The Gospel of Hope

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.”—Romans XV. 4.

Many persons are asking, “How can we recommend the Bible to Hindoos and Mussulmans? How can we show that it has an authority which does not belong to the Vedas or any later books which Brahmins account sacred; to the Koran, which the Prophet is said to have received by express dictation? With what apologies shall we go forth to convince the learned? How shall we bring those who are ignorant to feel that a book so strange, so utterly unlike any to which they have been accustomed, has any claim upon their attention?”

Various answers,—all plausible, all containing suggestions that may be worthy of reflection,—have been made and will be made to these inquiries. I think that perhaps St. Paul may give us more light respecting them than any modern doctors, however well they may seem to be acquainted with the circumstances of our age. For he was forced to consider this very subject. He was the Apostle of the Gentiles. The Scriptures he knew—those which had been the food of his childhood, and were the food of his manhood—belonged to the Jews. They were indeed translated into Greek; perhaps, from his education at Tarsus, he was more conversant with the translation than with the original. But the history in them was the history of a peculiar people, a people separated from the other peoples of the earth; the songs, the maxims, the discourses in them referred to their history, asserted the distinction of the Jews, rejoiced in their past triumphs, and foretold fresh triumphs, appeared to speak of other races as doomed to overthrow or perdition. What was he to do with these Scriptures? How could he hope that they would ever make their way among the very heathens whom the highest authorities, the most learned commentators, those under whom he himself had studied, believed that they shut out from the favour of God?

It was a tremendous doubt, complicated still further—not only by the earliest, the most deeply fixed habits of the Apostle’s own mind—but by the opinions of those who had embraced the Gospel. There were respectable Jewish converts who taught that the Gentiles must be circumcised before they could in anywise apply the meaning or the promises of the Scriptures to themselves. There were Gentile converts—men calling St. Paul their spiritual father, confident that they had caught the pure sense of his doctrine—who imagined that the Law was in direct contradiction to the Gospel, that the books which contained the Law could only be precious to them as illustrating their immense superiority to those who received it or still clung to it. There were Alexandrian converts who spoke of the letter of the Old Scriptures as comparatively worthless, but as containing a deep philosophy, a hidden lore, which the initiated were enabled to search out, to preserve, perhaps to expand.

Which of these opinions did he embrace, on which did he act? The Epistle which is chosen for the Second Sunday in Advent, that from which my text is taken, that on which our Collect is founded, is the classical passage on the subject. There he speaks expressly of the use of the Jewish Scriptures to Gentiles. He quotes passages from the Old Testament vindicating the application of them to Gentiles. He speaks of our Lord as a “Minister of the Circumcision to confirm the promises made unto the Fathers: and that the Gentiles might glorify God for His Mercy.” He adopts one of the very phrases which must have been often in the mouth of his Jewish opponents, and turns it to his own account. He speaks of a Root of Jesse who should rise to reign over the Gentiles, and in Whom the Gentiles should trust. And he ends as he had begun, by treating the encouragement of Hope as the great benefit and blessing of the Scriptures. He prays the God of Hope to fill them with all joy and peace in believing, that they may abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost.

This is a different way of looking at the subject from any one of those to which I have alluded. At first, one may feel a difficulty in connecting it with any of them. Strict Jews, exclusive Gentiles, philosophical Alexandrians, might each complain that it did not meet their difficulty, but left it just where it was. “Hope,” they might say, “is of course one of the emotions which the reading of the Scriptures produces. So also is Fear. But how can you explain their suitableness for Jews or for Gentiles, their bearing upon one age, or another age, or all ages, by fixing on this particular influence that proceeds from them?” The objection sounds reasonable. Let us see how it might be refuted by actual experiment.

I. Let us suppose St. Paul turning to those who thought the Old Scriptures had an exclusive reference to the Jew. The ground for their claim was obvious. The Scriptures, from first to last, were speaking of a covenant with a particular family; of the methods used to fence off that family; of the sins into which it had fallen, through contact with the nations round about; of the punishments which had avenged those sins; of the blessings which appertained to the faithful Israelite; of the curse which every lapse into idolatry involved. It was not the letter only of special texts, but the scheme and analogy of the whole record, which appeared to justify this interpretation.

“Be it so,” says the Apostle. “I understand this plea as well as you can. I have felt the force of it more than any of you. And since I have discovered these Scriptures to be books of hope, I have felt the worth of that separation of our race, of that careful discipline, of those protests against idolatry, of that terrible sentence accumulating from generation to generation upon every idolatrous practice, as I never felt it before. For I have perceived that that separation must have an object; that it cannot by possibility be an end in itself; that its end must be such a manifestation of God as there has never been in the world yet; that its end must be such a dominion of God over men as there has never been in the world yet; that its end must be the extirpation of idolatry. Less than this I see cannot satisfy the express words of Holy Scripture, the promises upon which holy men lived and died, the desires and longings which were kindled in them, and which they felt not to be the most unreal, but the most substantial portion of their lives. These words, then, of the Prophets, respecting the Gentiles, are not casual words, exceptions in the general course of their thoughts. They explain whither their thoughts, in their highest, which were yet their soberest, moments, were tending. They explain how much higher God’s thoughts were than their thoughts; how true it is that if men are able to hope at all, it is because He in whose image they are made is the God of Hope.”

And this I think would have been St. Paul’s answer to the notion about a balance of hope and fear which these Scriptures are supposed to preserve. There are two kinds of fear which they inculcate. There is a fear of all the evil consequences which ensue from distrust in God; from thinking of Him as an enemy and not as a Deliverer; from supposing that His presence is not with the host, or that He cannot provide bread in the wilderness. The Scriptures are ever pointing out signs and examples of these evil consequences, are holding them forth as warnings to after-generations. And by doing so they are giving the most unbounded encouragement to trust and hope, to the continual acknowledgment of God as the Inspirer of Hope, as the Fulfiller of Hope. There is another kind of fear which these Scriptures are encouraging. It is what they describe as the fear of the Lord, the fear of the righteous God Himself. This was a fear which the worshippers of visible gods could not cherish. Such gods might be played with, trifled with, scolded, even by those who trembled before them. The old comedies of Greece prove it. The language of the modern Italian peasant to his idols proves it equally. Awe must be reserved for that which we feel to be substantial and holy, for One Whom we did not make, but Who made us. The fear of Psalmists and Prophets was for the God Who had brought them with a high hand out of the house of bondage, for the God Who was faithful, just, longsuffering. “There is forgiveness with Thee,” they said, “therefore shalt Thou be feared.” Their countrymen who had lost their faith in such a God as this, who believed in a God unmerciful, unforgiving, from whom it was a blessing to escape, were cowards; but they had not one particle of the fear which the holy men spoke of; they feared where no fear was. The others feared God because their hope was in Him. Take away their hope, their belief in Him as a God of Hope, and their fear would have vanished with it.

II. But there were those, I said, who vaunted loudly of the Gospel which was preached to them, of the New Covenant into which Baptism had admitted them, and therefore spoke scornfully of the Law, and of the Old Covenant. St. Paul could surely understand this state of mind also, seeing that language which he had himself used, which was characteristic of him, furnished the justification of it. He had contrasted the Gospel with the Law; he had declared the weakness of the Old Covenant, the strength and depth of the New. Could he evade the force of his own discourses? What nice distinction could he draw which still saved the credit of the old books, without obliging him to say that he had claimed privileges for the Gentiles which were not theirs? He resorted to no evasions; he was provided with no nice distinctions. This one principle, that the Scriptures were Scriptures of Hope, enabled him to show the Gentiles that they would be making the most enormous sacrifice, if they renounced their claim to the treasures of the Jewish Books, if they severed their Church from the Church of the Fathers. Everything in the stability of their faith depended upon the question, whether they looked upon it as having suddenly dropped from Heaven in the reign of Augustus, or as the unfolding of that truth which had been from the beginning, as the revelation of Him Whose goings forth were from everlasting. If they received the Jewish Scriptures as testimonies of the method by which God had been preparing the world for the manifestation of Him Who had been before all worlds, and by Whom all things consisted, they would have a sense of the permanence of God’s counsels, of the permanence of God Himself. If they rejected these Scriptures, and chose to date the commencement of their Church from the time of our Lord’s Advent, or from the day of Pentecost, they would have no sense of a progressive revelation, of a light waxing brighter and brighter to the perfect day. They would think that the principles of the Divine government were changed, not discovering themselves from age to age. They would think that the God of the old world was not the God of the new; that the one had conquered the other.

What would be the effect of this habit of feeling upon their thoughts of their own Gentile forefathers? Would they rise in greatness as the Jewish people fell? No. There would be no witness of the Light which had been lighting them through all their dark pilgrimage; no testimony that the righteous Being, Whom they had confounded with the works of His hands, had not forgotten them, but had watched over them, had been making Himself known to them, had been preparing them for a better day. There would be no longer the Jewish Scriptures, to speak of One Who was a God of Righteousness and without iniquity, a God Who cared for all the families of the earth. The history of each nation would only look like a history of successive delusions and impostures. The glorious deeds which had been done, and thoughts which had been thought, by the heathens of old, would be referred to some evil origin.

What would be the effect of this rejection of the Old Scriptures upon the time to come? That very distinction of Law and Gospel, which had been the plea for it, would be obliterated. The New Testament Church would make its own Law, and would set that Law above the Gospel with which it was entrusted, or would confound one with the other. Discarding the testimony of the Old Scripture against idolatry as inapplicable to its condition, it would introduce a new system of idolatry, more complicated, more difficult to eradicate than that which it superseded, because investing the habits and notions of Heathenism with the dress and titles of the New Dispensation. It would make the world no longer a world of Hope; rather a world of dark fear and dread, which must look up, not to a God of Hope, but to one who was waiting to cast his creatures into utter despair.

III. St. Paul could have had as little difficulty in understanding those who sought for a mystical meaning beneath the letter of Scripture, as the maintainers of either of the opinions which I have been just considering. He had said himself, “The letter killeth; but the spirit giveth life.” Probably no one had ever suffered more from Rabbinical commentators, who were the slaves of the letter; no one knew them so well. But the spirit which revealed itself to him beneath the letter, was the spirit of the Son of Man. He found Him speaking in all the words of the Book to the hearts and consciences of men. He would suffer no phrases or maxims to be substituted for the living voice of the living Teacher, or to intercept the communication between Him and His disciples. He was never therefore in search for peculiar or recondite meanings. The most human meaning, the one which found its way most directly to the inner mind of the most ordinary mortal, was that which bore for him the clearest tokens of a Divine origin. The forms and modes of the utterance might be various, for those to whom they were addressed were various. But in every case the Divine Mind was seeking, not to wrap itself in veils, but to strip off the veils which are over the minds of men, and hinder them from apprehending it. The parable was the simplest, most natural way of imparting truth to those whose ears were dull of hearing. The moment the ears were unstopped, Christ would declare the mysteries of His Kingdom, would speak plainly of the Father.

How different was this conception from that of those who thought the vulgar only capable of coarse, palpable imitations or counterfeits of truth, who would not scruple even to feed them with falsehoods, that the contrast between them and the wise might be the more conspicuous! But whence arose this difference? Because the Apostle looked upon the Scriptures as written for men’s learning, that they through patience and comfort of them might have hope. Because the whole education of man by his Maker, he regarded as an education of hope; every new hill that is surmounted opening some larger vision; every level plain and dusty road that is traversed leading still to some end. Because he believed that the knowledge of God, which is eternal life, was that for which He formed, not sages or saints, but men, in His Son. Because he looked forward to the removal of one obstruction after another to this knowledge, till the earth should be filled with the glory of the Lord, and all flesh should see it together.

IV. I have said that I believe St. Paul can give us a help, in some of our most pressing and immediate difficulties, which modern teachers cannot give. Perhaps I should have said first that he can show us what kind of help we need, and where it is to be sought. One who feels more strongly and keenly than most of us, that there is an immense separation between St. Paul’s tone of feeling and thinking and our own, has observed that there never was an age in which Hope was so little alive as this. The two opinions sustain and elucidate each other. Our difference from the mind of St. Paul is explained at once, if the spirit of hope, which filled and possessed his heart, has departed from us. If that statement be true—and how much ground there is for it, the conscience of each one of us testifies—the apostolical tongue must have become an unknown tongue for Christians of the nineteenth century. As long as this gulf exists I cannot imagine that the most learned criticism, or the loudest expressions of reverence for the authority and Divine origin of the Scriptures, will bridge it over. We may understand more of the text of the Scriptures, more of all the habits of the people which the Scriptures speak of, than our fathers did; fifty thousand copies of them may be circulated in our days for one that was circulated in theirs; we may be immeasurably more jealous than they were of any doubts respecting their genuineness, of any confusion of them with other books; and yet the Book may teach us less than it taught them; it may be less dear to our hearts than it was to theirs; just because it did find in them something of hope to entertain it and translate its letters into life, just because that hope is dried up in us, and so the letter remains a mere letter, or becomes a killing letter. Wherever it is not so,—wherever you find persons on sick-beds, in lonely hovels, to whom, with few outward aids, the Book has interpreted itself, has become indeed a Word of Life, it is because the Spirit of Hope has come to that sick-bed, to that lonely hovel, and has discovered in the words man’s proper nutriment, the encouragement and assurance for which he craves.

V. Are then all the advantages which we have over our fathers, the experience of history, the severity of criticism, the manifold illustrations of former ages which travellers and philologers and even students of nature are daily contributing, to be wasted or to be of no avail for these Scriptures, because this one gift is wanting to us? May we not rather say, my brethren, that God is teaching us at this very time how needful and precious all these treasures which He has bestowed upon us are; how ready He is to impart that one which we think has been withheld? A world of old faiths and old traditions is unfolded before you, a world of books containing these faiths and traditions, a world of men, either governed by them or just ready to lose them, not knowing what shall replace them. And this world is placed under you. You have conquered it and are reconquering it, not chiefly by arms and physical force, but by the might of moral energy, endurance, hope. You know that when you have so reconquered it, your work is only just beginning. You have then to re-civilize it, to lay the foundations of its civilization on quite other foundations than those on which they have stood hitherto. You want to know by what means you shall recommend your sacred books to a people who have so many of their own, how you shall make them feel that yours have an authority which theirs have not. I answer, not speaking my own words, but the words of him whom we call the Apostle of the Gentiles, of him who we believe was the means of spreading the Gospel through the nations of the Roman Empire, who announced the foundation upon which the civilization of Christian Europe was to stand; “Proclaim your book to be a book of Hope: show that you think it is so, show that it fills you with hope for yourselves and for mankind. Then the difference between it and other Shasters, let them claim what antiquity they may, let them allege what derivation they may, will be bright as the noonday sun. Then the difference will not be a dry, hard one, to be ascertained by minute comparisons, by special-pleading apologies, by denunciations of that which has been dear to those whom you are wishing to move. It will manifest itself to the conscience of men in the sight of God. They will feel that it is a book of hope, because it kindles hope in them, because it delivers them from a gloom and despair from which nothing that they have heard before has delivered them.”

I need not stop to prove that the largest knowledge we can obtain of all that the people among whom we go have been thinking and uttering, will be of unspeakable worth to those who are preaching this Gospel of Hope, who are pointing out the applications of these Scriptures of Hope to men in circumstances the most unlike those in which they were written. I need not show that such knowledge will be turned to the best account, and will be likely to prove of most avail, when it is not used for the purpose of confutation, but of illustration, not to expose false notions, but to bring out the whole truth which both exposes and destroys them. Nor need I prove that simple men, with only a small amount of this knowledge, if they are endued with strong sympathy,—if they have the art of recognizing a brother through all outward disguises,—if they are glowing with the life of hope,—may do great works, and exercise a mighty power provided they know, as such men will know, what they cannot do, what they must leave to men trained in a different school, fitted with other armour.

But the subject of which I must speak—for if we are not clear upon it, all these remarks are utterly futile—is the possibility of our acquiring that quality in which we have too much reason to think that we are most of us sadly deficient, though it has been wonderfully awakened by suffering and necessity (why may I not add, despair?) in our Indian soldiers, and in the civilians who have become soldiers when none other were to be had.

I have partly indicated how this blessing may reach us. We too may gain it through despair. We may find that we have no fountain of hope in ourselves; that the springs which at one time we fancied were inexhaustible, are almost dry. And so we may learn, as we have never learnt before, as our fathers never learned, what is the force of that expression of the Apostle—that strange expression to which I have referred already,—God of Hope. Which of us would have dared to adopt such a phrase, if St. Paul had not sanctioned it and issued it? Which of us would not have found it inconsistent with some theory he had formed of the Divine Omniscience or Omnipotence? And so it is, incompatible—absolutely incompatible with all theories, and with all high-sounding abstract titles, by which we have circumscribed the Divine Nature, and then flattered ourselves with the vastness of our own conceptions. But, oh, how comely and how reviving does such a name sound in the ears of the actual fighter, whose theories have failed him altogether, whose grand abstractions have vanished into air at the touch of real suffering, but who wants a living God, incomprehensible by His creatures, but able to comprehend and to sustain all His creatures! What joy to hear of a God Who hopes with us and for us, of Whose hope that which is highest in man is the counterpart and reflection! What consolation to know that there is in Him that fountain of Hope at which our springs may be perpetually renewed! What an interpretation of our saddest experiences, to discover that we could not be acquainted with His fulness till we had learnt something of our own emptiness!

And all such discoveries—this is the most cheering fact of all—are not for ourselves, but to make us better teachers of the world. “How,” the missionary asks, before he has any practical knowledge of the field in which he has to labour, “how am I to convince heathen people that the Bible is the Word of God?” He comes face to face with the people whom he is to convince, and another question forces itself upon him. “The Word of God,—of what God? Am I to convince this worshipper of Siva that the Bible comes from him? Am I to leave him with the thought that the Destroyer has sent this book as the interpretation of his will? Am I to accumulate evidences, to remove objections against its Divine origin, only that it may be supposed to have this origin?” But what can he do? First, I should think and hope he would turn from his doubts to his prayers. He would say, “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Thou Whose perfect Image He is! Thou Whose Will He came to do! Save me from blaspheming Thy name! Save me from perverting the book which is the pure and blessed witness of Thee into a witness for Thine enemy!” And then, might not the answer to this prayer come in words drawn directly from the Book,—no gloss upon it, but its very letter? “The God of Hope? It is of Him I must testify to this people. It is to Him I must ascribe these Scriptures. As I do, how all the men and women who are spoken of in them breathe again! How sure I become that the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is not the God of the dead, but of the living! How each, as he falls, hands the torch to the next runner! How I see the light growing brighter and brighter, till He in whose hand are the seven stars, Himself comes forth! And when He does come forth, is it not to beget men to a new and living hope by the resurrection from the dead? Is it not to make that hope effectual for all mankind? Is it not to promise a final Advent when He, the Preserver and Deliverer, shall be declared to be Lord of all, to the glory of God the Father? Here indeed is a continuous book, because a book of Hope. Here is that which may cheer those who have kept up, amidst infinite confusions, the dream of a God who makes Himself incarnate, that he may be a deliverer,—the dream of voluntary sacrifice,—the dream of a glorious Avatar! The Book can set these dreams in order, can show how substantial they are, can remove the abominations with which they have been mingled, by telling from Whom they have proceeded, in Whom they are fulfilled.”

It might be thought that we should find readier access to the minds of those who use the Koran, because they recognize the holy men of the Elder Scriptures as theirs, because they do not deny that Jesus was sent by God, because the idea of a sacred writing which is given by God is so familiar to their minds. Facts have not justified, and do not justify, this expectation. There is a harder, more impenetrable front presented to any approach of Christ’s Gospel by those who appear to have so many points of contact with it, than by the professors of any other faith in the world. Nor can it be said that the opposition is, in any real or practical sense, weakened by the weakening of all the energies which once made Mahometanism a terror to the Nations. The vis inertiae is mightier for resistance than the vital force which belonged to them in other days. It must be so, it ought to be so. The despair of the fatalist should be more directly antagonistic to a message of hope than even the most perverted hope. And it is a most instructive, a most awful lesson and warning to Christendom, that the names and maxims of Scripture, when they become mere names and maxims,—when they are changed into dead letters or are only associated with fictitious legends—are more than ineffectual; they darken and stifle the conscience; they hinder the voice of the living God from reaching it. The Mahometan theory respecting the dictation of their holy book, as far as it has dominion over their minds, makes the understanding of our book impossible. A book which assumes man to be made in the likeness of God, because the Man is His perfect likeness; which affirms that the Spirit of God dwells with the spirits of men to raise and quicken them; which therefore, instead of treating the words of God as most pure and perfect when they do not come through men, when they are not connected with the thoughts, struggles, hopes of men,—makes their influence over men, their admission into the hearts of men, their power in awakening all the energies and hopes of men the test of their sacredness and divinity, must be a riddle to any people who recognize an unclosed chasm between God and Man, and therefore at last worship the letters which they suppose to have come from God, instead of God Himself.

But though this is not the opening through which the hopes our Scriptures hold forth can find their entrance into the Mahometan, there must be some opening. No men want hope as much as they do; no men are so forced to betake themselves to dreams of the past (sometimes, it would seem, to the possibility of recovering an empire if they cannot recover a faith), that they may escape the burden of the present. They did once expect to make the world one great Empire of God, from which all idolatry should be banished; they do still look forward to a final Advent for judgment. Let us show them that we cherish both these expectations. Let us tell them that what the arms of earnest passionate warriors could not effect, in putting down every visible thing which exalts itself into the place of the invisible God, in Heathendom or Christendom, we look to be accomplished one day by the proclamation, “The Kingdoms of the Earth are the Kingdoms of our God and of His Christ.” Let us show that we leave outward force to deal with outward crimes, but that for the reformation and renovation of society we hope in Him Who came upon earth in great humility to claim all powers that the gods of the heathen had usurped, for his Father; to show that the enemies of men were His enemies; Who will come in His glorious judgment, to satisfy every hope of those who have hoped in Him most, for themselves and for mankind.