Jesus Christ,” as Saint Paul says in the opening words of his first Epistle to Timothy, “The Lord Jesus Christ, our hope.” This hope is not something that we work up out of the fragments of moral idealsthat we find lying around in our lives or our nation. Jesus Christ is the hope for a man and a people. If we want it, why not now take Him? Genuinely, I mean, in a deep, living, religious way, take Him in His fullness of life? God and the nation want the men who are filled with His courage and hope: