But we trusted that it had been he which should have
redeemed Israel. LUKE xxiv. 21.
In the accounts of the disciples, contained in the New Testament, there
is no attempt to glorify them, or to conceal any weakness. From the
first to the last, they think and act precisely as men would think and
act in their circumstances;--they are affected just as others of like
culture would be affected by such events as those set forth in the
record. And the genuineness of their conduct argues the genuineness of
the incidents which excited it. The divine, wonderworking, risen Jesus,
is the necessary counterpart of the amazed, believing, erring hoping,
desponding, rejoicing fishermen and publicans. This stamp of reality is
very evident in the instance before us. The conduct and the feelings of
the disciples are those of men who have been involved in a succession of
strange experiences. For a little while they have been in communion with
One who has spoken as never man spoke, and who has touched the deepest
springs of their being. He has lifted them out of the narrow limits
of their previous lives. From the Receipt of Customs, and the Galilean
lake, he has summoned them to the interests and awards, the thought and
the work, of a spiritual and divine kingdom. At first following him,
perhaps they hardly knew why, conscious only that he had the Words of
Eternal Life, the terms of this discipleship have grown into bonds of
the dearest intimacy. Their Master has become their Companion and their
Friend, and their faith has deepened into tender and confiding love. But
still, theirs has been the belief of the trusting soul, rather than the
enlightened intellect. From the fitness of the teaching, and the wonder
of the miracle, they have felt that he was the very Christ; and yet,
from this conviction of the heart they have not been able to separate
their Jewish conceits. Sometimes, it may be, the language of the Saviour
has carried them up into a broader and more spiritual region; but
then, they have subsided into their symbols and shadows;--only,
notwithstanding the errors that have hindered, and the hints that have
awed them, they have steadily felt the inspiration of a great hope, the
expectation of something glorious to be revealed in the speedy coming
of the Messiah's kingdom. And now, does not the account immediately
connected with the text picture for us exactly the state of men whose
conceptions have been broken up by a great shock, and yet in whose
hearts the central hope still remains and vibrates with mysterious
tenacity?--men who have had the form of their expectation utterly
refuted and scattered into darkness, but who still cherish its spirit?
Christ the crowned King,--Christ the armed Deliverer,--Christ the
Avenger, sweeping away his foes with one burst of miracle,--is to
them, no more. They saw the multitude seize him, and no legions came to
rescue;--they saw him condemned, abused, crucified, buried; and so,
in no sense of which they could conceive, was this he who should
have redeemed Israel. And yet the suggestion of something still to
come,--something connected with three days,--lingered in their minds.
And, in the midst of their despondency, striking upon this very chord,
the startling rumor reached them that Christ had risen from the dead. It
was in this mood that Jesus found the two disciples whose words I
have selected for my text;--faith and doubt, disappointment and hope,
alternating in their minds; their Jewish conceit laid prostrate in the
dust, and yet the expectation of something, they knew not what, now
strangely confirmed. See how these feelings mingle in the passage before
us. "What manner of communications," said the undiscerned Saviour, "are
these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?"-"Art thou
only a stranger in Jerusalem," says one of them, "and hast not known
the things which are come to pass there in these days?" What things?
"Concerning Jesus of Nazareth," replied they, "which was a prophet
mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: and how the chief
priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have
crucified him. But we trusted that it had been he which should have
redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to-day is the third day since
these things were done. Yea, and certain women also of our company made
us astonished, which were early at the sepulchre; and when they found
not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of
angels, which said that he was alive. And certain of them which were
with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had
said: but him they saw not."
My hearers, I think we see, in this instance the minds of these
disciples working as the minds of men might be expected to work under
like conditions. And to me this casts a complexion of genuineness upon
the transactions which, as stated in the record, account for these
mental alternations. The entire passage is alive with reality. The
genuine emotions of humanity play and thrill together, there, in the
shadow of the cross and the glory of the resurrection.
But, if these feelings are thus natural, the experience itself indicated
in that portion of this verse which constitutes the text is not entirely
removed from our ordinary life. The incident which occasioned these sad
words was an extraordinary one; but its moral significance, as it now
comes before us, illustrates many a passage in man's daily course.
The language, as we read it, appears to be the language of
disappointment;---it was under the shadow of disappointment, though
alternating with hope, that these disciples spoke; and it is to the
lessons afforded by disappointment in the course of life that I now
especially invite your attention.
And the precise point in the text, bearing upon this subject, is the
fact, that while the disciples seemed to feel as though all redemption
for Israel was now hopeless, that process of redemption for Israel,
and for the world, was going on through the agency of those very events
which had filled them with dismay. Even as they were speaking, in tones
of sadness, about the crucified Christ, the living Christ, made perfect
for his work by that crucifixion, was walking by their side. Looking far
this side of that shadow of disappointment which then brooded over
them, we see all this, that then they did not see; but now is it with
ourselves, under the frequent shadows cast by more ordinary events? This
suggestion may afford us some profitable thoughts.
I need hardly say, in the first place, that man is continually inspired
by expectation. Every effort he makes is made in the conviction of
possibility and the light of hope. This is the heart of ambition and
the spring of toil. It is the balm which he applies to the wounds of
misfortune. It is the key with which he tries the wards of nature. And
from the morning of life to its last twilight he is always looking.
forward. The saddest spectacle of all--sadder even than pain, and
bereavement, and death--is a man void of hope. The most abject people
is a hopeless people, in whose hearts the memories of the past, and the
pulses of endeavor, and the courage of faith are dead, and who crouch by
their own thresholds and the crumbling tombstones of their fathers, and
take the tyrant's will, without an incentive, and without even a dream.
The most intense form in which misery can express itself is in the
phrase, "I have nothing to live for." And he who can actually say,
and who really feels this, is dead, and covered with the very pall and
darkness of calamity. But few, indeed, are they who can, with truth, say
this.
But if hope or expectation is such a vital element of human experience,
so does disappointment have its part in the mechanism of things, and,
as we shall presently see, its wise and beneficial part. For, after all,
how few things correspond with the forecast of expectation! To be sure,
some results transcend our hope; but how many fall below it,--balk
it,--turn out exactly opposite to it! Among those who meet
with disappointments in life, there are those who are expecting
impossibilities,--whose expectations are inordinate,--are more than the
nature of things will admit; or who are looking for a harvest where
they have planted no seed. They carry the dreams of youth in among the
realities of the world, and its vanishing visions leave them naked and
discouraged. The light of romance, that glorified all things in the
future, recedes as they advance, and they come upon rugged paths of
fact--upon plain toil and daily care,--upon the market and the field,
and upon men as they are in their weakness, and their selfishness, and
their mutual distrust. Or they belong, it may be, to that class who
are too highly charged with hope; whose sanguine notions never go by
induction, but by leaps; who never calculate the difficulties, but only
see the thing complete and rounded in imagination;--men with plenty
of poetry, and no arithmetic; whose theories work miracles, but whose
attempts are failures. It is pleasant, sometimes, to meet with people
like these, who, clothed in the scantiest garments, and with only a
crust upon their tables, at the least touch of suggestion, mount into a
region of splendor. Their poverty all fades away;--the bare walls,
the tokens of stern want, the dusty world, are all transfigured with
infinite possibilities. Achievement is only a word, and fortune comes in
at a stride. The palace of beauty rises, fruits bloom in waste places,
gold drops from the rocks, and the entire movement of life becomes a
march of jubilee. And they are so certain this time,--the plan they now
have is so sure to succeed! I repeat, it is pleasant, sometimes, to have
intercourse with such men, who throw bloom and marvelousness upon
the actualities of the world, from the reservoirs of their sanguine
invention. At least, it is pleasant to think how this faculty of
unfailing enthusiasm enables them to bear defeat, and to look away from
the cold face of necessity;--to think that, while so many are trudging
after the sounding wheels and the monotonous jar of life, and lying down
by the way to die, these men are marching buoyantly to a tune inside.
And yet this is pleasant only from a hasty point of view. These people
meet with disappointment, of course; and it is sad to think how many
lives have come to absolutely nothing, and are all strewn over, from
boyhood to the grave, with the fragments of splendid schemes. It is sad
to think how all their visionary Balbecs and Palmyras have been reared
in a real desert,--the desert of an existence producing no substantial
thing. And among these vanishing dreams, and on that melancholy waste,
they learn, at last, the meaning of their disappointment. And from
their experience, we too may learn, that we are placed here to be
not merely ideal artists, but actual toilers; not cadets of hope, but
soldiers of endeavor.
But there are disappointments in life that succeed reasonable
expectation; and these are the hardest of all to bear. I say the
expectation is reasonable; and yet, very possibly, the bitterness of the
disappointment comes from neglecting to consider the infirmity of all
earthly things. It is hard when, not dreaming, but trying our best, we
fail. It is hard to bear the burden and heat of the day, through all
life's prime, and yet, with all our toil, to earn no repose for its
evening hours. It is hard to accumulate a little gain, baptizing every
dollar with our honest sweat, and then have it stricken from our grasp
by the band of calamity or of fraud. It is hard, when we have placed our
confidence in man's honor, or his friendship, to find that we are fools,
and that we have been led in among rocks and serpents. And hard indeed
is it to see those who were worthy our love and our faith drop by
our side, and leave us alone. This dear child, the blossom of so many
hopes,--hard is it to see him die--to fold all our expectation in his
little shroud, and lay it away forever. We thought it had been he who
should have comforted and blessed us,--in whose life we could have
retraced the cycle of our own happiest experience,--whose unfolding
faculties would have been a renewal of our knowledge, and his manhood
not merely the prop but the refreshing of our age. This companion of our
lot,--this wedded wife of our heart,--why taken away now? She has shared
our early struggles, and tempered our anxiety with cheerful assurance.
She has tasted the bitterness; we thought she would have been a partner
of the joy. She has borne our fretfulness, and helped our perplexity,
and shed a serene light into our gloom; We thought she would have been
with us when we could pay the debt of faithfulness; when the cares of
business did not press and disturb us so. We thought it was she whose
voice, sweet with the music of old, deep memories, would have consoled
us far along; and that, in some calm evening of life, when all the
tumult of the world was still, and we were ready to go, we should
go--not far apart--gently to our graves.
Such are the plans that we lay out, saying of this thing and of that
thing, "We trusted that it would have been so." But the answer has been
disappointment. The old, ay, perhaps the most common lesson of life, is
disappointment.
And now I ask, is it not an intended lesson? Evidently it comes in as
an element in the Providential plan in which we are involved. For we
see its disciplinary nature,--its wise and beneficial results in harmony
with that Plan. Consider whether it is not the fact, that the entire
discipline of life grows out of a succession of disappointments. That
youthful dream, in which life has stretched out like a sunny landscape
with purple mountain-chains--is it not well that it is broken up, and we
strike upon rugged realities? Does not all the strength of manhood, and
the power of achievement, and the glory of existence, depend upon these
things which are not included in the young boy's vision of a happy
world. Welcome, O! disappointment of our hope that life would prove a
perpetual holiday. Welcome experience of the fact that blessing comes
not from pleasure, but from labor! For in that experience alone was
there ever anything truly great or good accomplished. We can conceive no
possible way by which one can be made personally strong without his
own effort;--no possible way by which the mind can be enriched and
strengthened where it is lifted up, instead of climbing for itself;--no
way, therefore, in which life could be at all a worthy achievement,
if it were merely a plain of ease, instead of holding every ward of
knowledge and of power under the guard of difficulty and the requisition
of endeavor.
And it is equally true that the greatest successes grow out of great
failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a
series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at
once. For all these successive failures induce a skill, which is so much
additional power working into the final achievement. Nobody passes at
once to the mastery, in any branch of science or of industry; and when
he does become a master in his work it is evident, not only in the
positive excellence of his performance, but in the sureness with which
he avoids defects; and these defects he has learned by experimental
failures. The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument
has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys. And if a man
derives skill from his own failures, so does he from the failures of
other men. Every unsuccessful attempt is, for him, so much work done;
for he will not go over that ground again, but seek some new way. Every
disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of
success, and makes it easier to find. We should thank past ages and
other men, not only for what they have left us of great things done,
but for the heritage of their failures. Every baffled effort for freedom
contributes skill for the next attempt, and ensures the day of victory.
Nations stripped and bound, and waiting for liberty under the shadow of
thrones, cherish in memory not only the achievements of their heroes,
but the defeats of their martyrs; and when the trumpet-voice shall
summon them once more, as surely it will,--when they shall draw for
the venture of freedom, and unroll its glittering standard to the
winds,--they will avoid the stumbling blocks which have sacrificed the
brave, and the errors which have postponed former hopes. In public
and in private action, it is true that disappointment is the school of
achievement, and the balked efforts are the very agents that help us to
our purpose.
And, if life itself--life as a whole--seems to us but a series of
disappointments, is not this the very conviction we need to work out
from it, through our own experience? Do we not need to learn that this
life itself is not sufficient, and holds no blessing that will fill us
completely, and with which we may forever rest? The baffled hopes of our
mortal state;--what are they but vain strivings of the human soul, out
of the path of its highest good? The wandering bird, driven against
the branches, and beaten by the storm, flutters at last to the clear
opening, by which it mounts above the cloud, and finds its way to its
home. This life is not ordained in vain;--it is constituted for a grand
purpose, if through its lessons of experience we become convinced that
this life is not all. In the outset of our existence here, and merely
from the teaching of others, we cannot comprehend the great realities of
existence.
How the things that have grown familiar to our eyes, and the lessons
that have sounded trite upon our ears, become fresh and wonderful, as
life turns into experience! How this very lesson of disappointment lets
us in to the deep meanings of Scripture, for instance! The Christ of
our youth,--a personage standing mild and beautiful upon the
Gospel-page,----a being to admire and love; how be develops to our later
thought! how solemnly tender, how greatly real, he becomes to us, when
we cling to him in the agony of our sorrow, and he goes down to walk
with us on the waters of the sea of death! As traditional sentiment,--as
a wholesome subject for school-composition,--we have spoken and written
of the weariness of the world-worn heart, and the frailty of earthly
things. But, O! when our hearts have actually become worn, and tried;
when we begin to learn that the things of this life are evanescent,--are
dropping away from us, and we slipping from them,--what inspiration of
reality comes to us in the oft-heard invitation, "Come unto me, all ye
that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest!" What a depth
of meaning flowing from the eternal world, in the precept we have read
so carelessly,--"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where
moth and rust doth corrupt, and thieves break through and steal!" Thus
the best results of life come from the defeats and the limitations that
are involved with it.
And, in all this, observe how disappointment is the instrument of higher
blessings. See how thus life itself suggests a higher good than life
itself can yield. And so the attitude of the disciples, after the
crucifixion, illustrates many experiences of our earthly lot. Those
incidents which perplexed and grieved them were securing the very
results they seemed to prevent. So, in our ordinary life, the things
that appear most adverse to us are often the most favorable.
I may say, indeed, that to any man who is rightly exercised
by it, disappointment always brings a better result. But this statement
requires that I should say, likewise, that the result of disappointment
depends upon the level and quality of a man's spirit. "One thing happens
alike to the wise man and the fool." But how different in texture and
substance is the final result of the event! Disappointment breaks down
a feeble and shallow man. There are those, again, whom it does not make
better,--in fact, whom nothing, as we can see, makes better. Everything
glides easily off from them. Now, it is a noble thing to see a man rise
above misfortune,--a moral Prometheus, submissive to the actual will of
God, but defying fate. But there are men whose very elasticity indicates
the superficiality of their nature. For it is good sometimes to be
sad,--good to have depth of being sufficient for misfortune to sink
into, and, accomplish its proper work. But the man who rightly receives
the lesson of disappointment, and improves by its discipline, bent as
he is on some great or good work, is impelled by it only to a change
of method,--never to a change of purpose; and the disappointment
effectually serves the purpose. But the fact before us is most clearly
seen when we contemplate the results of disappointment upon a religious
and un-religious spirit. A man is not made better by disappointment to
whom this world is virtually everything;--to whom spiritual things are
not realities. To him life is a narrow stream between jutting crags, and
its substance flows away with the objects before his eyes. Nay, some men
of this sort are made worse by the failure of earthly hopes, and their
natures are compressed and hammered by misfortune into a sullen and
granitic defiance. But he who sees beyond these material limits, looking
to the great end and final relations of our being, always extracts from
mortal disappointment a better result. In the wreck of external things
he gathers that spiritual good which is the substance of all life;--that
faith, and patience, and holy love, which, when all that is mortal
and incidental in our humanity passes away, constitute the residuum of
personality.
Our hopes disappointed,--our plans thwarted and overthrown; but out
of that disappointment a richer good evolving than we had conceived;
something that tends more than all our effort to produce the real object
of life. My friends, what do we make out of this fact? Why, surely this,
that life is not our plan, but God's. Consider what we, often, would
have made out of life, and compare this with what Providence has made
out of it. Contrast the man's achievement with the boy's scheme;
the dream of care with the moral glory that has sprung from toil
and trouble. Contrast the idea of the Saviour in the minds of those
disciples with the actual Saviour rising victorious from the conditions
of shame and death.
Life is God's plan; not ours. We may find this out only by effort; but
we do find it out.
We are responsible for the use of our materials, but the materials
themselves, and the great movement of things, are furnished for us.
Let us fall into no ascetic view of life. Out of our joy and our
acknowledged good the Supreme Disposer works his spiritual ends. But,
especially, how often does he do this out of our trials, and sorrows,
and so-called evils! Once more I say life is God's plan; not ours.
For often on the ruins of visionary hope rises the kingdom of our
substantial possession and our true peace; and under the shadow of
earthly disappointment, all unconsciously to ourselves, our Divine
Redeemer is walking by our side.