A wand'rer I, oh ! living Lord ;
I come, I cling to Thee ; My Brother loved, my God adored.
Life, Eest and Home for me.
III.
The Nature of our Hope.
1. It is called " a living hope." In what sense is it living ?
(1) It is the hope of a living man. — A dead man cannot think, cannot wish, cannot hope, neither can a man spiritually dead possess the Christian's living hope. The carnal man minds earthly things, is more or less absorbed in them; and to be
' R. W. Cliurch, Cathedral and University Sermons, 135.
42 A LIVING HOPE
carnally minded is death. In the mind of such a man this hope cannot bud and blossom, cannot, indeed, exist unless it be in a delusive form. They are opposites and cannot be brought into conjunction or companionship without a radical change in the man's nature. The Apostle, reminding the Ephesians of their carnal state, says, " At that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope." There must be a change, therefore, from the carnal to the spiritual state before this hope can be planted in the soul, before a man can truly say, "The Christian's hope is my possession. I have it ! It is mine ! "
^ There is in Scotland an old castle, where far below the ground level was discovered, some time ago, a dark and noisome dungeon. No sunbeam could find its way into its pestilential depths. The very air was laden with damp and disease, and when the workmen, letting in the light, made their way into the dungeon, they found on the wall, scratched by some miserable wretch who had met his doom there, the pitiful words, " No hope. No hope." ^
^ It has been well said : " Death and death alone is what we must consult about life ; and not some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is our own end ; and every- thing happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number : do not talk to me — to me who am to die outright — of societies and peoples ! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion ! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts ; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death ! "
That is where we stand. For us death is the one event that counts in our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it battens but on our fears.^
(2) It centres in a living Christ, — We are begotten to it — how ? " By the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Our hope is rooted in the resurrection — that is, centred in Christ, not only because He once died for the sinner's guilt, but because He is now
1 Quintin Hogg, 396. ^ M. Maeterlinck, Death, 1.
I PETER I. 3 43
alive for evermore, our Advocate with the Father, our great High Priest as well as our SacriJSice. If the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are not theologically one, practically they are. They are interlocked. They are conjoined. You cannot divorce them without destroying their redemptive worth. Without the resur- rection the efficacious death would be of no avail redemptively. Hence the Apostles speak of Jesus Christ as "delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification"; "who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by him do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead . . . that your faith and hope might be in God." " Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect ? " There is a bold, defiant challenge for you ! How dare even an Apostle give utterance to it ? Here is his reason, " It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again ! "
^ It has often been a subject of wonder in modern thought that Christianity should rest the hopes of the human race so greatly on the concrete instance of Christ's resurrection rather than on the general inference of the heart and of the reason. But still, as a matter of history, this concrete, particular resurrection has brought about a belief which the inference of universal reason failed to produce. Mankind has manifested a profound capacity for being influenced by concrete instances rather than by abstract speculations. It seems difficult to deny that our Lord's own argument for the continued existence of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of the dead in general, on the ground of the im- mortality of Him with whom they were spiritually united, has been less understood down the centuries, and far less influential in deepening the hopes of the human race, than the particular fact that He Himself rose again the third day from the dead. It is of small value to indicate by what means we should prefer the deepest convictions of humanity to have been developed. The fact remains that faith in immortality has been created and intensified by the concrete resurrection of Christ as it has been by nothing else in the world. Of course, not by that resurrection apart from the personality in that resurrection, and from all that the Divine Personality involved. It has been the fact together with its significance. Still it has been the fact rather than abstract considerations. Eeason and heart, apart from Christ's resurrection, have faltered and often failed. Where they have proved inconclusive or ineffective the triumphant morning in Joseph's garden has determined the conviction and hopes of