HOPE'S HARVEST, AND THE FAR-OFF INTEREST OF TEARS.
The soul is monarch of three kingdoms. Man lives at once in the present, the past and the future. Memory presides over yesterday; to-day is ruled by reason; to-morrow is under the sway of hope. The ancient seer who stood by the historic vine reflecting how the rain of yesterday had disappeared to give its sweet liquors to the roots only to reappear to-morrow in purple clusters, gave us a beautiful image of himself. Each human life is like unto a vine—its trunk manifest in the present; its roots deeply buried in the past; its branches throwing themselves forward, ripening fruit for days to come. Life is a solid column of days all compacted together. To-day's usefulness is in the number of wise, happy and helpful yesterdays, whose accumulated treasures crowd forward the soul's present activities. But for his yesterdays stored up in memory man would be impotent for any heroic thought or deed. He would remain a perpetual infant. As the child journeys away from the cradle memory gathers up and carries forward faces, words, books, arts, sciences, literatures, and these recollections are embalmed and transmitted as soul-capital, legacies unspeakably precious.
Yesterday, therefore, is no mausoleum of dead deeds; no storehouse of mummies. Memory is a granary holding seed for to-morrow's sowing; memory is an armory holding weapons for to-morrow's battles, memory is a medicine-chest with balms for to-morrow's hurts; memory is a library with wisdom for to-morrow's emergency. Yesterday holds the full store of to-day's civilization, contains our tools, conveniences, knowledges; contains our battlefields and victories; above all gives us Bethlehem and Calvary. But alone man's yesterday is impotent; his to-morrow insufficient. The true man binds all his days together with an earnest, intense, passionate purpose. His yesterdays, to-days and to-morrows march together, one solid column, animated by one thought, constrained by one conspiracy of desire, energizing toward one holy and helpful purpose, to serve man and love God.
God governs man through the regency of hope. The reasons thereof are self-evident. Man is born a long way from home. No cradle rocks a full-orbed manhood. The babe begins a mere handful of germs; a bough of unblossomed buds. It is a weary climb from nothing to manhood, at its best. As things rise in the scale of being the distance between birth and maturity widens. Mollusks are born close up to their full estate, sandflies mature in two days, butterflies in two weeks, humming-birds in as many months. But let no man think the vast all-shadowing redwood trees of California grew in a mushroomic night. When the seed first thrust its rootlets down into the soil and its plumule up to the sunshine it entered upon a long career. Saved by hope after 800 years of growth it gives shade to myriads of birds; beams for lath and loom and ship in the service of industry; lends pen and pencil to poet and artist in the service of beauty; through desk and pew enters into man's intellectual and moral life; through instruments of convenience strengthens the sweet amenities of the home; working, it also waited and is saved by hope.
Man stands at the very summit of creation. He is at the head of all that creep and swim and walk and fly. Preparatory to his dominion he begins with the lowest and runs the whole gamut of experience of all living things below him. And hope alone can save him as he journeys upward through all the intermediate stages on his way to his throne and his God. Big with destiny, he is saved by hope. Not to-day and not yesterday can suffice. The present offers only standing room—four-and-twenty hours. Memory is a bin banked with snowdrifts, not the waving harvest-fields. Man's life is all in front of him. His large endowment asks for an extended period of time, asks seventy years for skill toward his body; asks an immortal destiny for mind and heart. He is saved by hope and futurity.
Consider the scope and functions of hope and aspiration. Man is governed from above and within; while rocks, birds, beasts are governed from below and without. Gravity holds the bowlder in its place. The channel saith to the river: "Thus far and no farther." The fawn that is struck, the lion that strikes, the eagle dwelling above both, are controlled by fear. The charioteer drives his steeds from behind and controls by rein and scourge. But man is controlled from within and in front. God does not scourge his children forward through whips of fear. Hopes moving on before him lure him onward. The Italian artist shows us the child passing near the precipice. Then drew near a gentle guardian spirit. The unseen friend rolled along the pathway apples of Paradise and the child, following after with shouts of glee, was lured from danger. To the beauty of the artist's thought Homer's story adds elements of instruction. When the Grecian boy was pursued by a giant whose breath was fire, whose hand held a huge club, two invisible beings lent help. One took the boy's hand and lifted him forward, the other casting an invisible cord over him flew before him until his speed was doubled and the palace gates gave shelter. Oh, beautiful story of God's gentle rule o'er men! When troubles sweep over the world like sheeted storms, when men fear exceedingly and strong men cower and shrink and little ones believe the next step to be the precipice, then God smiles. Striking some sweet bell he sends forth messengers to lure men forward; they hang stars in man's night; they whisper that the twilight is nothing, since it is morning twilight; that fears are bats and owls hooting at the dawn; that hope is a lark singing the new day; that God reigns and all is well. Then depart all fears and superstitions. The courage of the future comes; the columns begin a forward march. These upward movements of society are the yearnings of God's heart lifting his children forward by hope.
Hope and aspiration also furnish the secret springs of civilization. All things useful and beautiful were once only hopes and ideas. Free institutions are ideals of liberty, crystallized into word forms. Tools and instruments are ideals dressed up in iron clothes. The early forest man dwelt in a cave; ached with cold and moaned with hunger. Going into the forest to dig roots he found honey hived by the bees and nuts stored up by squirrels against the winter. Straightway hope suggested to him a larger granary, whence hath come all man's bins and storehouses. Man plucked a large plum and found it sour, and another plum small, but sweet. Hope suggested that he unite the two and strike through the abundant acid juices of the one with the sugar of the other. Thence came all vineyards and orchards. Digging in the soil tired him, but hope suggested that his pet ox might pull his forked stick; when the wooden stick wore blunt hope replaced it with an iron point; when the iron point refused to scour hope suggested steel; when the steel made his burden light and doubled the pace of his steeds, hope suggested a seat on the plow; when the riding-plow gave him time to think, hope suggested he could increase the harvest by doubling the depth, when the weight was overheavy for his beasts, hope suggested a steam-plow. The Kensington Museum exhibits the growth of the plow idea, as it moved from the forked stick to the "steam gang." If in this procession of material plows we could see the procession of ideal plows we would find that thoughts and hopes are a thousandfold more than material things.
By hope also do the people increase in wisdom and culture and character. Millions of men are digging and toiling twelve hours each day; and God hath sent forth hope to emancipate them from drudgery. The man digging with his pick hath a far-away look as he toils. Hope is drawing pictures of a cottage with vines over the doorway, with some one standing at the gate, a sweet voice singing over the cradle. Hope makes this home his; it rests the laborer and saves him from despair. Multitudes working in the stithy and deep mines sweeten their labor and exalt their toil by aspiring thoughts. Thinking of his little ones at home, the miner says: "My children shall not be as their father was; my drudgery is not for self, but for love's sake; the sweat of my brow is oil in the lamp of love; I will light it to-night on the sacred altar of home." Here is the secret of the rise and reign of the people. This explains all man's progress in knowledge and culture. As the fruits and flowers rise rank upon rank in response to the advancing summer, so all that is most refined and exalted in man's mind or heart bursts forth in new ideals, reforms, revolutions, in response to the revelation of that personal presence from whom all hope and aspiration incessantly proceed.
Hope's noble ministry hath grievous enemies. Among these let us include a false use of the past. Yesterday contains sins and mistakes, but multitudes err in dwelling too much upon their wrongs. Each man hath had his temptations, each his fierce conflicts and defeats, each bears grievous scars from the battle-field. Yet if one constantly revives all his old sins life will be filled with hideous specters. Memory will become a place of torment and a ghastly chamber of horrors. We shall be the children of despondency and wretchedness. Memory will be a graveyard; the past will give no light save the "will-o-the-wisp" light from putrescence and decay. All the springs of joy will be poisoned by morbid griefs that keep open old wounds. The city hath its offal heap where refuse matter is destroyed; each home its garret, the contents cast out at regular intervals; the individual throws away his old clothes, old tools, old vehicles. Why should not the soul have its refuse valley—where the past is cast out of life and memory?
Farmers' boys sometimes set steel traps by shocks of corn whither come quail and prairie chickens. Stepping upon the traps, the cruel jaws close upon foot or wing and the bleeding bird beats out its life upon the frozen ground. Memory often with cruel jaws holds men entrapped. A single error wrecks the whole life. But once forgiven of God let the sin go. Reflection upon past sins is good only so long as it produces revulsion from sin, and like a bow shoots the soul toward God and righteousness. God is like a mother who forgives the child's sin into everlasting forgetfulness. Man should be ashamed to remember what God forgets. "I will cast your sins into the depth of the sea." Someone says: "God receives the soul as the sea the bather, to return it cleansed—itself unsoiled." Gather up, therefore, all thy sins—old wrongs, old hatreds, burning angers, memories of men's treachery; stuff them into a bag and heave them into the gulf of oblivion. Your life is not in the past, but in the future. "We are saved by hope."
Multitudes may embitter their new year by undue reflections over opportunities neglected and lost in the past and denied in the present. Professor Agassiz tells of a friend who sold his farm in Pennsylvania for $5,000 to invest it in Dakota, and after losing all in the new home returned to find the German who purchased the homestead had found oil and great wealth in a swamp which he had tried to drain off. An old gentleman recently told of his refusal in 1840 to accept as payment of a small note a lot on a corner in Chicago now worth a million dollars, and he shed bitter tears over the loss of property he never owned. When Ali Hafed heard of the diamonds in India he sold his estate and went forth to seek his fortune. His successor, watering his camel in the garden, saw the gleam of gems in the white sand and discovered the Golconda mines. Had Ali Hafed had eyes to see his would have been boundless treasure at home instead of poverty, starvation and death. These and similar legends stand for the opportunities that have gone forever. How many neglected their opportunities for education; how they knocked unbidden at every door and no man opened. Others were denied culture, and now feel they are unfulfilled prophecies. Many by one error have injured eye or ear or lung or limb or nervous system. They grievously handicapped themselves. Others by ingratitude, infidelity to trusts, treachery to friends, have poisoned happiness. Repentance is theirs, and also forgiveness, but not forgetfulness. The past is full of bitterness.
Let the dead past bury its dead. The future is still ours. The trees in October willingly let go their leaves to fall into the ditch. Their life is not in last year's leaves, but in the infant buds that crowd the old leaves off. Put forth new activities. Open new furrows. Sow new seed. All the tomorrows are thine; but they are few and short. Fulfill his dictum who said: "I am as one going once across this vast continent; I would lean forth and sow as far as hand can scatter my seed. Let the angels count the bundles." No man should be discouraged in whom God believes, preserving him in life. Let hope in God sweeten life's bitterness.
Another enemy of hopefulness is found in nervous excesses and overwork. Men drain away their vitality. Ambitions unduly stimulate the brain. Many break the laws of sleep and the laws of digestion and the laws of nerve sobriety. They spend their brain capital. Then they grow hopeless toward home and business. Ill-health spreads a gloom over all life. Every judgment is pessimistic; it could not be otherwise. The jaundiced eye yellows the landscape. The sweetest music rasps like a file upon the nervous ear. Thomas Carlyle's pessimism was largely physical. He overworked upon his life of Oliver Cromwell. Maurice once said: "Carlyle believed in God down to the time of Oliver Cromwell." Once, in a moment of depression, Lyman Beecher prayed: "Lord, keep us from despising our rulers, and help them to stop acting so we cannot help despising them." Poor, nerve-racked Pascal, grew fearful lest his affection for his sister, who had nursed him through a long illness, was sinful. One day he wrote in his journal: "Lord, forgive me for loving my dear sister so much!" Afterward he drew his pen through the word "dear." Hope and trust toward God go with health. Sickliness is not saintliness. God cannot save by hope what man destroys by ill-health.
Dean Stanley used hopefulness as a test of all systems of truth. Rightly so. God is the God of hope, and his truth, like himself, carries the atmosphere of good cheer. The falsity of medievalism appears in this—it robbed men of joy and gladness. God was the center of darkness. His throne was iron. His heart was marble. His laws were huge implements of destruction. His penalties were red-hot cannon balls crashing along the sinner's pathway. Repentance toward God was moving toward the arctics and away from the tropics. Christianity was anything but "peace on earth, good will to men."
Philosophers destroyed God's winsomeness. The reformers came in to lead men away from medievalism back to God himself. Men found hope again in redemptive love. They saw that any conception of God that dispirited and depressed men was perverted and false. No man hath done more to establish this fact than him who long ago said: "Any presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ that does not come to the world as the balmy days of May comes to the unlocked northern zones; any way of preaching the love of God in Christ which is not as full of sweetness as the voice of the angels when they sang at the advent; any way of making known the proclamation of mercy which has not at least as many birds as there are in June and as many flowers as the dumb meadows know how to bring forth; any method of bringing before men the doctrine of salvation which does not make everyone feel, 'There is hope for me in God—in the divine plan, in the very nature of the organization of human life and society,' is spurious—is a slander on God and is blasphemy against his love."
Hope hath her harvest also for teachers and reformers. Often men think their work is squandered. They seem to be sowing seed not upon the Nile, to find it again abundantly, but in midocean, to sink and come to naught. Parents and teachers break their hearts, fearing their watchfulness and instruction have failed. Men sow wheat and wait six months for a harvest; but they sow moral seed Sunday and on Monday whip their children because the seed has not ripened. They forget that apples bitter in July may be sweet in August. To-day's vice in the child is often to-morrow's virtue, as acid juices through frost become saccharine. Yesterday the mother rocked a little angel in the cradle; to-day she moans: "Alas, that I should have rocked a little fox, a little serpent, a little wolf!" To-morrow the child becomes a model of truth and integrity.
The sage might have said: "It is good that woman should hope and wait." Truth's errand has always been a successful errand. Not a single social truth or civic truth or moral truth has ever been lost out of the world. Secrets of cruelty and fraud, secrets of oppression and sin perish, but nothing that makes life happier or better hath been forgotten. We do not have to keep God and truth alive, they keep us alive. Vegetable seeds can be killed, but not moral seeds. When God issues his silent command to the earth flying into winter and wheels it back toward summer, it is given to no man to put a brake upon warmth; nor can he go up against the spring with swords and banners. But easier this than staying the upward march of mankind. God is abroad upon a mission of recovery. Open thy hand, O publicist! and sow thy seed. The seed shall perish, but not the harvest.
Our childhood was pleased with the story of the old monk who was shipwrecked alone on a desert isle. He always carried with him a few roots and seeds. Planting these, he died, but sailors coming twenty years later found the isle waving with fruit trees. To the beauty of this legend let us add the truth of one who has made all this land his debtor. In 1801 a youth passed through western Pennsylvania. He was collecting apple seeds with which to found orchards in the then unbroken states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. When he came to an open, sunny spot in the forest he would plant his seeds and protect them with a brush fence. Years afterward new settlers found hundreds of these embryo orchards in the forests. Thrice he floated his canoe laden with seeds down the Ohio to the settlers in Kentucky. To this brave man, called by our Congressional Record "Johnny Appleseed," whole states owe their wealth and treasure of vineyards and orchards. This intrepid man is a beautiful type of all those who, passing through life's wastes, sow the land with God's eternal truths, whose leaves and fruits heal nations. If God remembers the roots in dark forests he will not forget his truths in human hearts. Therefore, sow thy seed. Ye are saved by hope.
The ground and basis of all hope whatsoever is God. It is his good providence and redemptive love in Jesus Christ that make us optimists. Hope is not within the scope of our wisdom or culture or skill; and hope is not in our health or tool or treasure. We journey into an unknown future. It is not given to us to know what a day or an hour of the new year may bring forth. How impotent are the wisest and strongest in the hour when we hear the sound of the ocean and in darkness ford the deep and dangerous river, beyond which is high and eternal noon. What can the child on some great ocean steamer caught in a winter's storm do to overcome the tempest? Can it drive the fierce blasts back to their northern haunts? Can its little hand hold the wheel and guide the great ship? Can its voice still the billows that can crush the steamer like an egg-shell? Can its breath destroy the icy coat of mail that covers all the decks? What the child can do is trust the Captain who has brought this same ship through a hundred hard storms. It can rest and trust and hope. And all we upon this great earth-ship have been caught, not in a storm, but in the gulf stream of God's providence. The warm tropic currents sweep us on to the heavenly harbor. The trade winds above aid the forward flight. More than all else is the larger planetary movement that sweeps gulf stream, winds and ship onward towards the infinite. Soon shall we enter into quiet waters and cast out our anchor.
Looking forward, let us hope and cleanse all fear out of life—trust God, love him and rejoice. Even our largest problems need not dispirit us. Problems are not to be analyzed, but accepted. He who analyzes a flower loses it. He who cracks a diamond to see what it is, is without both gem and knowledge. Life's great questions are seeds. Plant a seed, then wait. Some day the flower and fruit will explain the seed. It is well to lay aside difficult questions to be asked some day at the throne of God. Then we will look back to smile at what now disturbs us exceedingly. Remember the Russian Cathedral—travelers tell us the din and noise of the crowds thronging under the dome to those above the dome become a strain of soft music. It is good to hope and wait. Because God lives and loves, man should enter the future as he enters temple or cathedral—to dedicate all its days to hope and aspiration.