And is it not well for us from time to time to open the gates of our own souls, and hold a similar consistory?—to make solemn inquisition with our hearts in their seasons of trouble and disquietude?
"Why art thou cast down?" Is it outward trial that assails thee? Has calamity abridged thy earthly comforts? Have the golden heaps thou mayest have been a lifetime in amassing, dissolved like a snow-wreath;—the waxen wings of capricious fortune, when thou wast soaring highest, melting like those of fabled Icarus of old, and bringing thee helpless to the ground? Or is it sickness that has dulled thine eye, paralysed thy limb, and ploughed its furrows on thy cheek; shutting out from thee the din of a busy world, and chaining thee down to a couch of languishing? Or is it the treachery of thy trusted friend that has wounded thee; blighting thine affections, crushing thy hopes, dashing thy cup of earthly bliss to the ground? Or is it bereavement that has made gaps in thy loved circle; torn away the fixtures which gave thy dwelling and life itself all its gladness and joy?
"Hope thou in God." The creature has perished. God is imperishable! Thou mayest be saying in the bitterness of thy spirit, "All these things are against me;" there may be no gleam of light in the tempest, no apparent reason for the dark dispensation; you feel it is with stammering lips and a misgiving heart you give utterance to the reluctant word, "Thy will be done." But, "My soul, wait thou only upon God;" (or, as Calvin translates this, "Be silent before God;") "for my expectation is from Him."[29] "Commit also thy way unto the Lord, and He shall bring it to pass."[30] Here is the province of faith,—implicit trust in dark dealings. God brings His people into straits; sends often what is baffling and unaccountable, to lead them devoutly to say, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Oh, beautiful is it thus to see Hope sitting, like the sea-bird, calmly on the crested wave! While others (strangers to the peace of the gospel) are beating their breasts in tumultuous grief, indulging in wild paroxysms of rebellious sorrow,—beautiful is it to see the smitten one prostrate at the feet of the great Chastener, saying through tear-drops of resignation, "Even so, Father; for so it seems good in Thy sight!" Believe it, in the apparently rough voice of thy God, there is, as in the case of Joseph to his brethren, tones of dissembled love, disguised utterances of affection—"Although thou sayest thou canst not see Him, yet judgment is before Him; therefore trust thou in Him."[31]
Besides, this lofty grace of Hope requires stern discipline to bring it into exercise, and to develop its noble proportions. It is the child of tribulation. The apostle thus traces its pedigree—"Tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, Hope."[32] As there can be no rainbow in the natural heavens without the cloud, so Hope cannot span the moral firmament, with its triumphal arch, without the clouds of tribulation. As the mother eagle is said, when other expedients fail, to put a thorn in the side of her nest to urge her young brood to fly, so tribulation is the thorn which drives Hope to the wing.
"And thou shalt yet praise Him." "Yet!" We cannot venture to scan or measure that word. It may be after many bitter tears of sorrow;—it may be after many struggles with a murmuring heart;—many storms may still sweep—many hours of pining sickness may be endured—many a rough and thorny path may have to be trodden—the harp may be muffled in sadness to the last; but, "at evening-time it shall be light." There is a season infallibly coming when the fettered tongue shall be loosed—the lingering cloud dispelled—and faith's triumph complete; when, with regard to the very dispensation on earth which caused you so much perplexity, you will be able triumphantly to say, "I know" (yea, I SEE) "that Thy judgments are right, and that Thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me."[33]
But your depression may proceed from a different cause. It may not be outer trial, but inward sources of disquietude which are causing despondency and doubt. It may be thoughts regarding your spiritual condition. Latent corruption in a partially renewed and sanctified heart,—the power of remaining sin robbing you of your peace; at times leading you to question whether you have any real interest in Gospel blessings and Gospel hopes—whether you have not long ago quenched the strivings of the Holy Spirit by your impenitence and unbelief—whether your hopes of heaven may not after all be a shadowy delusive dream. "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" Who, I ask, is teaching you to breathe out these penitential sighings after a happiness to which at present you feel you are a stranger? Who is it that is teaching you thus to interrogate yourself about the erring past? It is not Nature's work. If there be within you one true breathing after repentance and return, that secret aspiration is the work of that Spirit who, although He will not always strive, is hereby shewing you that He is striving still with you! Think of all that God hath done for you in the past, and is still willing to do. After the gift of His Son,—after such an expenditure of wrath and suffering on the head of a guiltless Surety, and all this that a way of reconciliation might be opened up,—think how dishonouring it would be to distrust either His ability or His willingness to save you. Having bestowed this greatest boon, He will "with Him also freely give you all things." Turn away from self,—sinful self, righteous self, condemned self,—and direct your believing regards to Him who is "the Hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof." Keep your eye steadily fixed on the infinite grandeur of His finished work and righteousness. Look to Jesus and believe! Look to Jesus and live! Nay, more; as you look to Him, hoist your sails, and buffet manfully the sea of life. Do not remain in the haven of distrust, or sleeping on your shadows in inactive repose, or suffering your frames and feelings to pitch and toss on one another like vessels idly moored in a harbour. The religious life is not a brooding over emotions, grazing the keel of faith in the shallows, or dragging the anchor of hope through the oozy tide-mud, as if afraid of encountering the healthy breeze. Away! with your canvas spread to the gale, trusting in Him who rules the raging of the waters. The safety of the timid bird is to be on the wing, if its haunt be near the ground,—if it fly low, it exposes itself to the fowler's net or snare. If we remain grovelling on the low ground of feeling and emotion, we shall find ourselves entangled in a thousand meshes of doubt and despondency, temptation and unbelief. "But surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of THAT WHICH HATH A WING"[34]—(marginal reading.) "They that wait (or hope) in the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles."[35]
Hope strengthens and invigorates her pinions the higher she soars. She gathers courage from the past, and looks with eagle eye to the future. "I know," says Paul, "in whom I have believed," (hoped, or trusted,) "and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him." "I will hope continually," says David, "and will yet praise Thee more and more."[36] Again, using a kindred emblem—the bird in the tempest rushing for shelter under the mother's wing—"Thou hast BEEN my help, THEREFORE in the shadow of Thy wings will I rejoice."[37]
Can such be said of the world's hopes? Does experience lead to repose in them with similar implicit confidence? Hope—the hope of earthly good, and earthly joy, and earthly happiness—is often (too often) the mirage of life; the bubble on the stream, tinted with evanescent glory, a flash of prismatic beauty, and then gone! Multitudes flock to this enchantress in her cave, and though mocked and duped, and mocked and duped again, still they haunt her oracle, and kiss her magic wand. She has built for them again and again air castles—turret on turret, buttress on buttress, gilded dome and glittering minaret, and these have melted like frost-work. But yet these Babel builders, with the same avidity as ever, return to the work, and again the fantastic battlements are piled high in mid air!
We do not condemn these noble aspirations and struggles of this noble emotion;—far from it. What would the world be without Hope? It is the oil which keeps its vast machinery in play; it is the secret of all success—the incentive to all enterprise. Annihilate hope, and you blot out a sun from the firmament. Annihilate hope, and the husbandman would forsake his furrow, the physician his patient, the merchant his traffic; the student would quench his midnight lamp; science would at this hour have been lisping its alphabet, and art and philosophy would have been in their infancy.
But this we say, that if so much is perilled on a peradventure;—if hope—the ignis fatuus of earth—be so greedily pursued,—why the cold and careless indifference regarding "the hope which maketh not ashamed"—the hope which is beyond the possibility of disappointment; promises which never fail; words which rest on a firmer and surer basis than the foundations of earth and the pillars of heaven? Shall the disappointed hewer still go on patching the shivered and broken earthly cistern? Shall the man of science, undeterred by successive failures, pursue his unwearied analysis? Shall the merchant remain unbaffled by adverse markets that have drained his coffers, or successive storms that have stranded his vessels and wrecked his cargo? Shall the fragments of a brave army re-muster at the bugle call, and, amid dying comrades around and a shower of iron hail in front, return with undaunted hearts to the charge? Shall pining captives in a beleaguered garrison, pressed by famine, decimated by disease, outnumbered by force—shall these light their beacon-fires of hope, and sit to the last by their smouldering ashes, struggling on, either till calm endurance win its recompence, or until hope and life expire together? And shall the spiritual builder, or merchant, or soldier, be left alone coward and faint-hearted, and give way to unworthy distrust, or pusillanimous despair; and that, too, when the guarantees of their hope are so amazing? Listen to them! What words could be stronger? what pledges more inviolable? "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began."[38] "Wherein God, 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, and which entereth into that within the veil."[39]