I.
Salvation in Hope.
If we were to seek to illustrate what seems to be the plain meaning of the text, we might take the case of a sailor, washed overboard and in imminent peril of drowning. He feels hia strength ebbing, and is on the point of giving up, when the flash of a boat's lantern and a hail give him fresh hope, so that, hope lending him vigour, he battles on until he is picked up by his rescuers. Of such a one we may say that he was saved by hope. Had hope not inspired him with fresh strength he would have been lost. Or, again, we may, as an illustration of this meaning of the text, remember how, within limits, patients tend to die or to recover according as they are despondent or hopeful. Such things, then, illustrate what seems to be the plain meaning of the text ; and what they suggest is in fact true.
But the meaning thus suggested for our text, though true in fact, is not its real meaning. A better though a less simple translation is, "We were saved in hope." The text does not tell us by what we were saved. It tells us of something involved in the salvation. Salvation has hope in the heart of it. It is
ROMANS VIII. 24, 25 53
not exhausted in the initial experiences. It is fraught with happy consequences, the hope of which characterizes all those who have been saved. There is an experience, salvation, and something involved in it, hope,
^ The older commentators for the most part took the dative here as the dative of the instrument, " by hope were we saved." Most moderns take it as the dative of the manner, " in hope were we saved," the main ground being that it is more in Accordance with the teaching of St. Paul to say that we were saved ly faith, or from another point of view — looking at salva- tion from the side of God — hy grace (both terms are found in Eph. ii. 8) than hy hope}
i. Hopefulness.
Hopefulness is in a very real sense the keynote of all Christian aspiration; the one ever-present distinction of the Christian religion and life from all that ever went before it (with one notable exception), and from much that has obtruded itself as " philosophy," even in these latter days.
1. We know how in pre-Christian times that vast Oriental system of Buddhism (which still counts more adherents, probably, than any other), even with many admirable moralities set forth in the way of precept, was pervaded throughout by a kind of philosophicpessimism ; a hopelessness, in fact, which Schopenhauer in these latter days has only adopted and rendered into more modern terms of expression. The world is, at the best, according to that great Oriental philosophy, an illusion ; at the worst, and as tested by human experience, a passing show of misery, dis- appointment, and vexation. It had been better for all of us not to have been born. Best now, for all of us, simply to cease to be. The only beatitude is Nirvana.
2. The pagan idolatries, into the midst of which Christianity was launched at the coming of Jesus of Nazareth, had no such definite incarnation in a single historic figure, nor perhaps any such definite philosophical outcome, as in the case of the religion of the Buddha. But in a pregnant word of St. Paul, addressed to those who had been " Gentiles in the flesh," and
' Sanday and Heacllam, Har/uins.
54 THE SAVING GRACE OF HOPE
who, under his teaching, had accepted Christ as their Lord, we find a most striking appeal to their own inward consciousness of the change that had been wrought in their spiritual state. "Wherefore remember," he says, "that ye were at that time (i.e. before their conversion) strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope, and without God in the world" (Eph. ii. 11, 12, RV.).
3. But St. Paul could even have added to the force of such an argument had he been able to extend it to this present hour, through all the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem, the abominable persecutions of the Middle Ages, and the long endurance under injustice, confiscation, and proscription (even, alas ! and mostly, by professing Christians) of which the Jewish communities scattered throughout the world have been, and are even now, the object. For the Jew, even in his worst national aberrations in the earlier days, and still more in the long years of exile and persecution, and more than ever in St. Paul's time under the dominion of Eome, had maintained, as his most prominent and unique national characteristic, an undying in- extinguishable hope as to the future of his race and country ; a hope founded on faith in the one unchanging Jehovah, who had of old chosen and set apart Israel out of all the nations, and never would desert the people of His choice. This, indeed, is the very point of the Apostle's appeal to the Gentile converts in the Epistle to the Ephesians ; they were, he says, " aliens from the commonwealth of Israel," and therefoie " having no hope, and without God in the world."
^ Hope was the very life of Israel. " Our fathers trusted in thee." "The Lord will be the hope of his people," "the confi- dence of all the ends of the earth." And, if the old fire of hope burned low in the ages of Pharisaic formalism, it blazed out again more brightly than ever when Christ our Lord brought life and immortality to light. Christ in us is the hope of glory, the one living power that could overcome the disgust and loathing of that hard old pagan world where hope was lost. And if its brightness was dimmed again in the dark times of Christian Pharisaism, it was never quite extinguished. Beyond the Dies irae rose Jerusalem the golden.^