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 fascina- tion 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 recog- nizing 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 hopeless- ness ? " 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
1 W. Hudson Shaw.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 405
of a mere spasmodic outburst, if he had no durable hope of any- thing in heaven or earth ?
If 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 beauti- ful 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
If To the quenchless hope in their souls all the strong heroes of the past, from Leonidas to King Alfred, from Alfred to Hilde- brand, from Hildebrand to Cromwell and Lord Chatham and Washington and Mazzini, have owed their power. Without it, Keligion, 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
1 J. H. Skrine, The Heart's Counsel, 118.
4o6 THESE THREE
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 discourage- ment and listlessness and despair.