If we were asked what we considered to be the supremest motive in
life, the motive which does actually exercise the largest control
over human conduct, what would our answer be? A generation ago men
would have answered glibly enough: “The desire for happiness.” That
was then supposed to be the one commanding motive of mankind. But it
was not long before the answer seemed unsatisfactory and indefinite,
because what brings happiness to one man brings misery to another, or
what a man thinks will delight him in the end disappoints and such
experiences issue in confusion. It was ethically indiscriminate also.
The same motive covered moral contradictions, and men wanted some more
consistent answer to the question. Nowadays those who look despondently
at life often say in reply: “Avarice,――the desire for wealth.” Or,
those who look a little more deeply say it is not money, but the power
that money represents that men desire, and that their real motive is
to acquire sources of influence and control. Some who look at life
more hopefully are likely to reply: “Love or friendship.” That is
the thesis of one of the noblest books of our generation, written by
the late Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull, entitled “Friendship, the Master
Passion.” Doctor Trumbull told me once that when he first began the
work on this theme he spoke about it to his friend Charles Dudley
Warner, who said: “Trumbull, you cannot prove that thesis.” After the
book was done, Doctor Trumbull took the book to him and asked if he
would read it. He read it, gave it back, saying: “Well, Trumbull, you
have shown that it is true, after all.” And that is a lovely view to
take of life: that the motive that lies deeper than any other, and that
really in the actual conduct of men and women is the most controlling,
is the motive of unselfish friendship, of love.
But what would you say if instead of any one of these three or other
answers that may suggest themselves, some one were to reply: “Not a bit
of it. The motive that really controls human life, that does actually
and not theoretically play the largest part in determining the conduct
of men and women, is――_fear_.” And before we pass that contention by it
may be worth our while to look at it and ask whether, or how far, it is
true.
Take it in the matter of dress, for example. Does not fear play a large
part there,――either the fear of being unlike everybody else, or the
fear of being too much like everybody else? In every land, more even
in civilized lands than in uncivilized, the element of fear enters into
the small external characteristics of our daily living.
And in the matter of opinion. We speak of public opinion as though it
were a free and stable and trustworthy thing. But the public opinion of
one generation contradicts the public opinion of another generation.
The public opinion of one section of the land denies the public opinion
of another section, in the same way in which two sections of society
in one community think in opposite ways. Why? Not because all the
individuals of these particular generations, or sections, or portions
of the community really and independently have thought the thing out
for themselves, but because, held under the atmospheric constraint of
fear, they are unwilling to break away from what is determined for them
by the opinions in the midst of which they live. There is a good deal
of pacifist opinion and a great deal more of militarist which is not
free and personal at all, but simply herd intimidation. And a great
deal of race prejudice and international suspicion is nothing but the
miasma arising from cowardice or that bullying selfishness which is
essentially cowardly.
And a great deal of religion is of the same character. The predominant
element in many of the non-Christian religions is fear. It is so in
all of the earlier or animistic religions, where men live in constant
terror of the spirits that haunt the air or the world, and where a
large element of their worship is shaped by that dominant principle of
their religion, the dread of the unseen and the unexperienced. Even
among us is there not a great deal, both of religious orthodoxy and of
religious heresy, that is only the child of fear? There is a coercion
of sound doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, and a
great many men and women belong to their school of religious opinion
simply because they are afraid to break away from the companionship in
which they have always been or to disagree with the associations which
condition them.
Much religious conduct, too, springs only from the fear of one’s
environment. One of the saddest things which one meets in going out
across the world is the great multitude, especially of young men, who,
when they have left Christian lands and the environment and support of
Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in all their religious
conviction and character. Asia is strewn from one end of it to the
other with the wrecks of men who, while they were at home, supposedly
were men of religious character and conviction, but who showed when
they went away from home that it was not a matter of their own real
selves at all. It was just a matter of their timid servility and
acceptance of the conditions imposed upon them from without, so that
once they were away from home and free to do as they pleased and had no
longer the help and uplift of their surroundings, their environmental
religion collapsed and they went in an entirely different way.
And I think if only we would go deep enough in our own lives, and be
honest enough with ourselves to gain a clear insight into our motives
and impulses, we would discover how large a part fear has played in
us,――fear, of course, in all the wide range of its aspects, that shades
off on the one side into arrant cowardice and on the other side into
a mere hesitancy of character and timidity, but fear nevertheless.
Some of us are even now cloaking the things that lie deepest in our
hearts, because we are afraid to give expression to them. We go into
communities, into circles, into conditions where what has been natural
and real to us is unnatural and abnormal, and we hide our colours and
conceal our principles. And we do things we ought not to do or we do
not do the thing we know we ought to do simply because of fear.
I had an experience a little while ago when this diagnosis was
confirmed to me. In a visit to one of our colleges, among the boys who
came around to talk quietly was one whom I knew as one of the leading
men in the life of the institution. He played on the eleven; he was
president of his class. He was very timid about talking lest somebody
should overhear, but when assured that we had the whole house to
ourselves he took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to me.
He said: “Mr. Speer, I wish you would read this.”
I looked at it and saw that it was written in a girl’s handwriting, and
said: “No, tell me about it.”
“No,” he said, “please read it. It will tell you a great deal better
than I can.”
So I opened his letter and began to read, substantially as follows:
“DEAR ――――:
“I know all about your life at ―――― College, and I want to tell
you what I think about you. You and I have known one another
all our lives, and we have been good friends; but I think you
are a coward and I think that I ought to tell you so.”
I closed his letter and handed it back to him. His lips were quivering
and his eyes were moist as he said:
“You can believe that when I got that letter it cut me all up, and the
worst of it is that what she says is true.”
His father was a minister; his mother was of the salt of the earth.
He had grown up under the best influences of a clean and wholesome
Christian home, and he had slipped those strings. He had thought that
it was manly to surrender to the current ideals of the college; that
in cutting loose from the influence of his home he was doing a brave
and courageous thing. But the girl knew he was doing it because he was
a coward and she had the courage to tell him so. And he had come to
see it in that light for himself. In his college fraternity and in his
own class, men were praising him because he had broken from the old
enslavements of home and was living his own life like a man. But he
knew that he was nothing but a coward, who
“Held that hope was all a lie
And faith a form of bigotry
And love a snare that caught him.
Then thought to comfort human tears
With sundry ill-considered sneers
At things his mother taught him.”
And he had thought he was doing it because he was courageous, whereas
the real motive was that of fear. He was a coward, without courage
enough to fly his own flag unflinchingly, to be and do the thing which
in his heart, in the very fibres of his being, flesh of his mother’s
flesh, he knew was the thing he should be and do.
And if we would really look into our lives we should discover that
fear plays a far larger part with us than we ever dreamed. Men and
women lie. Why? Simply because they are afraid of telling the truth
and taking the consequences. Nine out of every ten falsehoods――perhaps
ninety-nine out of every hundred――are the spawn of fear. And the same
thing is true of sin, and of no small measure of unbelief, as well as
of no small measure of pretended belief.
Our great need is the discovering of something that will cast fear out
of our lives, that will enable us to walk unafraid in the open sunlight
of His pathway Who bade men to be afraid of nothing. Think how greatly
we need this emancipation from fear in the simple matter of loyalty to
principle. There is so much of expediency and compromise and adaptation
among us, so great reluctance to ruffle the smooth conventionalities
of life, whereas what the world needs is men and women who can see
right principle as principle, unconfused and undistorted, and then who,
unafraid, will abide in that right principle.
How greatly, too, this is needed in the plain, commonplace matter of
duty-doing! All around us much simple work waits to be done by men and
women who, first of all, can see it, and then have the courage to do
it. The obscure tasks that, after all, are the really great and worthy
ones, how few there are to do them! There is a fine passage in Morley’s
essay on Rousseau in which he describes what real history is, and how
much we make of history that really is not history at all, but simply
the spectacular doings of men who for the time being were deemed great
and who usually were engaged in war, whereas the great bulk of life
was not the life of warfare at all. It was the life of peace,――of the
quiet agricultural people, of the tradespeople, of the homes, which is
not written up in any history at all,――that was the real history of the
world. The men and the women who were doing earth’s work were not those
who went out to battle or on great expeditions, but those who, day by
day, heroically, unflinchingly, and without fear of oblivion, did the
real business of the world. There are some familiar lines of Lowell’s
in “Under the Old Elm” that put the principle for us:
“The longer on this earth we live
And weigh the various qualities of men,
Seeing how most are fugitive,
Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,
Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,
The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty
Of plain devotedness to duty, steadfast and still,
Not fed with mortal praise,
But finding amplest recompense
For life’s ungarlanded expense
In work done squarely and unwasted days.”
And take this matter of Christian service that lies before the thought
of every earnest young life. Why are so many of us going to be, in the
cities and homes from which we came, the same useless driftwood that
we have been? Why? Simply because of our want of courage to face the
work that needs to be done there, and to undertake that work without
fear that we cannot do it, without fear that God will desert us in
attempting to do it, without fear of the irregularity and uniqueness of
our being seen engaged in it. Throughout the world Christ waits for men
and women to-day, as He waited for them――and so often in vain――while
He was here on earth. Who will hear His call now? “Lay aside your fear
and trust Me to be with you and to enable you to do the thing. Come and
take up My task after Me.”
Some of us would dread to go out to live among the Chinese or
Mohammedan peoples, so far away. But we would not dread going out to
live in the legation, nor would we dread it much if we were to be
employed in some great commercial enterprise. Yet the geography would
be precisely the same, and our dangers and friendlessness would be
far greater. But we would not fear all that, because others would
think it natural and appropriate for us. But this other thing――the
missionary call――would be so exceptional, so unusual, so fantastic,
even fanatical, that we would fear to do any such dreadful thing! But
which life of us is worth mentioning in the same breath with the life
of God’s Son Who came into a carpenter’s home in a wretched little
Jewish village amid an outcast race, in a bare remote corner of the
earth, and lived there among peasant folk and farmers, pent up in the
charnel house of humanity, and Who was willing to count His equality
with God not a prize jealously to be retained, Who emptied Himself and
took on Him the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even
the death of the Cross? The contrast between our life, with all its
privileges, to-day and the most squalid African village is invisible
over against the contrast between what Christ laid down and what Christ
took up for the love He bore us and His world.
And we need greatly this fearlessness in our confession of Him,――that,
without concealing Whom we follow and Whose servants we are, we should
go out now, openly to avow our discipleship and the vow we have taken
of loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ! Think how many betrayals of Him
there have been, and how much of putting afresh to shame the Son of God
and crucifying Him anew by men and women who had said they were going
to follow Him faithfully, just as Simon said he was resolved to do on
that very night in which before the cock crew he denied his Lord. Shall
we not go out into the coming days with something in us that casts out
this fear?
We look with longing and admiration upon such deliverance from fear
when we find it in other lives. I was in Edinburgh during the South
African war, just after the battle of Maegersfontein, and was staying
in the house of friends. There was one little boy in the family
named after Prof. Henry Drummond. I had been in the library all
the afternoon, the very room in which Sir James Simpson discovered
chloroform, and then had gone into the drawing-room for afternoon tea.
The boy and his governess were the only other members of the household
who came down. He and I fell to talking about the war. I asked him:
“What do you think about the war in South Africa?”
“Well,” he said, “I did not think much about it at the beginning; I did
not think about it much until a friend of mine was killed.”
“Yes,” I said, “who was the friend?”
“General Wauchope.”
He was, as you know, the commander of the Black Watch, and the Black
Watch had been recruited from Edinburgh. The boy told me about the
regiment and its fate, and shortly after his story was filled up by an
Oxford man who had been in Edinburgh when the tidings of the battle
came. He said every shop was closed, and along the streets little knots
of men were gathered, and you could see the sobbing of strong men
everywhere. There was scarcely a great family in Edinburgh that had not
been touched. And yet, at the same time, all through the city there was
a subdued sense of moral elevation, as though something had lifted the
character and temper of the city. They sorrowed in what had gone out
from them; but they rejoiced in the way that it had gone. That regiment
had been organized as a Scotch kirk. The chaplain was the minister of
the kirk. The officers constituted the kirk’s session. I believe almost
every man in the regiment was a member of the kirk, and I was told
that as they went down through the streets of Cork to embark for South
Africa, although not under orders or restraint, the men walked with
arms on one another’s shoulders, singing:
“I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,
Or to defend His cause,
Maintain the honour of His Word,
The glory of His laws.”
And when they were disembarked at Cape Town and were taking their train
to go to the front, they went on board singing the old Gospel soldier’s
hymn:
“When the roll is called up yonder,
I’ll be there.”
They were sent right up and almost at once into that fateful battle.
General Wauchope knew somebody had blundered, and he said to the men:
“Men, do not blame me for this.” And without any fear they went into
the ending from which no soldier such as they would draw back, unafraid
of anything that might come to them because unashamed to own their
Lord and unfearing to follow Him.
Of such as those are we to be? Or will temptation intimidate us, and
the tone of the conversation of the men and women with whom we mingle
pull us down and cause us to fold our colours up and lay them away, as
the man did whom the sneer of a serving maid caused to deny the Lord
Who was dying for him?
Where are we to find that which will drive out this fear? “Perfect love
casteth out fear.... He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”
From how many of our hearts to-day will the perfect love of Him Whom
we call Master and Lord expel all fear? Let it be so now. Not years
afterwards, when other things shall have palled upon us, years that
shall have brought their dulling influence with them, but now, in all
the full strength and richness and glory and eagerness of our lives,
let us admit the perfect love that shall cast out fear and send us out
the kind of men and women Christ would have us be, to join the great
company of men and women and girls and boys who, unfearing,
“... climbed the steep ascent of Heaven,
Through peril, toil and pain.
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train!”
Christian character needs this conquest of fear and it needs the love
which is one of the deep springs of such conquest. It needs also in
our day an immensely more practical use of the principle of hope, a
principle almost totally neglected in theology and made nothing of in
our codes of conduct or in our creeds. Paul had a far deeper insight
into the human heart and a vastly richer grasp on life. “Now abideth
faith, hope, love, these three,” said he.
Paul rendered a large service when he condensed the central ideals and
principles of Christianity in this way. The human mind is very fond
of formulas. If it had not been for some authoritative, simplifying
word like this, we might have gone on to construct all sorts of
prescriptions like the threes and sixes and tens and fifteens with
which we are so familiar in Buddhism. And yet the service which Paul
rendered is not without its dangers, for men are prone to simplify
further and to see whether the three cannot be reduced to one, or to
arrange the order and proportions of the three, or to contend alone
for that which some one of them signifies at the expense of the other
two. Paul’s own words should have saved us from such folly, for he
said quite clearly that one of these three was the greatest, “And now
abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is
love.” And yet his own doctrine elsewhere has been used to correct and
to counteract his expressed judgment here, and through the years we
have had our theologies constructed in disregard of the domination of
that one of these three principles which Saint Paul exalts. It has been
in terms of faith, and faith given a very definitive construction, that
our theological thinking with regard to Christianity has been chiefly
done. Little by little however the proportions have changed, and now
love, as one of the three great fundamental principles of Christianity,
is coming to its own, not as a principle of action only but as a
regulative principle also of our thought.
But it is a strange thing that no one has ever arisen, apparently,
to say of hope what the intellect of the Church, over against Paul’s
judgment, has been prepared to say of faith. He declared that of these
three, love is the greatest. The current opinion of Christian thought
through the Christian centuries has contended that faith was the
greatest. What would men say if some one should arise now to restore
the proportions, who would make bold to declare, “Now abideth faith,
hope, and love; and the greatest of these is hope”? Surely the day will
come some time when hope will come to its own, when the Christian heart
and mind will no longer be content to construe its interpretation of
Christianity in terms either of love or of faith, or of love and faith
together, but will insist that these three abide――faith and love and
hope.
And when a man stops for a moment to think, to disengage himself
from the unscrutinized conventions, he begins to realize immediately
that he has no faith and love unless he makes larger room for hope
in his thinking and feeling than has been allowed to us. For there
cannot be any faith detached from hope. You can conceive of faith in
three different ways. You may think of it in its primary form, in its
primary form in the New Testament at least, as personal trust, as the
confidence that exists between two personal spirits. But even so, can
you think of it without hope? If I have no hope of seeing Him in Whom
I trust, of consulting with Him, or serving Him, of entering into a
deeper and enlarged fellowship with Him, will not my personal trust
soon empty itself of reality? Or, secondly, you may think of faith as
the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews does, as the “substance of
things hoped for”; in which without any flinching, he binds faith up
with hope in terms that cannot be severed. And, thirdly, if you go on
to the rest of his definition, “the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen,” still faith is undetachable from hope;
for, as Paul says in another passage, “We are saved by hope: but hope
that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope
for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait
for it.” And you cannot detach love from hope or have anything that
is real in the experience of love unless it inevitably leads a man on
into those things that clearly were in Paul’s mind when he spoke not
of faith and love only but also of hope. I ask any man’s heart if it
is possible to divorce hope from love. I suppose in one sense it may
be, and that you can speak of a hopeless love. Henry Martyn’s heroic
and tragic life was the unfolding of a hopeless love. But how different
that is from love that is undershot with hope. One looks towards
evening to see the children waiting as he comes home. The workman lives
in the hope of all that is there of joy and confidence and perfect
trust inside his home. Love would be a sorry thing to-day if it were
stripped of the hopes that give it its sweetness and its joy.
And it is not only faith and love that root themselves inseparably in
hope, and that lose their fragrance and meaning if they do not continue
to draw both out of hope, but regarding almost everything else that
is dearest and most precious to us in life, does it not spring from
this same great treasury? In one of the chapters of the Epistle to
the Romans we find Paul again and again, in his efforts to bring his
message out to those to whom he writes, describing God in different
terms of speech. He begins by speaking of Him as the God of comfort,
the God of patience, and then he goes on to speak of Him as the God
of hope. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, that ye may abound in hope.” And then he closes by speaking
of the God of peace who is to order all hearts. Quite evidently in
his thought these things all run together, as again he writes: “Be ye
sober. Walk as children of light. Put on the breastplate of faith and
love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation.” Joy and gladness and
confidence and trust and hope,――all are rooted each in the other in his
own mind and experience. The best that we have got in life springs from
the fountains of hope.
We do not wonder, accordingly, that the old religious experience and
the richer Christian experience, when it came, conceived and spoke of
God as the God of love and the God of hope. They never spoke of Him as
the God of faith. The old Hebrew idea of Him was as the ground-rock of
their hope. “O hope of Israel,” was their cry. The lovely thing is that
that burst from the lips of the man who mourned for his nation: “O the
hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble.” “Hope thou in
God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance,
and my God.” God Himself when He comes to let Himself be richly known
to men makes on them the impression of a great and joyous and glad and
eager and boundless hope.
And when we turn away from such clews as these and look right into
the face of life to ask what the powers and services and functionings
of hope in the actual life of man and in the life of the world are,
we realize that all this exultant hope has its deep grounding in
the actual living needs of men. It is by hope――the New Testament is
unequivocal about it, and our own experience answers to that word――it
is by hope that we are saved. Not in one passage in the New Testament
can you find the declaration that we are saved by faith. We are saved
“by grace through faith,” but Paul is flat-footed in his declaration
that we are saved by hope. And the moment a man looks life square
in the face he sees why it should be so. Were it not for hope there
could not be any saving that were worth a man’s while. There might
be a clearing up of the past; we might secure something like a clean
conscience; but there could not be any confidence, any ease, any rest,
as over against the tragic problem of life, if a man could not look
out into the future――which is really the thing he now has to deal
with――with boundless hope. Salvation is just that thing. It is not
cleaning up our lives from the point of view of the past, just for the
sake of cleaning up our lives; but it is the hope that for the sake of
our future God is going to live in us a saving life.
All this is true whether we think of salvation as it comes penetrating
our lives and dealing with such problems as in shame and self-distrust
we think of in our hours of recollection and penitence, or whether we
think of it as something reaching out into the expanding experience
of the future. Either way, salvation is a matter of hope. There is a
lovely touch in one of Paul’s epistles where he says: “Having therefore
these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all
filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear
of God.” What do you think of that motive? He does not say, “Seeing
that our sin is so black and abhorrent as it is, seeing that the past
is so shameful and unworthy as it is, let us cleanse ourselves.” “My
brothers,” he said, “seeing we have such promises”――that is, “that the
hope is so bright, that there is no ground for despair, that we can
believe victory can actually be achieved by us, seeing that we have
these hopes, let us cleanse ourselves in growing holiness.”
And then when those first Christian men came to look not only at
this present purging of life which should leave it rich and fragrant
and glorious but out upon the wide ranges of the untried and the
unforeseeable, they still construed salvation in terms of hope. “Now
are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be:
but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we
shall see him as he is. And he that hath this hope in him purifieth
himself, even as he is pure.” It is so because there is in front of us
the dear voice calling, the voice that says to every one of us: “Man,
let that old past go now. It is done and gone beyond recall. Come out
with Me. There is a new road for your feet and Mine, a new tale that is
to be unfolded now, a new story, the contradiction of the old. Let the
past go now, and come and walk with Me in the limitless hope of the new
ways.”
And it is not only by hope, as a simple downright matter of fact, that
men are saved and held fast to the Saviour; it is by hope also that
men are nerved and empowered. In the hour of darkness, it is what
lights all the darkness and makes it possible for men to bear. “Yes,”
we say to ourselves in the hour of pain, “I know; but I can stand it,
for after this comes something that is different from this.” That is
what the honest doctor says to us when he deals with us. “Now hold
steady for a moment. I am going to cut and it will hurt dreadfully.
But just wait. Beyond the pain lies freedom from pain.” And we say,
“Yes, doctor, cut. I can stand it.” In a moment the anguish is over. We
endure in that hope. Has it not always been so? For a little while the
mother bears her anguish and her pain for the joy and hope that a child
is born into the world. For a little while Jesus bore the loneliness
and the anguish of His grief and the shadow and the pain and the
disgrace of His Cross, because, looking over it, He saw the glory that
awaited Him and the world, and He endured all this, this anguish of
the Cross, for the joy that was set beyond. “Therefore,” says Paul,
“we rejoice in tribulation, in being flailed, in being pressed down as
grapes in the wine-press, in being put through discipline and strain,
we rejoice in all that, because we know that tribulation worketh
steadfastness, steadfastness experience, and experience hope, and hope
maketh not ashamed.”
And you know the paradox, and the glory of it, is that the darker
you make the shadows the more triumphantly hope laughs in the midst
of them. The more difficult you make the night, the more hopeful and
enticing is the sure confidence of the dawn that is not far away. Our
word, “Cheer up! The worst is yet to come,” is as deep a Christian
word as was ever yet spoken. Be glad, because darker things lie just
ahead and then light beyond. Thank God that you are counted worthy for
tribulations like these; for these are what wash white a man’s robes
and make him fit to walk after the Lamb whithersoever He goes, in
company with the men whose lips have never known a lie.
All this is put finely for us in “The Ballad of the White Horse,” the
best piece of work Chesterton has done. They were as dark days as ever
had been in English history. Tide after tide of invasion from Norse and
Dane had come pouring in. Again and again Alfred had called his men
and gone out and fought, and each time in vain. Now, as he sits on his
little island in the Thames among the reeds, the news comes to him that
the Danes are on their way for a fresh invasion of his land. He kneels
in prayer and asks the Virgin Mother whether he ought to go out yet
once more. Again and again, he tells her, he has gone out in hope, and
each time in the confidence that victory would be his, and each time he
has come back defeated, his men killed, and his people to sink lower
after each despair than the time before. And yet, as he prays to her he
says that if she will give him one word of assurance, he will go again.
But only this, as she stands by his side, will she say,
“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.”
And there that day among the reeds under the promise only that the
night was going to be blacker than he had ever known, that storms
fiercer than he had ever breasted were coming, Alfred rises up to do
what he had never done under the old assurance of easy victory,
“Up over windy wastes and up
Went Alfred over the shaws,
Shaken of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause.”
And as his men saw him coming, they thought it was with the old vain
word of a sure victory, and they were about to tell him in advance that
if he came with such a message they would follow him no more. But not
now was Alfred’s word the easy word. No, but――
“This is the word of Mary,
The word of the world’s desire;
‘No more of comfort shall you get
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.’”
And in front of that darkening sky and that rising sea his men rose up
to go with him, and this time, from the darkest night they had ever
known, came the bright morning of their lasting victory. Thank God, we
are not called out on any soft errand under the incitement of bright
choices, but challenged by great difficulties, black nights and rising
storms, to work in the hope of that which is invisible and which lies
beyond. It is by hope, and hope that lies behind impenetrable clouds,
that men are nerved and empowered. It is because the world is so black
and dark to-day that we walk out into it smiling in its face, knowing
that behind all this the morning the more surely waits, the morning in
which the men believe who have faith and love and hope.
And it is by hope that our comforts are drawn down into our lives when
the darkest of all days come, and everything is quiet about the house
and the little feet that had run to and fro are still. We say, “Yes, a
little while and then those angel faces will smile, that I have loved
and lost and love.” What would we do in those hours if it were not for
the sure hope? Saint Paul lays his own heart open to all his friends
in one of his epistles: “But I would not have you to be ignorant,
brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even
as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and
rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with
him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which
are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them
which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a
shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and
the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain
shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord
in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort
one another with these words.”
And as for us who are in the full flush and possession of all that
we have, it is by hope that we draw our comfort for our struggle. As
against the background of our defeats and failures, we say to our own
hearts: “Well, wait, just wait; my time will come. No matter how much
of this there has been, some day my hope will be fulfilled. It is sure
that something else than this there will yet be.” William Henry Green
became the outstanding Hebrew scholar in America. He was plucked when
he entered college in Latin and Greek. At Lafayette College for months
and months he found himself beaten on the very battle-field where
he stood at last the first man in the land. At Lexington, Virginia,
several years ago, I went to the grave of General Lee in the chancel
of the chapel of his college and then I went out to the grave of
Stonewall Jackson on that little hill. One of his townsmen was telling
me the story of Jackson and how by hope he wrested triumph out of his
uttermost failure. He had been teaching in the military academy, and
had just been about to give up his work because he had no gift of
discipline. He could not maintain order in his own classroom, my friend
said, and was about to surrender his career as a teacher, because he
thought he was incapable there. Then the war broke out, and within
twelve months Stonewall Jackson was the most famous disciplinarian on
earth. On the very field where the man’s failure had been most clear,
there he achieved his richest and greatest victory, by hope. And so we
comfort our hearts here to-day. “Yes,” we say to memories of which we
are reminded in our searching hours, “the evil and unworthy imaginings
and desires cling to us still, but it will not be forever. Some day, no
matter how often I have failed, if I live in hope, it will come to me,
the clean thing that the Lord said should be mine.”
And last of all, there is nothing adequate for us in the way of
actually moulding men and doing that with life which we were set here
to do unless we can go to the work in the spirit in which our Lord and
Saint Paul entered it. If I have no hope for another man, I cannot
awaken any hope in him for himself. Unless I believe in him, how can he
believe? The glory of Christ was that, though He knew just what was in
man, and saw all the weaknesses and the slavery and the impurity and
the unwholesomeness, though He saw all this in man, He shut His eyes to
it deliberately and believed in the better capacities and possibilities
that were there and that He by His grace and His power could plant and
nurture and bring out until all that old baseness that had been the man
was not the man any more, and all this new purity that had not been the
man was the man, and Simon was turned at last out of his putty into
rock and stone.
I do not know whether the apostles were conscious or not of what was
happening to them. Maybe they did not appreciate their Master, but
one likes to think that they must have done so, and that often they
would go off by themselves and one would say: “Andrew, is He not just
great? Did you ever meet any one like that before? Did you see what He
did this morning? He just shut His eyes completely to that meanness
that He saw in me, and that I saw the moment I let it out, too, and
He pretended that He never saw it at all, and He believed in me when
He knew and I knew there was nothing there to believe in. Is He not
wonderful? He will make a man of me yet.” And to this day He is still
doing just what He was doing then. In this place now He is doing just
that thing. He is shutting His eyes to what we do not want Him to see
and opening them to what only He can see in us. And His law must be our
law.
I can put it in a little story that a friend of some of us, George
Truett, told to a little group some years ago in a western city. “I am
fond,” he said, “of recalling the first soul it was ever given me to
win to Jesus. I was a lad barely grown and a teacher in the mountains
of Carolina. One morning, as we were ready for prayers in the chapel,
there hobbled down the aisle to the front seat a boy of about sixteen
years old. He was an eager, lonely-looking lad. I read the Scriptures
and prayed and then sent the teachers to their classes. But my little
cripple lad stayed. I supposed that he was a beggar. And I said to
myself, ‘Surely this boy deserves alms. His condition betokens his
need.’ So I went to him at recess and said, ‘My lad, what do you want?’
He looked me eagerly in the face and said: ‘Mr. Truett, I want to go to
school. Oh, sir, I want to be somebody in the world. I will always be
a cripple. The doctors have told me that, but,’ he said, ‘I want to be
somebody.’
“He had won me. He told me of their poverty, and that was taken care
of. I watched that lad for weeks and weeks. How bright his mind was!
How eager he was to know! One day I called him into my office and said
to him: ‘My boy, I want you to tell me something more about yourself.’
He told me how, a few months before, his father had been killed in the
great cotton mill where he worked, and the few dollars he had saved up
were soon gone. They tried to do their best in the county where they
were, but found it difficult; so his mother said one day: ‘Let us move
to the next county, where they do not know us. Perhaps we can do better
where we are not known.’ So they moved and now he had come into my
school. He said, ‘I want to help mother, and I want to be somebody in
the world; so I made my appeal to you to come to your school.’ It was
time in a moment for the bell to ring for books. I laid my hand on the
head of the little fellow and said to him: ‘Jim, I am for you, my boy.
I believe in you thoroughly, and I want you to know that I love you, my
boy.’ And when I said that last word, the little pinched face looked
up into my face almost in a lightning flash, and he said: ‘Mr. Truett,
did you say you loved me? Did you say that?’ I said, ‘I said that,
Jim.’ And then with a great sob he said: ‘I did not know anybody loved
me but mother and the two little girls. Mr. Truett, if you love me, I
am going to be a man yet, by the help of God.’ And when a few Friday
nights afterwards I was leading the boys in their chapel meeting, as
was the custom, I heard the boy’s crutches over in the corner. There
Jim sat, in a chair away from the other boys to protect his leg. And
a little later he got up, sobbing and laughing at the same time, and
said, ‘Mr. Truett, I have found the Saviour, and that time you told
me you loved me started me towards Him.’” And then our friend added,
“Brothers, working men in the shops and everywhere are dying for love.
Your grammar may be broken, your plans may be imperfect, your machinery
may be crude, your organization may be rough; but if you love men and
pour your hearts out to them honestly and directly, there will be a
response that will fill your hearts with joy and heaven with praises.”
And the need and functions of hope should be viewed in no narrow
personal way. We want to-day men who have a large and courageous
faith in God for the nation and the world. Of recent years a mood of
pessimism has spread through America. In one sense it represents a
wholesome reaction from the spirit of braggadocio and spreadeagleism of
an earlier day. So far it is wholesome. We need to be sobered and made
modest and quiet in our national spirit. But it is a bad thing when a
nation loses the zest of a great consciousness and a brave patriotism,
and thinks meanly of what God can do with it. Our nation needs now
not a timid and fearful sense of its impotence and incapacity, but a
realization that, whatever its difficulties and defects, God has a
mission for us which only we can fulfill for Him. For this mission
those men must be the nation’s soul of hope and expectation who know
that our greatest duty and service lie ahead of us and are waiting to
be grasped by men whose hearts face the untried without fear.
And now shall we have this hope that nothing can slay? Do we want it?
Well, it is so near to us that we do not need to reach out after it.
You know where it is, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “The Lord
Jesus Christ,” as Saint Paul says in the opening words of his first
Epistle to Timothy, “The Lord Jesus Christ, our hope.” This hope is not
something that we work up out of the fragments of moral ideals that we
find lying around in our lives or our nation. Jesus Christ is the hope
for a man and a people. If we want it, why not now take Him? Genuinely,
I mean, in a deep, living, religious way, take Him in His fullness of
life? God and the nation want the men who are filled with His courage
and hope:
“God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world,
Now each man to his post.
The red cross banner is unfurl’d,
Who joins the glorious host? Who joins the glorious host?
He who in fealty to the truth
And counting all the cost
Doth consecrate his gen’rous youth,
He joins the noble host! He joins the noble host!
“He who, no anger on his tongue
Nor any idle boast,
Bears steadfast witness ’gainst the wrong,
He joins the sacred host! He joins the sacred host!
He who with calm, undaunted will
Ne’er counts the battle lost
But though defeated battles still,
He joins the faithful host! He joins the faithful host!
“He who is ready for the cross,
The cause despised loves most,
And shows not pain or shame or loss,
He joins the martyr host! He joins the martyr host!
God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world.
Now each man to his post.
The red cross banner is unfurled.
We join the glorious host! We join the glorious host!”