Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1876 — HOPE. [ARTICLE]

HOPE.

[ftw »IMraoo by Prof. »wIM. ChlMg®] Ron h one of the vital force# that are ■ordained «f God to move society. Within the seed of oak, or wheat, or pine, a vital force lies which puzzles the scientist and delights the religionist. When the seed U placed la its lawful surrounding*. thia vital axialitv within, asserts itself, and she seed rises up and seta out upon its career m oak, or palm, or pine. Ip a WnsSM-n city, some workman having, in >ami*( * shaft, thrown up some alluvial ■soil, found that under the warm sun some thousands of mulberry trees sprang up in that old black earth. These seeds had lain in the ground for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years, holding their vital principle till the happy sunlight should com*. But the God of nature must be more truly and more kindly the God of man, and hence it must be that He who has put into little seeds such laws and powers of action must have placed in the soul some potency of leaf, and flower, and fruit. It was a primal law of nature that there should be on all sides forces empowered to move, and change, and combine things, till dead elements should be transformed into life, and inorganic into organic form. It is said bleak, formless rocks came first. But God assailed them with the rams, and frosts, and winds, and with a whole battery of chemical forces, and pounded and melted them Into soil. Then into the seeds he placed other forces, and thus onward goes the world, urged forward by inward impulses to manysided destiny. Opening the human heart thia immense scene repeats itself, for lo! there lie a group of forces ready like soldiers to spring forward to obey any command. Ambition, love of fame, love of money, love of learning, are some of these, and lofty and beautiful among them is St. Paul’s ideal hope. It is one of the forces sent by the Almighty to lead man along from the earth to the leaf, from leaf to flower, from flower to fruit It is not the storm or the earthquake to smite rock and melt it into soil, but it is the sunshine to woo the vital powers into sweet life. An old General, after a dreadful defeat, called together his staff, and inquired about the condition of his troops. He was informed that they were suffering from nothing but from want of heart. They had food, but would not build fires to cook it; had all they needed,but had no heart for the hour. The General replied: 44 Unless we can fill their minds with hope ■all is indeed lost” Those words might be repeated always along all the paths of mankind, for unless the heart be kept full of happy anticipation all is already in sad ■decline.

OWr wayward maabood woaldit thou hold firm rule. And ruu ihee in the licht of happy facet, Love, hope, and patience, these must be thy irraoee, And In thine own heart most they first keep •ehool; —r —— For a» old Alla* on his broad neck placet Heaven's starry globe and thus sustains It, so Do these upbear the mighty realms below. Evidently, faith, hope and charity are pillars or arches upon which the beautiful temple of society rests. As the metallurstudies and experiments until he finds what elements must be melted together, and in what proportions, that he may secure the beet iron, or steel, or gold for man’s use, so in the great laboratory of God, which makes no mistakes, there must have been poured into the soul the -qualities and quantities of mental action that would best make that strange result called man. What a mortal would he be through whose learned and powerful mind there should flow just enough of faith, and hope, and charity! But we must not wander from our one grace to exhaust our few moments in admiration of the attractive trinity. Dear to eveiy one of you should be the grace of hope, that quality or quantity of the soul! What it once did for you in childhood, it should be permitted to do all along the path of this career. It would seem, from the evidence ot experience, that this virtue was ordered to decorate only the early years of man, for, as a fact, we behold it the angri of youth ornamenting all its future, pouring gold-dust and uiamond•dust on the rich form of to-morrow; but this scene does not measure the law, but only shows how man cuts short the glory of his own estate, and of his own deed and accord abdicates a throne. In the •economy of nature, man should be found •changing the thing hoped for, but not the blessed hopefulness itself. From the obe looked (forward to in childhood with delight, coming feasts, coming plays, comine snow-storm or coming blossoms, or coming beauties or honors, mature days should pass to coming wisdom and char acter and home and country and friendship and virtue and God. It is a difficulty ■i- with the many that after early life has exhausted its objects of hope no new objects come to take their place. Some mercenary or unworthy pursuit came, or else -some utter idleness, and thus no path remains along which the heart can run forward as once it ran. The philosophy of this virtue is this: The present is a mere point. It comes the nearest to being nothing of which any one can conceive. It is not even a moment of time. To a mind thus situated the Creator came with memory aad hope, that with memory this strange soul might be full of the past, and with nope full of the future. Thus life is made wider and deeper than the simple pres jot. It expands out into a vast remembrance, and a vast expectation, and these two streams, the one following us from the by-gone years, and the other leaping down from the future, empty into the heart and make up its wisdom and inspiration and bliss. How we pity one whose memory has failed. The aged father and mother often fail to remember die children they once loved so fondly. What a world is thus stricken out! Take also hope away and what a perfect ruin we witness! Thus approach this second ideal of Paul and measure her worth in the drama of man’s being. Hope is to 'widen and intensify life. The fleeting moment is by her magic laden with the treasures of days and years to come, and thus each day is enlarged into the proportions of a generation or a century. An existence gathered up into the present only like the existence of the gambler, or the profligate, or the “fallen,” is a house without foundations, for the wide outrenchings of both memory and hope are gone; that being the true temple of life where the past and future are lying as deep foundations. That is a ruin which has no past to remember nor future to anticipate. Let us pass to a secund thought. You nay say hope so often disappoints you that you dare not longer ask of it much service. There is much truth in this complaint, but, notwithstanding all this failing of expectations, yet it will always remain true that hope absolutely makes more success than the hasty have ascribed to her name. No misfortune is greater Xhan to have a heart that boats despondently. Hope is the absolute creator of suctms. Success die outcome of the most mmistent effort. ' All the valuable things Ette world are the result of toll. Each siwaker each writer, each thinker, each

musician, each craftsman, is the result of twenty years of hard labor toward a given result. It requires half a lifetime to master a great language or to become skilled in a groat oroiesaion or art, and this being so, only the buoyant, hopeful heart can undergo with patience the labor that precedes all triumph. Thus it helps to make the destiny it first paints. No soul will run along a path that has no charms, either by the border or at the end. None will sit and gaze into a cloudy, rainy, November sky. But when the east or west is all colored with nature's best tints, then the heart and brain of mortal will watch it long and lovingly. Thus no great work of life will be faithfully pursued unless the second grace in the group Wore us acts as painter of the final result. Thus hope enters the world, not as a decoration for only children and lovers, but as the everlasting impulse of all society. It is the highly-colored horizon from which all the suns must rise and into which they must sink. God makes no flowers without painting them, and no day without hopes. A large part of the evil resulting from a life of dishonesty and all gross sins may be found in the abatement of hope which it brings the heart. Instead of deeply loving the future, the fallen soul fears it. The criminal does not any longer expect happiness, he thinks only of escaping pain. The outlook before the murderer, before the defaulter, before the perjurer, canuot be such as lies before the citizen or the statesman, or the poet, or the Christian, who looks forward from the heights of integrity of action and thought. Sin empties the future of all romance. The New York criminal who has just been brought back from a distant land, in which he was vainly attempting to conceal himself, will doubtless find a prison as happy a place for him as a continent, for long-continued and great dishonor have emptied his future of its once alluring contents. An empty urn Is in his withered hands. Whose holv duet wan scattered lone ago. Thus all sin and all littleness and meanness of action injures deeply the heart by robbing it of blessed anticipations. Not that the guilty soul always fears a hell beyond death, but that it dares not hope much from the future of this life. The reasons of a great morrow have been all withdrawn. The maxim of the abandoned, “ Let us eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die,” finds its deep significance, not simply in death, but in the fact that the morrow of this world has lost the charm it had in the early, purer life. One of the first proofs of a fallen nature is this failure of the inner hopefulness. Hope is joined to charity, that is love, for only where the heart sends out its love do its hopes spring up. Some old poet, speaking of these three graces, says Methinks I sec them grouped In seemly show. The straightened arms upraised, the palms aslope. And robes that touching as adown they flow. Distinctly blend like snow embossed with snow; Oh, nart them never! If Love prostrate lie. Ho e too, will sink and die.

Thus must the soul remain so pure that it need not fear thefuture of either man or God. We mu»t be able to love the days to come, and then the beautiful will always hover over them. Charity is wedded to hope, not simply in Christianity, but in the temple of nature. Having thus examined this mental action called hope, having found it to be a fundamental law of spiritual progress, let us note some of the greater applications and results in society. . If we should trust a certain class of poets, we should certainIv conclude that hope is, par excellence, the faculty of deception, that it was set in the heart to be an ignisfatuus, to lead it to disappointment. Harm has been done to the world’s happiness and ambition bv the excess of poetic lamentation over blighted hopes and faded flowers. Our world is one in which doubtless each one is to cheer his neighbor, and in which the worst possible philosophy was to be the philosophy of pespair. The soul is such a delicate piece of machinery that even a cloudy sky checks its motion. Upon the old sun-dials this inscription is always to be found: Noto non horas nisi serenas—l point out no hours except sunny ones. Upon the human heart one may well trace the same sentiment. It will make no use of its hours unless they be lit up with the. sun and stars of expectation. If, therefore, the poets say very much to us about the delusive nature of hope, they only reproach the Being who laid the foundation of the spirit. Let us assume that hope, instead of being a failing leader, is for the most part an organizer of victory. One cannot learn this fact from a study of individuals, for one cannot go to the individuals of all times and learn this form of triumph and defeat; but one can look at mankind in the large, and in great eras learn whether hope has been only a glaring cheat. Now it comes to pass tiiat mankind has for the most found the objects toward which they have struggled in the wilderness. The great hopes of men have been coming to pass all along the well-trodden pathway. What is our civilization but the ocean formed at last by all the streams of hope that began to drip and then to flow in all antiquity? It is the fulfillment of the Greek dream and of the Roman expectation when Virgil said: “A better day will come down from the sky." What is it. but a coming of the liberty foreseen by Dante and Milton ? What is it but an unfolding of what tqp soldiers fought for on the battle-fields of Europe and America? In fact, since the star of liberty was first discovered in far-off times, it has risen higher and has flamed out in*each century into a new magnitude.' Along all the paths along which man has cast his heart forward, ms reward comes to meet him half-way. The hope of higher happiness, higher culture, of liberty, of better religion, of better benevolence or charity, has never proven a delusion, but has been daily transformed into a blessed reality. Viewing the world over, the great hopes of mankind have always been the shadow of coming events. They have been heralds riding in advance in brilliant livery announcing the chariot of the King. If then these National anticipations have never been deceivers, but the messengers of God, we may descend readilv from the greater to the less, and declare that the individual soul will, m a valuable sense, secure the noble ends it hopes most for in all these long, laborious days. The beloved education and personal culture, and home, and peace, and honor, do come at the human call. To those who knock, these gates have always been wont to open. But' if foilowing noble paths one fails to find the thing hoped for, he at least blesses his friends and children who live after him, for his labors and merits are all garnered up in the wide bosom of his country. If the patriots of ’76 died without having found the object of their struggle, their children, all their loved ones ,and their loved country, passed into fruition. When a Moses dies in the lonely mountains, those he loves march Into the promised land. When Abraham marched toward a city

that had foundations he turned other feet and other eyes toward it, and what he may have lout to himself in happiness has been fully made up to the pilgrims who have followed him. What signifies one’s own penonal failure if only his children or his country shall, through his great hopes, come to a fairer land. Of all hopes that earth holds out Christianity ia]greatftMt. The common expectations of mankind, the vision of liberty, of property, of culture, of fame, of home, of happiness, grow dim in presence of this hope of a blessed life beyond the tomb. When John Knox was dying, a friend said to him: “John, hast thou hope?” Being unable to speak, he looked up and smiled, and so died. One of the poems says:

Thera i« • mourner and her heart la broken, She la a widow, ebo la old and poor: Her only hope la Inthateacrad token Of peace and bappineea when life la o'er. Thus all the way from the illustrious Knox down to the lowliest widow in solitude and poverty, from monarch to slave, this hope of heaven embraces us and penetrates all our best hours of meditation and wisdom. Some are ready for the event; all expect to be when the hour shall have announced itself. Can you conceive of anything more immense than this theory of eternal life? The scattered families, the parted friends, the heroes, the martyrs, the saints of all ages, the armies of little children torn from the loving anna of earth, these arc all expected to meet in a land where there shall be no pain, no sin, no death. Oh! mightiest dream that ever entered or can enter the mind of men! Applying to it the philosophy we have applied to all hope, this cannot be a delusion, but must, under the hand of the same wise Creator, be the advance herald of a solemn truth. If the hopes of man for liberty and education and civilization are not cheats, but are powerful agents making for man the very scene which they so gorgeously paint, and if they cast society at last over into actual liberty and civilization, so this hope of life beyond will prove no delusion, but a power urging the soul along toward immortality. The plan of earth seems to be to keep back the future and let it come to man little by little, a daily bread for his use. The clouds open and show him something of freedom, something of progress. These gloamings of future are called hope. Of these the most sublime is the gleaming of a life beyond the tomb. Being the most impressive and most useful and most divine, it will doubtless prove the most true. Heaven is the compensation for all the dreams that fail. It is the ocean where the streams of hope all meet. In this survey of the office of hope there is involved a lesson for those hostile to the Christian religion. Th'-se minds, often so educated and so just, should hasten to mark that it is not certainty, but it is hope that plavs the largest part in the drama of man. They know that society dares not wait for a certainty to come, but must always choose between two hopes, or between a hope and a despair. All our forefathers asked for when they sailed for this new world was a grand half-reasona-ble expectation. All that society have ever dared wait for has been the better of two hopes. He who would argue to the nature of the case should confess that a pure, beautiful influential hope must form a part of the Christian evidence. It would seem that the best conclusion to which pure reason can come would be to declare itself inadequate, unfitted to measure all the sentiments and poetry of life. The proud friends of demonstration should say: “ Thou, oh, Christian, livest in a world when hope is one of the gigantic forces, an earthquake that pushes up a beautiful continent in the midst of bitter waters, making a marsh a paradise. I perceive hope to be a aream that entrances man w’hen he is widest awake. It leads the school-boy, the pilgrim, the martyr, the hero. It wakes the mother’s song by the craole and it alone cheers her at the little grave. Hope is the electric thrill which sends the warm blood all through noble hearts, hence I shill not ask thee whether thou hast seen heaven, but shall hope that thou and I may come at last to its blessed gates. In all your meditations about religion confess, my friends, the peculiarity of a philosophy whose perfect vindication must come after death. The Christian cannot help this. The veil is not one of his weaving. It was woven in the loom of nature and hangs before the skeptic as well as before the Christian. Confess the value of Christiah Hope, and disturb it not in whatever heart it sleeps. In fact, for this hope throw away all else and spring thou into this fiery chariot that travels between the two worlds—the seen and the unseen.