What gives its moral value to hope, what makes it a virtue and a duty, is that in its higher forms it is a real act and striving of the will and the moral nature; and if any one thinks that this is an easy process he has yet much to learn of the secrets of his own heart. It is an act, often a difficult act, of choice and will, like the highest forms of courage. It is a refusal to be borne down and cowed and depressed by evil ; a refusal, because it is not right, to indulge in the melancholy pleasure, no unreal one, of looking on the dark side of things. It is so that hope plays so great a part in the spiritual life ; that it fights with such power on the side of God.
TI Millions of men are digging and toiling twelve hours each day; and God hath sent forth hope to emancipate them from drudgery. The man digging with his pick hath a far-away look as he toils. Hope is drawing pictures of a cottage with vines over the doorway, with some one standing at the gate, a sweet voice singing over the cradle. Hope makes this home his; it rests the labourer and saves him from despair. Multitudes working the stithy and deep mines sweeten their labour and exalt their toil by aspiring thoughts. Thinking of his little ones at home, the miner says: "My children shall not be as their father was; my drudgery is not for self, but for love's sake;
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 407
the sweat of my brow is oil in the lamp of love ; I will light it to-night on the sacred altar of home." Here is the secret of the rise and reign of the people. This explains all man's progress in knowledge and culture. As the fruits and flowers rise rank upon rank in response to the advancing summer, so all that is most refined and exalted in man's mind or heart bursts forth in new ideals, reforms, revolutions, in response to the revelation of that personal presence from whom all hope and aspiration incess- antly proceed.1
5. What is the use, it is asked, of bidding us hope without giving us first some certain or probable reality to hope about? The faculty of hope is like the faculty of reason so far as this, that both must have some foundation of facts whereon to work. Give us a permanent and reasonable object of hope and we shall be only too glad to hope ; but without such an object we must be content to be hopeless. We cannot allow ourselves to be fooled, even though the fooling may lead us along a path of happiness. Better the hopeless path of truth than the fool's paradise of comfortable delusions.
(1) The whole universe, when illuminated by the light that streams upon it from the Cross of Christ, furnishes us with a durable object of hope in the Fatherhood of the Maker of the world, who, in the course of many ages, is conforming man to the Divine image. The hope of the ultimate perfection of all things, based upon the sense of the Divine Fatherhood, is the source of all healthy activity in men. In the strength of this hope we can look all evil in the face without blenching, and beneath the abyss of sin discern the vaster abyss of the Divine love.
(2) But what shall we say to those who tell us that about the future we may reason but have no right to hope ? Our reply will be that we cannot reason about the future without taking into account the evidence that the world was made by a good and wise Being who has given us many faculties tending to happiness and righteousness, which faculties He cannot have intended to fust in us unused; and among the highest of these faculties stands hope. Furthermore we may point out that healthy natural hope, though it may work through illusions, does not
1 N. D. Ilillis, The Investment of Influence, 235.
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delude. There is no deception in the Divine Providence which leads the human soul from the cradle to the grave under the guidance of unfulfilled hopes. Hope, like faith, may be literally, but it is not spiritually, deceptive : the spirits of heaven are not like the fiends —
That palter with us in a double sense, That keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope.
Of the word of God's promises we may assert the direct opposite. That word is never " kept to our ear " and never " broken to our hope." Just as the faith or trust of the child in the father (who to him is as a God) is not a delusion but a truth enwrapped in illusion, so it is with the natural hopes of childhood and of every age ; with the aspirations of a generous youth and the ambitions of a virtuous man. These neither "fool us when young" nor " beggar us when old " ; but, on the contrary, each bright cloud of hope, breaking as the traveller is allured onward by it from one stage to another in his lifelong upward journey, reveals a brighter cloud within, to break in its turn and to disclose a still brighter interior splendour, till at last those heights are reached where all clouds shall vanish away, and the mind shall be pre- pared to receive the direct rays of the Sun of righteousness.