1 H. M. Gwatkin.
ROMANS VIII. 24, 25 55
ii. The Christian Hope.
1. The Christian hope is not identical with hopefulness. We shall not understand how we are " saved in hope " unless we have a clear idea of the hope of which St. Paul speaks in the text. In so far as it is an act of the mind merely, it does not differ from the hope with which we are all familiar in daily life. Everybody remembers Lord Byron's words to Hope : —
Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life ! The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray !
Without hope endeavour would languish. No room would be left for design, or for rational enterprise of any kind. Life would become mere lazy, unconcerned trifling. Everybody feels this, and admits the power which that act of the mind, called by us hope, exercises in and upon our lives. But, though the hope of the text, in so far as it is a mere act of the mind, does not differ from natural hope, in other respects it does differ from it very widely.
•fl As faith is the special counter-agent of materialism, so the counter-agent of pessimism is hope. Like faith, this has a natural basis, which is commonest and strongest in the young. But this natural hopefulness, which varies with temperament, can be confirmed into Christian hope only " by the power of the Holy Ghost." For the mere natural hopefulness of a sanguine dis- position fades when the troubles of life thicken with advancing years, as " the clouds return after the rain." But " tribulation," says St. Paul, " worketh patience ; and patience, probation ; and probation, hope." ^
2. The importance of the Christian hope may be experienced — (1) In our daily life. — There is the conflict with sin, in which
we often seem to gain no ground, the same temptations recurring year after year with wearisome identity, or disappearing, when resisted, only to reappear in a new form, while our efforts after virtue seem daily to be renewed only that in like manner they may be daily disappointed. And in this long struggle with dis- couragement, hope is the sole secret of our success, for it is the one thing that enables us to rise after every fall, to take new
^ J. E. lUiiigworth, Christian Character, 73.
56 THE SAVING GRACE OF HOPE
heart after every failure, resolute to die fighting, rather than accept defeat.
Say not, the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making.
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
^ But though Watts calls his tremendous reality Hope, we may call it many other things. Call it faith, call it vitality, call it the will to live, call it the religion of to-morrow morning, call it the immortality of man, call it self-love and vanity; it is the thing that explains why man survives all things and why there is no such thing as a pessimist. If there be anywhere a man who has really lost it, his face out of a whole crowd of men will strike us like a blow. He may hang himself or become Prime Minister ; it matters nothing. The man is dead.^
(2) In old age. — The decrease of capacity, the increase of infirmity, the prospect of the end, oppress the ageing man with gloom, and tempt him cynically to sadden others with the shadow of his own distress. But if we contrast Matthew Arnold's melancholy picture of old age with the stirring trumpet-tones of Browning's " Eabbi ben Ezra," we see, in sharp contrast, how Christian hope has changed all this :
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned. Youth shows but half ; trust God : see all, nor be afraid ! "
(3) In the last hours. — This is the climax of our Christian hope : " The righteous hath hope in his death." " Death," said Aristotle, " is of all things the most terrible, for it is an end." And it is precisely because to the Christian it is not an end that his conduct is so different from that of the Greek — a contrast well drawn out by Browning in his " Old Pictures at Florence." For
1 Chesterton, WaUs, 103.
ROMANS vni. 24, 25 57
the Greek and all who think with him must seek tlieir full development in this world ; whereas, in the Christian view " man has for ever," he can afford to wait, and his whole life is conditioned by this fact. Hence his hope culminates in death, as being but the entrance to the life immortal ; he dies looking forward and not backward, and therefore progressive to the very end; for hope is the mainspring of progress, and "the righteous hath hope in his death."
^ Over the grave of the first Bishop of Manchester is inscribed the one Greek word which in our English Bible is translated " The trumpet shall sound " — a word which carries our minds forward to the coming again of our Lord Jesus Christ, and utters forth the note of expectancy in the place where all hopes might seem to have died. Contrast with this Christian inscription what has been found written over the grave of a priest of the religion of pagan Eome in its decay. " He gave to his devotees," — such is the praise ascribed by the priest to the god he worshipped — " he gave to his devotees kisses and pleasures and fun." ^