'The hope of the Gospel.'--COL. i. 5.
'God never sends mouths but He sends meat to feed them,' says the old
proverb. And yet it seems as if that were scarcely true in regard to
that strange faculty called Hope. It may well be a question whether on
the whole it has given us more pleasure than pain. How seldom it has
been a true prophet! How perpetually its pictures have been too highly
coloured! It has cast illusions over the future, colouring the far-off
hills with glorious purple which, reached, are barren rocks and cold
snow. It has held out prizes never won. It has made us toil and struggle
and aspire and fed us on empty husks. Either we have not got what we
expected or have found it to be less good than it appeared from afar.
If we think of all the lies that hope has told us, of all the vain
expenditure of effort to which it has tempted us, of the little that any
of us have of what we began by thinking we should surely attain, hope
seems a questionable good, and yet how obstinate it is, living on after
all disappointments and drawing the oldest amongst us onwards. Surely
somewhere there must be a reason for this great and in some respects
awful faculty, a vindication of its existence in an adequate object for
its grasp.
The New Testament has much to say about hope. Christianity lays hold of
it and professes to supply it with its true nourishment and support. Let
us look at the characteristics of Christian hope, or, as our text calls
it, the hope of the Gospel, that is, the hope which the Gospel creates
and feeds in our souls.