The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

Paul rendered a large service when he condensed the central ideals and principles of Christianity in this way. The human mind is very fond of formulas. If it had not been for some authoritative, simplifying word like this, we might have gone on to construct all sorts of prescriptions like the threes and sixes and tens and fifteens with which we are so familiar in Buddhism. And yet the service which Paul rendered is not without its dangers, for men are prone to simplify further and to see whether the three cannot be reduced to one, or to arrange the order and proportions of the three, or to contend alone for that which some one of them signifies at the expense of the other two. Paul’s own words should have saved us from such folly, for he said quite clearly that one of these three was the greatest, “And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” And yet his own doctrine elsewhere has been used to correct and to counteract his expressed judgment here, and through the years we have had our theologies constructed in disregard of the domination of that one of these three principles which Saint Paul exalts. It has been in terms of faith, and faith given a very definitive construction, that our theological thinking with regard to Christianity has been chiefly done. Little by little however the proportions have changed, and now love, as one of the three great fundamental principles of Christianity, is coming to its own, not as a principle of action only but as a regulative principle also of our thought.

But it is a strange thing that no one has ever arisen, apparently, to say of hope what the intellect of the Church, over against Paul’s judgment, has been prepared to say of faith. He declared that of these three, love is the greatest. The current opinion of Christian thought through the Christian centuries has contended that faith was the greatest. What would men say if some one should arise now to restore the proportions, who would make bold to declare, “Now abideth faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is hope”? Surely the day will come some time when hope will come to its own, when the Christian heart and mind will no longer be content to construe its interpretation of Christianity in terms either of love or of faith, or of love and faith together, but will insist that these three abide—faith and love and hope.

And when a man stops for a moment to think, to disengage himself from the unscrutinized conventions, he begins to realize immediately that he has no faith and love unless he makes larger room for hope in his thinking and feeling than has been allowed to us. For there cannot be any faith detached from hope. You can conceive of faith in three different ways. You may think of it in its primary form, in its primary form in the New Testament at least, as personal trust, as the confidence that exists between two personal spirits. But even so, can you think of it without hope? If I have no hope of seeing Him in Whom I trust, of consulting with Him, or serving Him, of entering into a deeper and enlarged fellowship with Him, will not my personal trust soon empty itself of reality? Or, secondly, you may think of faith as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews does, as the “substance of things hoped for”; in which without any flinching, he binds faith up with hope in terms that cannot be severed. And, thirdly, if you go on to the rest of his definition, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” still faith is undetachable from hope; for, as Paul says in another passage, “We are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” And you cannot detach love from hope or have anything that is real in the experience of love unless it inevitably leads a man on into those things that clearly were in Paul’s mind when he spoke not of faith and love only but also of hope. I ask any man’s heart if it is possible to divorce hope from love. I suppose in one sense it may be, and that you can speak of a hopeless love. Henry Martyn’s heroic and tragic life was the unfolding of a hopeless love. But how different that is from love that is undershot with hope. One looks towards evening to see the children waiting as he comes home. The workman lives in the hope of all that is there of joy and confidence and perfect trust inside his home. Love would be a sorry thing to-day if it were stripped of the hopes that give it its sweetness and its joy.

And it is not only faith and love that root themselves inseparably in hope, and that lose their fragrance and meaning if they do not continue to draw both out of hope, but regarding almost everything else that is dearest and most precious to us in life, does it not spring from this same great treasury? In one of the chapters of the Epistle to the Romans we find Paul again and again, in his efforts to bring his message out to those to whom he writes, describing God in different terms of speech. He begins by speaking of Him as the God of comfort, the God of patience, and then he goes on to speak of Him as the God of hope. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.” And then he closes by speaking of the God of peace who is to order all hearts. Quite evidently in his thought these things all run together, as again he writes: “Be ye sober. Walk as children of light. Put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation.” Joy and gladness and confidence and trust and hope,—all are rooted each in the other in his own mind and experience. The best that we have got in life springs from the fountains of hope.

We do not wonder, accordingly, that the old religious experience and the richer Christian experience, when it came, conceived and spoke of God as the God of love and the God of hope. They never spoke of Him as the God of faith. The old Hebrew idea of Him was as the ground-rock of their hope. “O hope of Israel,” was their cry. The lovely thing is that that burst from the lips of the man who mourned for his nation: “O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble.” “Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” God Himself when He comes to let Himself be richly known to men makes on them the impression of a great and joyous and glad and eager and boundless hope.

And when we turn away from such clews as these and look right into the face of life to ask what the powers and services and functionings of hope in the actual life of man and in the life of the world are, we realize that all this exultant hope has its deep grounding in the actual living needs of men. It is by hope—the New Testament is unequivocal about it, and our own experience answers to that word—it is by hope that we are saved. Not in one passage in the New Testament can you find the declaration that we are saved by faith. We are saved “by grace through faith,” but Paul is flat-footed in his declaration that we are saved by hope. And the moment a man looks life square in the face he sees why it should be so. Were it not for hope there could not be any saving that were worth a man’s while. There might be a clearing up of the past; we might secure something like a clean conscience; but there could not be any confidence, any ease, any rest, as over against the tragic problem of life, if a man could not look out into the future—which is really the thing he now has to deal with—with boundless hope. Salvation is just that thing. It is not cleaning up our lives from the point of view of the past, just for the sake of cleaning up our lives; but it is the hope that for the sake of our future God is going to live in us a saving life.

All this is true whether we think of salvation as it comes penetrating our lives and dealing with such problems as in shame and self-distrust we think of in our hours of recollection and penitence, or whether we think of it as something reaching out into the expanding experience of the future. Either way, salvation is a matter of hope. There is a lovely touch in one of Paul’s epistles where he says: “Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” What do you think of that motive? He does not say, “Seeing that our sin is so black and abhorrent as it is, seeing that the past is so shameful and unworthy as it is, let us cleanse ourselves.” “My brothers,” he said, “seeing we have such promises”—that is, “that the hope is so bright, that there is no ground for despair, that we can believe victory can actually be achieved by us, seeing that we have these hopes, let us cleanse ourselves in growing holiness.”

And then when those first Christian men came to look not only at this present purging of life which should leave it rich and fragrant and glorious but out upon the wide ranges of the untried and the unforeseeable, they still construed salvation in terms of hope. “Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And he that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.” It is so because there is in front of us the dear voice calling, the voice that says to every one of us: “Man, let that old past go now. It is done and gone beyond recall. Come out with Me. There is a new road for your feet and Mine, a new tale that is to be unfolded now, a new story, the contradiction of the old. Let the past go now, and come and walk with Me in the limitless hope of the new ways.”

And it is not only by hope, as a simple downright matter of fact, that men are saved and held fast to the Saviour; it is by hope also that men are nerved and empowered. In the hour of darkness, it is what lights all the darkness and makes it possible for men to bear. “Yes,” we say to ourselves in the hour of pain, “I know; but I can stand it, for after this comes something that is different from this.” That is what the honest doctor says to us when he deals with us. “Now hold steady for a moment. I am going to cut and it will hurt dreadfully. But just wait. Beyond the pain lies freedom from pain.” And we say, “Yes, doctor, cut. I can stand it.” In a moment the anguish is over. We endure in that hope. Has it not always been so? For a little while the mother bears her anguish and her pain for the joy and hope that a child is born into the world. For a little while Jesus bore the loneliness and the anguish of His grief and the shadow and the pain and the disgrace of His Cross, because, looking over it, He saw the glory that awaited Him and the world, and He endured all this, this anguish of the Cross, for the joy that was set beyond. “Therefore,” says Paul, “we rejoice in tribulation, in being flailed, in being pressed down as grapes in the wine-press, in being put through discipline and strain, we rejoice in all that, because we know that tribulation worketh steadfastness, steadfastness experience, and experience hope, and hope maketh not ashamed.”