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.