The Grace of Hope

“Now abideth hope.” — i COR. xiii. 13.

ATT is related of Lord Nelson when a child that, on his mother telling him not to expose himself to some danger, but to fear it, he turned round to her saying, Mother, what is fear? — there the boy was in deed father to the man, who, brave even to rashness, stept on the quarter-deck of the Victory for his last battle wearing all his orders; a glittering mark for the bullets of the enemy. But strangers as some may be to fear, who ever asked, What is Hope? Kings and beggars, saints and sinners, childhood, youth, manhood, and old age, all have tasted her pleasures; and the motto on the crest of one of our old families, Dum spiro spero. While I breathe I hope, is one that may be adopted by the whole human race. To expect when circumstances are at the worst that they will be come better, ay, and better when at the best, is as natural to us as it is to breathe.

Hope presided at all our births; and in yonder mother whose busy fancy is weaving a bright future for her child, she rocks the infant’s cradle. Other pleasures, like streams which summer dries or winter freezes, fail us; hers never — like the waters of the smitten rock, they follow us to the close of life. Constant as the emblem of God’s presence to the wandering host, the pillar that was a cloud by day and a fire by night, she accompanies us to the end of our pilgrimage. Hovering like an angel over the bed of death, she often stays when physicians leave; and lingering in the bosoms of beloved ones while there is breath to move a feather, only departs with the sigh with which, as if unwilling to part, the body yields up its soul into the hands of God. God be thanked for Hope!

Often, it is true, but a fair enchantress, still she has been the parent of noble deeds; of patriots’ and martyrs’ heroic struggles; of the Church’s and the world’s greatest and boldest enterprises. Lighting up the dark future, and supporting thousands of afflicted and tried ones, of poor, hard-working, heavilyburdened men and women, who were ready to sink beneath their load, to her the world owes a large, perhaps the largest, measure of its happiness. She throws her bow on the stormiest cloud, and kindles her star in the darkest sky; for the deadliest malady she has a medicine, and for the deepest wound a balm. It is under her flag the exile sails j and beneath her banner that the soldier fights. By her lamp the pale student pursues his midnight toils. In husbandmen it is she who ploughs the wintry fields, and in seamen the jratery deep. Hers is the brightest beam that shines into the captive’s dungeon; and hers the hand that smooths life’s thorniest pillow. She brings the wanderer home; she gives back the fallen one to a mother’s arms, and to the eyes of a father mourning a long-lost son, she presents a vision of the wreck, though broken and shattered, steering to its haven — the returned prodigal weeps on his father’s bosom, the fatted calf smokes on the board, music wakes up that long-silent house, and floors shake to the dancers’ feet. This world’s good Samaritan, Hope pours her wine and oil into the wounds of humanity; and, approaching the miserable in the mercy and might of him who came to Jericho, she casts a healing virtue into misfortune’s bitterest springs. This world with out Hope would be a world without a sun.

The darkest hour is that before the dawn; when things are at the worst they mend; the longest road has a turning — so Hope bravely speaks to all. And some there are whom no misfortunes seem able to overwhelm; blessed with a happy, hopeful, temperament, they ride the waves of adverse fortune like a sea-buoy, which, though submerged one moment, is up the next, mounted on the back of the billow that broke over it. No doubt, a large proportion of our hopes suffer the fate of these billows, so soon as, rolling landward, they meet the shore, and breaking, are dashed into froth and foam. But thanks be to God, that never hinders us from forming new hopes as yonder sea new waves, that, rising from its bosom, succeed each other so rapidly that one is no sooner broken than another comes rolling joyously in.

Now, if the hopes that are followed by disappointment are better than gloomy despair, if skies lighted only by dying meteors are better than utter darkness, if nights of happy dreams are better than days of dull despondency, how much better, and how blessed the hope of my text She springs from faith, and aspires to heaven. Born of the promises of a faithful God, and never doomed to disappointment, she finds in her dying grasp no fleeting shadow, but an immortal crown.

Let us consider —

I. The object of this hope — immortality; which is,

i. The hope of nature.

All nations, whether barbarous or civilised, have cherished this hope; and, even when they shrank from the grave, have regarded it as but a gloomy passage to another and an eternal world. It was left to the infidels of Paris, amidst the ungodliness of their bloody Revolution, to inscribe over the gate of their cemetery the sentiment, Death is an eternal sleep. Among the rudest pagans death never quenched the hope of immortality.- That hope rose over the grave, shining to weeping eyes, like the evening star above the place where the sun had gone down. They saw the body turned into cold, unconscious clay; they saw it wither into a whitened skeleton; they saw it

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moulder into a heap of dust; yet, despite these changes, the power of death, and the foul ravages of the tomb, hope, tenacious of her hold, clung to immortality. This hope was not shaken by the convulsions of dissolution; it did not expire with the passing breath; it was not buried in the dead man’s tomb. If buried, it sprang like the flowers that bloomed above the sod; but not to wither and die with them.

There is no nation that does not shew some evidence of such a hope. It breathes in the prayers and flowers which are offered by the Chinese to the manes of their departed ancestors. It is painted in those pictures of a final judgment that are found on Egypt’s oldest tombs. It shone in the lamps that lighted the sepulchres of Greece and Rome. It triumphed over death in the evergreen wreaths which they hung on their tombs. And nowhere is this blessed hope more distinctly expressed than at yon forest grave, where plumed and painted and silent warriors bury with his body the bow and arrows of the Indian, that his spirit might follow the chase in the land of spirits. The conclusion I draw from these things is, that hopes of immortality are as natural to the human heart as are those seeds to the soil which spring up so soon as it is stirred, and quickened into activity by the influences of light and air. Like these, they were planted by no human hand; they are the gift of God.

This belief, that in its universality presents the character of an instinct or intuition, found in remarkable analogies what nursed its hopes, and were their props, though not their parents. Men saw an image of death in sleep — the closed eyes, the dull ears, the speechless lips, the unimpassioned countenance, the prone form, the profound unconsciousness of all life’s griefs, or joys, or cares; and to some happy genius, might not sleep’s awakening suggest another 1 — the thought that as sleep is a short death, so death may be a long sleep. Might not this truth burst on a thoughtful savage at the moment of sunrise 1 Stand ing on the shore, yesterday at even, he saw the declining sun sink, full-orbed, in the western waves, and expire amid a flood of glory, unshorn of a beam and to-day, after a period of darkness, he hails his rise, as, with ever-fresh light and splendour, he climbs the eastern heavens, to bathe hill and dale, shore and waves, with gold. And why, might he not ask, may it not be so with the spirit that, retaining its faculties to the last, and strong amid the body’s decay, sank, full-orbed also, into the darkness and night of death 1 May it not have gone, like that sun, to shine in other lands — perhaps, after long years of absence, to return and shine once more in this?

The wish might have been father to the thought; but might not the yearly revival of nature have suggested to some the hope of a resurrection, though, when proclaimed by Paul, that doctrine startled all, and shocked some of, the men of Athens 1 Winter surrounded them with the emblems of death; trees turned into naked skeletons j the sweet flowers all gone; unbroken silence in groves and skies; every stream glazed like a dead man’s eye, and motionless in the frost’s embrace j and the earth lying stiff and cold beneath its shroud of snow. And when spring returns to clothe the trees anew, and the flowers spring up to bloom upon their graves, and songs, breaking the long silence, burst forth afresh from skies and woodlands, might not a mother, hanging over her dead, fancy that her flower also would bloom again, and some future day restore the lost one, breaking the seal of death and silence of the tomb? These things they might see through a glass darkly.

2. The object of hope is immortality as clearly revealed in the Word of God.

What was once probable, is now certain. The heathens had immortality in its shadow; we have the substance. It is not a fancy now, but a certainty. Life and immortality, the objects of a believer’s hope, are clearly brought to light by the gospel; and that grand old prophecy is fulfilled, was fulfilled on the cross by its -expiring, yet rejoicing and conquering victim, “O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.” The object of this hope, the grandest man can cherish, or mind aspire to, allies us to him ‘who is the same yesterday, to-day, for ever; whose life knows no end and his happiness no change. It is not that life which, brief as it is, men dread to lose, and the dying would buy at the price of a fortune; which the woman in the gospel spent all she had to preserve; which kings account of greater value than their crowns; nobles, than their titles; a miser, than his glittering heaps of gold. The hope of the Christian is immortal life — the purchase of a Saviour’s blood, — the boon which God that can- not lie promised before the world began. It is begun on earth, for in the germs and seeds of it, he that believeth, as the Bible says, hath eternal life — much as the tree has the leaves and flowers of next year wrapped up in the buds of this. Commenced at the new birth, and consummated in the hour of death, it is enjoyed in that world where there is neither woe, nor want; nor griefs, nor graves; nor sickness of body, nor sorrow of heart; nor cares, nor sighs, nor sin; where the crown hides no thorn, and the heart bleeds from no secret wound; the sky wears no cloud, and day never darkens into night. Into such blessedness believers enter at death. Such blessedness has their God and Saviour laid up for all those that love him. Instead of being reluctant, the wonder is that we are not impatient to depart, saying, as we raise our eyes to those realms of bliss from this chequered and sinful world, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.

II. Consider the source of this hope.

On opening an Etruscan tomb they found it occupied by the skeleton of a king. After thousands of years of sepulture, he still wore, amid the gloom of the grave, a memorial of his former state. The skull was bound round with a fillet of gold, a remnant of his past greatness, and a bitter mockery of his present condition. Such a crown man wears in his hopes of eternal life; these, like the indestructible gold of the royal tomb, have survived his fall, and are little else now than the vestiges of departed glory. Then, bereft of power to be or to do good, of the purity of his nature, and his peace with God, man lost all true life, and became “dead in trespasses and sins.” Those hopes of happiness beyond the grave, in which, whether Pagan, or careless, unconverted Christian, he now indulges, delights, wraps himself up, are but the ivy that, clothing, conceals a ruin; or, by folding a green mantle around its trunk, gives the appearance of life to a dead and withered tree.

I believe that no man lives in utter, blank, black despair. Voyaging to hell or heaven, to the haven of rest or to a fearful wrecking, every one carries hope in his heart, as all our ships do her symbol — the anchor hung at their bows. Who believe that they shall be lost when they die ] None. Who lives a life of sin in this world without some expectation of escaping its punishment in the next 1 None; not the lowest, basest, vilest slave of vice. If men believed that death was the end of their existence, that there was no here after, they might toss the reins on the neck of passion ioo The Grace of Hope.

—this their motto, “A short life and a merry one!” or, as they raised the foaming cup, this, “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we shall die.” But no man says, or could say, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall be in hell. It is no more in human nature to quaff the cup and toy with pleasure under such dread feelings, than it was in Damocles to linger at the banquet when he discovered a sword above his head, hung from the roof by a single hair. The worst have hope. Tenacious of life, she can live in an atmosphere that is fatal to every human virtue. She blooms on the grave, where all innocence, and beauty, and grace lie buried; a phenomenon more wonderful to behold than the rose of the Alps, with its roots planted on the edge of the glacier, and its arms, thickly covered with blushing flowers, thrown on a wreath of snow.

And what is the source, what are the foundations of hopes by which many are deceived till, like the rich man, they lift up their eyes in torment? Here they are; judge ye what they are worth, and see that they are not yours — God, they say, is merciful; we have been guilty, no doubt, of many bad actions, but we have done some good ones; if we are not what we should be, we are not so bad as we might have been, or as some others are; if God did not mean us to indulge our appetites, why did he give them? he does not, cannot expect perfection from those in whom he has planted passions more powerful than reason, and whom he has placed in circumstances of all but irresistible temptation; youth must sow its wild oats; we will grow better as we grow older, and find leisure to repent before we die! Thus, fed by the devil’s hand, that of others, or their own, the lamp of hope burns on in this city’s darkest haunts of vice.

More specious, yet not more solid, are the foundations on which a different class rest their hopes of eternal life. With a sort of general and indefinite trust in Christ, but without any humble, real, appropriating faith in his finished work and all-sufficient merits, your hopes, in the main, rest on what your, selves have done, or have not done, or intend to do. You are sober and chaste, — which many are not; you are honest men, or virtuous women; you bear an unblemished reputation; you have won the respect oi the world; you maintain a reputable Christian profession j you are known by your charities; you say your prayers; you read your Bibles; you go to church; you attend the communion table. “These be thy gods, O Israel;” but, oh! wait till death comes, and if God have mercy on you at last, perhaps whether or no, you will turn to them to say, as said Job to his friends, Miserable comforters are ye all!

I do not deny that these hopes look bright; but so does the ignis fatuus that plays in the quagmire, luring the steps of the belated traveller to death. I grant that they yield bright visions; but so does the opiate which, while it pleases, poisons. Borne on their bosom your course is pleasant; but so is that of the boat which, with blue skies overhead, and beauty on either bank, is gliding on to the fatal cataract. From these hopes, if yours, I beseech you to turn to Christ, — “Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope.”

The hope of my text rests, not on the sinner’s work, but on the Saviour’s; on works, certainly, but not our own. God justifies none but those who condemn themselves, and loves none but those who, hating the works of the flesh, abhor themselves. Those only who have felt themselves lost, are found; nor are any pardoned but those who, putting in no plea but guilty, have cast themselves on the mercy of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. As the apostle says, it is “Christ in you, the hope of glory;” Christ on us in his righteousness, and in us in his image; enthroned in love on our hearts, and dwelling there by the indwelling of his Holy Spirit. Have you found him? Often offered, have you accepted him 1 Is it he whom your soul loveth 1 Have you laid the burden of your sins on his back, and your sick head on his bosom] Have you felt the beating of a new heart? and in new desires, new loves and hatreds, new aims and objects, can you say, Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new 1 I congratulate you; the greatest kings might envy your condition. What though you are tossing on a sea of troubles, your anchor holds fast, having entered into that within the vail; and, to borrow an illustration which that well-known symbol suggests, some of you, old men if not old Christians, have not long now to lie off the harbour, exposed to the temptations and tossed on the storms of life — the hour comes when, having heaved your anchor and spread out your sails, you shall be borne safely over the swell that breaks on death’s moaning bar, and pass into the haven of eternal rest.

“Such are the hopes that cheer the just;

These hopes their God hath given;
His Spirit is the earnest now,

And seals their souls for heaven.”

III. Consider the certainty of this hope.

In that how different it is —

i. From such hopes of happiness as the world offers.

A fruit-tree in early summer, covered with a sheet of flowers, sounding with the hum of bees, topped by a thrush that pours forth a flood of song, standing on a sward enamelled with flowers and under calm blue skies that ring with music, offers a striking contrast to the same tree as it appears in autumn, with the ground around it strewed with withered leaves, and only a few fruits of all those rich blossoms hanging on its half-naked branches. Still greater the contrast between this world, as it presents itself to the eyes of youth, and as it appears to those of age. How rarely are its expectations of” happiness fulfilled! of its blossoms how few ever ripen into fruit! It is common here for speakers and authors to summon two famous kings, —

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the Jew, laying down the cup of all earthly pleasures to seize the pen, and write, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity; and the Greek, laying down the sword to weep, that having conquered one world he had not a second to conquer. Those crowned heads may be left undisturbed in their graves. Every man with gray hairs can tell as well as they, that this world, in what ever of its pleasures he has sought for happiness, is full of disappointment. How many parents, lovers, friends, have met bitter misery where they looked for joy! They indeed may be accounted fortunate who, merely disappointed, have not had their experience of the world foreshadowed by what befell St Paul, when from the fire at which he expected to warm his shivering limbs, a viper sprung to sting him. Without the hopes of my text, this world were vanity at its best; and how often also vexation of spirit?

2. From the hopes of the ungodly and unbelieving.

Who among us, asks Isaiah, shall dwell with the devouring fire 1 who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings 1 Change the shall there into will, and I answer, None. As we have often seen and sought to prevent, the poor moth, allured by its glare, may, narrowing its circles, dash at length into the flame, and drop dead on our book; but such a fate, every sinner, however near to hell he ventures, intends and hopes to escape. He resolves on amendment, but not now — at some future date. Buoyed up with such hopes, and grown bold, he ventures further and deeper into sin, till he is lost, like the heedless boy who, borne up on his airy float, pushes out from the calm waters of the bank, further and deeper into the body of the current, and caught at length in its resistless sweep, is hurried down helpless and powerless into the fatal pool. They hope to amend, and never do; growing worse instead of better, dying as they lived. Be assured that, if it be true that as the tree falls so it lies, it is about as true that as the tree leans so it. falls. A solemn fact! On you who are hesitating, hanging, halting between the two opinions — God or the world, Christ or pleasure, the indulgence of the flesh or the hopes of heaven — how should it enforce this saying, “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

I am not charging you with hypocrisy. No. You do not profess to be religious, though you intend one day to be so j yet Job’s description of the hopes of the hypocrite applies equally to yours — they are a spider’s web. What more beautiful than those threads thrown from branch to branch of the golden gorse — an aerial bridge — all gemmed with diamonds of morning dew1? But would any man in his senses trust his weight to it 1 And while, most false security, it snaps at an infant’s touch, see how, crouching in the centre of her web, a cruel, cunning, bloody, venomous, ugly murderer sits, watching for her prey; and how over those silken strands lie scattered the wings and limbs, and disembowelled carcasses of once happy creatures, that shone in the gayest colours, and danced, all day long, in sunbeams. Equally ensnaring and insecure are the hopes of the unbelieving and ungodly, “whose hope,” to use the words ot Job, “shall be cut off, and whose trust shall be a spider’s web. He shall lean upon his house, but it shall not stand; he shall hold it fast, but it shall not endure.”

3. Now look at the certainty of the hope of my text.

I have a good security in the word of an honest man, still better in his bond, and, best of all, in his oath. On such an oath I will embark my fortune; I will believe the most extraordinary statements; sitting on a jury, I will hang a man — set him free, or send him to the gallows. If such certainty is afforded by the word of an honest, though fallen and sinful, man, what security is that which lies in the oath of God 1 So anxious is he, our heavenly Father, that poor sinners should believe that he will save them, is anxious to save them, has no more pleasure in your death and damnation than I would have in seeing my son die or damned, has given his own Son to save you, and will save you now if you will only come to him, that he has sworn it, passed his great oath for it — “Wherein God,” says the apostle, “willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us: which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast.” I can add nothing to that To paint a rose, or gild the burnished gold, would be a less waste of time and labour than any attempt to augment the force of that. Heaven has no further security to offer; and if people will not believe the oath of God, I have nothing more to say.

As to those who rest on his word and oath, what hopes, what happiness like theirs! Now, said one, I can shake hands with death — Save Christ’s, said an other, .no countenance to me so beautiful as death’s! Enjoying this hope the believer may walk in perpetual sunlight, and go singing on his way to heaven. Under her eye how do all things change — sick-beds, losses, disappointments, bereavements? They throw their furnace-light on the face of Jesus, as sitting by the fire, a refiner, he purifies, not destroys his gold; and the death-struggle itself, with its tossings, and groans, and pains, appears as the effort of a bird to burst its shell, of the insect to shatter its case and enter on a new and bright existence. Looking on the grave as a bed for the weary, and as one from whose long and quiet sleep we shall rise, not as we do now, with the infirmities and weaknesses under which we lay down, but in the beauty of perfect holiness and the bloom of everlasting youth, there are times when Christian hope can use the words of Brainerd, My heart turns longing to the burying-place. Yes j we shall be happiest when our heads lie beneath the sod — we shall then be with the Lord; and, as surely as faith falls short of sight, we shall find that our brightest, dearest, loftiest hopes never rose to the height of our enjoyments — “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” May these hopes draw us more and more heavenward; purify our hearts; wean our affections from earth, and wed them to the skies! May they help us to live above this world, and to look beyond it; and, as sailors, homeward bound, crowd every sail on the mast where the watch sits aloft looking out for land, may we, guided by the Spirit of God, inspired with the hopes of the gospel, and enabled to welcome such failings of nature as prognosticate the change at hand, haste, to use the words of Peter, be “hasting unto the coming of the day of God I” Then what 1

“The pains of death are past;

Labour and sorrow cease;
And, life’s long warfare closed at last,

The soul is found in peace.
Soldier of Christ, well done;

Praise is thy new employ;
And while eternal ages run,

Rest in thy Saviour’s joy.”