U By faith Jacob, when a-dying, leaves his children a legacy of hope in God. He looks upward in faith and forward in expectancy. His religion makes him sanguine and prophetic. "Behold," he said, "I die: but God shall be with you" (Gen. xlviii. 21). The words are suggestive of infinite possibilities. The One remains while the many change and pass. When man dies, God lives on, and faith in the real presence of a living God is the spring of eternal hope. Faith is the power by which men grasp the future, the unseen, the Divine, by which they maintain their expectant look, by which they remain optimists in spite of all the evil of the world. Dying saints are enabled to bequeath messages of comfort to after ages, because they are sure that the God who has so greatly blessed themselves has greater blessings in store for their posterity. True religion bids them expect a brighter day to dawn and a happier society to come into being. Jacob, dying in Goshen, the proverbial land of plenty, sees something still better than Goshen. His conviction of the goodness of God kindles an ardent and unquenchable hope of the amelioration of the state of his people. The vision of God is always accompanied by the vision of a better and happier world.2
Tf In the career of Columbus faith and hope supported each other. So sings the American poet, Maurice Francis Egan —
1 R. Collyer, The Life that Now Is, 64. 8 J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 150.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 427
Who doubts has met defeat ere blows can fall ; Who doubts must die with no palm in his hand; Who doubts shall never be of that high band Which clearly answer — Present ! to Death's call : For Faith is life, and, though a funeral pall Veil our fair Hope, and on our promised land A mist malignant hang, if Faith but stand Among our ruins, we shall conquer all. 0 faithful soul, that knew no doubting low ; 0 Faith incarnate, lit by Hope's strong flame, And led by Faith's own cross to dare all ill And find our world ! — but more than this we owe To thy true heart ; thy pure and glorious name Is one clear trumpet call to Faith and Will.
2. Faith and Love. — Faith is energetic love. Divinely implanted love, spiritually inspired self-surrender increases every faculty of knowledge, deepens every impression made by truth, opens the eye which indifference or passion had blinded, purifies the gaze which prejudice or evil bias had corrupted and obscured, and so makes the trembling faith which can only cry, " I believe ; help thou mine unbelief," grow, burn, gleam with holy enthusiasm, until it cries, " I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded."
]f I have been writing lately on the subject of Keble's lines (Hymn for Sunday next before Advent). I have little doubt that the Church of Kome has paid far more attention than we have to that which forms the subject of this hymn — the treatment of penitence. She has more power to soothe, because she dwells chiefly on that which is the most glorious element in the nature of God — Love. Whereas Protestantism fixes attention more on that which is the strongest principle in the bosom of man — Fc^th.1
I ask not for Thy love, 0 Lord : the days
Can never come when anguish shall atone.
Enough for me were but Thy pity shown, To me as to the stricken sheep that strays, With ceaseless cry for unforgotten ways —
0 lead me back to pastures I have known,
Or find me in the wilderness alone, And slay me, as the hand of mercy slays. I ask not for Thy love ; nor e'en so much,
As for a hope on Thy dear breast to lie;
1 F. W. Robertson, in Life, and LcUcn>, 2<U.
428 THESE THREE
But be Thou still my shepherd — still with such Compassion as may melt to such a cry ;
That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch, And dimly see Thy face ere yet I die.1
K In 1836 James Field, of Cork, called for the third time on an unsaved woman to whom he had been introduced. She cried out to him, " Oh, sir, I do not love God ! " He replied, " What have you to do with loving God ? How can you love until you apprehend His love to you ? and this you cannot do until you believe. It is folly to think of loving God he/ore you obtain pardon" Tears gushed from her eyes, and she said she had never understood it before. As the two prayed, God set her soul at liberty, and then she found she could love God, because He first loved her. It was the gift of pardon that filled her heart with the love of gratitude.2
3. Hope and Love. — Who has not experienced what he and others call Christian hope, but which on close analysis is found to be little better than a faint and feeble desire after better things, and a desponding cry of the soul for what is just a grade better than blank despair ? This is not the hope that saves. Contrast it with the full evidence of things hoped for, which is imparted by living faith. Let desire be large, and expectation strong; let hope embrace all Divine promises, and it becomes a vast capacity for blessedness, and often bursts out in solitary places and on dark nights into songs of rejoicing. Then is revealed what the Apostles call "patience," born of quiet waiting, with a smile upon its face, reflecting all the lustre of the Divine manifestation. Tribulation and sorrow are but the crucible in which this precious quality and energy of soul is refined. "This hope maketh not ashamed," and can never be disappointed, because it is a veritable foretaste of its own object — it is the earnest and foretaste of the purchased possession. What leads the soul from hope to hope, from the faint uplifting of the wearied weeping eye to the " hope full of immortality " ? St. Paul gives us the answer : " Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us."