And as for us who are in the full flush and possession of all that we have, it is by hope that we draw our comfort for our struggle. As against the background of our defeats and failures, we say to our own hearts: “Well, wait, just wait; my time will come. No matter how much of this there has been, some day my hope will be fulfilled. It is sure that something else than this there will yet be.” William Henry Green became the outstanding Hebrew scholar in America. He was plucked when he entered college in Latin and Greek. At Lafayette College for months and months he found himself beaten on the very battle-field where he stood at last the first man in the land. At Lexington, Virginia, several years ago, I went to the grave of General Lee in the chancel of the chapel of his college and then I went out to the grave of Stonewall Jackson on that little hill. One of his townsmen was telling me the story of Jackson and how by hope he wrested triumph out of his uttermost failure. He had been teaching in the military academy, and had just been about to give up his work because he had no gift of discipline. He could not maintain order in his own classroom, my friend said, and was about to surrender his career as a teacher, because he thought he was incapable there. Then the war broke out, and within twelve months Stonewall Jackson was the most famous disciplinarian on earth. On the very field where the man’s failure had been most clear, there he achieved his richest and greatest victory, by hope. And so we comfort our hearts here to-day. “Yes,” we say to memories of which we are reminded in our searching hours, “the evil and unworthy imaginings and desires cling to us still, but it will not be forever. Some day, no matter how often I have failed, if I live in hope, it will come to me, the clean thing that the Lord said should be mine.”
And last of all, there is nothing adequate for us in the way of actually moulding men and doing that with life which we were set here to do unless we can go to the work in the spirit in which our Lord and Saint Paul entered it. If I have no hope for another man, I cannot awaken any hope in him for himself. Unless I believe in him, how can he believe? The glory of Christ was that, though He knew just what was in man, and saw all the weaknesses and the slavery and the impurity and the unwholesomeness, though He saw all this in man, He shut His eyes to it deliberately and believed in the better capacities and possibilities that were there and that He by His grace and His power could plant and nurture and bring out until all that old baseness that had been the man was not the man any more, and all this new purity that had not been the man was the man, and Simon was turned at last out of his putty into rock and stone.
I do not know whether the apostles were conscious or not of what was happening to them. Maybe they did not appreciate their Master, but one likes to think that they must have done so, and that often they would go off by themselves and one would say: “Andrew, is He not just great? Did you ever meet any one like that before? Did you see what He did this morning? He just shut His eyes completely to that meanness that He saw in me, and that I saw the moment I let it out, too, and He pretended that He never saw it at all, and He believed in me when He knew and I knew there was nothing there to believe in. Is He not wonderful? He will make a man of me yet.” And to this day He is still doing just what He was doing then. In this place now He is doing just that thing. He is shutting His eyes to what we do not want Him to see and opening them to what only He can see in us. And His law must be our law.
I can put it in a little story that a friend of some of us, George Truett, told to a little group some years ago in a western city. “I am fond,” he said, “of recalling the first soul it was ever given me to win to Jesus. I was a lad barely grown and a teacher in the mountains of Carolina. One morning, as we were ready for prayers in the chapel, there hobbled down the aisle to the front seat a boy of about sixteen years old. He was an eager, lonely-looking lad. I read the Scriptures and prayed and then sent the teachers to their classes. But my little cripple lad stayed. I supposed that he was a beggar. And I said to myself, ‘Surely this boy deserves alms. His condition betokens his need.’ So I went to him at recess and said, ‘My lad, what do you want?’ He looked me eagerly in the face and said: ‘Mr. Truett, I want to go to school. Oh, sir, I want to be somebody in the world. I will always be a cripple. The doctors have told me that, but,’ he said, ‘I want to be somebody.’
“He had won me. He told me of their poverty, and that was taken care of. I watched that lad for weeks and weeks. How bright his mind was! How eager he was to know! One day I called him into my office and said to him: ‘My boy, I want you to tell me something more about yourself.’ He told me how, a few months before, his father had been killed in the great cotton mill where he worked, and the few dollars he had saved up were soon gone. They tried to do their best in the county where they were, but found it difficult; so his mother said one day: ‘Let us move to the next county, where they do not know us. Perhaps we can do better where we are not known.’ So they moved and now he had come into my school. He said, ‘I want to help mother, and I want to be somebody in the world; so I made my appeal to you to come to your school.’ It was time in a moment for the bell to ring for books. I laid my hand on the head of the little fellow and said to him: ‘Jim, I am for you, my boy. I believe in you thoroughly, and I want you to know that I love you, my boy.’ And when I said that last word, the little pinched face looked up into my face almost in a lightning flash, and he said: ‘Mr. Truett, did you say you loved me? Did you say that?’ I said, ‘I said that, Jim.’ And then with a great sob he said: ‘I did not know anybody loved me but mother and the two little girls. Mr. Truett, if you love me, I am going to be a man yet, by the help of God.’ And when a few Friday nights afterwards I was leading the boys in their chapel meeting, as was the custom, I heard the boy’s crutches over in the corner. There Jim sat, in a chair away from the other boys to protect his leg. And a little later he got up, sobbing and laughing at the same time, and said, ‘Mr. Truett, I have found the Saviour, and that time you told me you loved me started me towards Him.’” And then our friend added, “Brothers, working men in the shops and everywhere are dying for love. Your grammar may be broken, your plans may be imperfect, your machinery may be crude, your organization may be rough; but if you love men and pour your hearts out to them honestly and directly, there will be a response that will fill your hearts with joy and heaven with praises.”
And the need and functions of hope should be viewed in no narrow personal way. We want to-day men who have a large and courageous faith in God for the nation and the world. Of recent years a mood of pessimism has spread through America. In one sense it represents a wholesome reaction from the spirit of braggadocio and spreadeagleism of an earlier day. So far it is wholesome. We need to be sobered and made modest and quiet in our national spirit. But it is a bad thing when a nation loses the zest of a great consciousness and a brave patriotism, and thinks meanly of what God can do with it. Our nation needs now not a timid and fearful sense of its impotence and incapacity, but a realization that, whatever its difficulties and defects, God has a mission for us which only we can fulfill for Him. For this mission those men must be the nation’s soul of hope and expectation who know that our greatest duty and service lie ahead of us and are waiting to be grasped by men whose hearts face the untried without fear.
And now shall we have this hope that nothing can slay? Do we want it? Well, it is so near to us that we do not need to reach out after it. You know where it is, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “The Lord Jesus Christ,” as Saint Paul says in the opening words of his first Epistle to Timothy, “The Lord Jesus Christ, our hope.” This hope is not something that we work up out of the fragments of moral ideals that we find lying around in our lives or our nation. Jesus Christ is the hope for a man and a people. If we want it, why not now take Him? Genuinely, I mean, in a deep, living, religious way, take Him in His fullness of life? God and the nation want the men who are filled with His courage and hope:
“God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world,
Now each man to his post.
The red cross banner is unfurl’d,