1 Una, In Life's Garden, 93. I COR. — 26
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security and self-deceit ; it tempts us to dreams which cannot be realized, which divert us from the necessary and wholesome realities which do concern us : it is the mother of half the mis- takes, half the fruitless wanderings, half the unhappiness of the world. How comes it that such a quality is placed on a level with faith and love ? What need of encouragement to what men are only too ready to do of themselves ?
If 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 Thucy- dides, " 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.
T[ 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
1 W. Hudson Shaw.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 403
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.
Tf 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,
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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 denned 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