HOPE FOR THE LIVING.

And now abideth Faith, Hope, Charity, these three.—
1 COR. XIII. 13.

So far from being always considered a virtue, Hope has been stigmatised as a dangerous deceiver or as a luxury not to be indulged in by the weak. Hope, says the Athenian in Thucydides, the procuress of peril, cannot indeed destroy, though she may harm, those of her employers who have a reserve to fall back upon: but to those who risk their all upon the issue of her services—and a costly servant she assuredly is-she unmasks herself only in the moment of their ruin, when her victims have no resource left to defend themselves against her recognised treachery. Poets in the same strain cry shame upon this delusive phantom, and protest that they are-

-tired of waiting for this chymick gold,

Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.

Yet the common sense of mankind tells us that life would be but a poor shrunken thing without

hope; and even the poet who reviles its chymick gold, marvels at the fascination which it still imparts to the future in spite of our monotonous and oft-repeated experiences of the flat unprofitable past:

Strange cozenage! Who would live past days again?
Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain.

Surely the common sense of the world is right. While recognising that hope may be an evil if it makes us careless or indolent, trustful to chance or to luck or to interpositions of Providence rather than to our own energies and skill, we cannot fail to see that hopelessness is a still greater evil, paralysing energy and neutralising skill. No business in life, however purely intellectual, can dispense with hope as a stimulus to activity. That impulse which the immediate pressure of pleasure or pain gives to irrational animals, hope gives to human beings, who are endowed with the faculty or necessity of looking forward. Who could toil on through threescore years or more in hopelessness? Work without hope, says Coleridge, draws nectar in a sieve and, indeed, what possibility is there that any human being, however richly endowed with genius, should ever produce the durable results that come from harmonious and continuous effort, or give birth to anything but the perishable expressions of a mere spasmodic outburst, if he had no durable hope of anything in heaven or earth!

Let us not be put off with the answer that

"Hope is a matter beyond our control; a result of physical temperament, according to which some may be constitutionally sanguine, so that they cannot help being hopeful, others constitutionally phlegmatic or melancholy, so that they cannot succeed in being hopeful." We know, on the contrary, that hope is, to some extent at least, within our own power. By dwelling more on the bright side of things and less on the dark side, we may gradually accustom ourselves to a hopeful habit of mind, which will, in time, become a second nature.

Obviously, however, we have not yet touched the bottom of this question; for we shall be met with the retort: "What right have you to dwell on one side of the truth to the neglect of the other? In this imperfect world every subject that claims our serious attention has a dark as well as a bright side is it honest or truthful, then, to neglect one half of the Universe because it happens to be unpleasant?" So arguing, our objectors may complete, and turn against us, the quotation we just now used against them

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve.

"Yes," they will say, "but

Hope, without an object, cannot live.

"What is the use," they will ask, "of bidding us hope without giving us first some certain or probable reality to hope about? The faculty of hope is like the faculty of reason so far as this, that

both must have some foundation of facts wherein to work. Give us a permanent and reasonable object of hope and we shall only be too glad to hope; but without such an object we must be content to be hopeless. We cannot allow ourselves to be fooled, even though the fooling may lead us along a path of happiness. Better the hopeless path of truth than the Fool's Paradise of comfortable delusions."

Now one answer to this is, that hope is in some sort a necessary condition of life. All men, if they wish to avoid madness, must in some measure exercise their power of attending more to the brighter than to the darker side of nature. We know, for example, at this very moment, while we are assembled here in health and strength and peace, that throughout the world thousands and tens of thousands of souls are either passing away in the last gasp of death, or writhing under agonies of disease, or pouring forth unavailing lamentations under the despair of desolating bereavement; others, again, are plotting or perpetrating frauds, schemes of oppression, treacherous villanies, foul and unnatural crimes; others, again (most pitiable sight of all), are trembling upon the brink of sin, making a half-hearted resistance, lifting up tremulous hands to a seemingly unanswering heaven; and even while these words pass into your ears, Satan perhaps has prevailed and a soul has fallen, and a life is cast away. Who can suffer his mind to rest on such scenes as these for the same time and with the same attention as on

scenes of happiness and righteousness, and yet expect to retain the balance of reason?

These things must not be thought on

After these ways: so, it will make us mad.

Still there is something reasonable in the demand for an "object of hope," and the intention of the last two discourses which I have preached here has been to show that the whole universe, when illuminated by the light that streams upon it from the Cross of Christ, furnishes us with a durable object of hope in the Fatherhood of the Maker of the world, who, in the course of many ages, is conforming man to the divine image. The hope of the ultimate perfection of all things, based upon the sense of the divine Fatherhood, is the source of all healthy activity in men. In the strength of this hope we can look all evil in the face without blenching, and beneath the abyss of sin discern the vaster abyss of the divine love.

When we realise, and not till we realise, that the Fatherhood of God in various shapes and disguises is the only true object of hope, we shall be able to distinguish good hopes from bad hopes. For hope, like faith, is in itself neutral and colourless, neither a virtue nor a vice, taking its colour and its quality from its object; and, if centred upon an unworthy object, hope itself becomes unworthy. Thus, for example, hopes of wealth may engender avarice, and hopes of ease indolence; and hopefulness of this kind, so far