1 A. Rowland.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 411
What shall save us now, in the second critical period of life, but the grace of Christian hope, which is not temperament, is not human quality at all, but a blessed boon from God? By that gladdening spirit alone shall despair be quelled, demons exorcized, the old energy of youth recovered, the battle renewed.1
Tf Nowhere, perhaps, is Hope in relation to one's own future more beautifully illustrated than in the noontide scene in Pippa Passes. Phene, a Greek girl, has become the wife of Jules, a French sculptor. The union is the result of a cruel joke practised upon him by some students who owed him a grudge; and the sculptor finds, when it is too late, that the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her remorse at seeing what man she had deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her. And this is what she says —
You creature with the eyes! If I could look for ever up to them, As now you let me, — I believe, all sin, All memory of wrong done, suffering borne, Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth Whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay — Never to overtake the rest of me. All that, unspotted, reaches up to you, Drawn by those eyes! What rises is myself, Not me the shame and suffering; but they sink, Are left, I rise above them. Keep me so, Above the world!
Both he and she are saved.2
(2) It is for ourselves in the hereafter. — For it is simply the most literal fact that God has set before us, in another state of being, the most wonderful future, which is within the certain reach of every single one of us : as much, as certainly, within our reach, as anything that we know of, which we could obtain to- morrow. This is the plain, clear, certain promise, without which Christianity is a dream and a delusion. The life and destiny of each individual man runs up to this ; this is what he was made for; for this he has been taught, and has received God's grace, and has been tried, and has played his part in the years of time.
1 W. Hudson Shaw. a J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 119.
4i2 THESE THREE
It is the barest of commonplaces ; and yet to any one who has tried to open his mind to its reality and certainty, it must have come with a strange and overpowering force — new on every fresh occasion, like nothing else in the world. For it is one thing to look forward to some great general event, the triumph of the saints of God, the final glory of the great company of the redeemed; one thing to look at all this from the outside, as a spectator by the power of imagination and thought. It is quite another, when it comes into your mind that you yourself in the far-off ages, you yourself, the very person now on earth, are intended to have your place — your certain and definite place — in all that triumph, in all that blessedness, in all that glory ; and yet surely, to any one that will, this is the prospect ; this, and nothing less.
Just come from heaven, how bright and fair The soft locks of the baby's hair, As if the unshut gates still shed The shining halo round his head!
Just entering heaven, what sacred snows Upon the old man's brow repose! For there the opening gates have strown The glory from the great white throne.1
(3) It is for others. — That ye may abound in hope, says St. Paul, — hope for ourselves, hope for our neighbour, hope for the world. Be the sin of our heart what it may, and seventy times seven the falls of the past, in Christ we know that sin shall have no more dominion over us. Be the sin of our neighbour what it may, love hopeth all things, and without love we are nothing. Be the sin of the world what it may, we know who came to take it away. His arm is not shortened, that it cannot save ; neither is His ear heavy, that it cannot hear the great and bitter cry that cometh up from earth to heaven. We may give up hope when the Saviour of the world confesses Himself defeated, and all-ruling Love retires for ever baffled from the battlefield of human wickedness : but until then Christ calls us tu set our hope on Him, and to bear witness of it to the world.
1 Harriet Prescott Spofford.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 413
If In the England of John Wesley, numbers of men were his peers in faith. Butler, Toplady, Romaine, John Newton, had as firm a grip on what faith can reach as he, and said words as noble for it. But Wesley had more hopefulness in his little ringer than any other man of them had in his whole body. And so it was, that, wherever Wesley went, men caught the contagion of his great hope, and then ran tirelessly as long as they lived, kindling over all the world. Macaulay does well to say that no man can write a history of England in the last century, who shall fail to take into account Wesley's vast influence in the common English life.1