A Christian's Habits: Chapter Eight
The Habit of Hopefulness.
“…the dreamers have caught the true Christian secret of hope.”
“All that is, in fact, was first in someone’s hope before it ever came to be in fact.”
Robert Speer urges us to practice a different kind of hope. We use the word “hope” to describe the longing for something better than what we currently have without any idea of how this will actually happen. “I hope it will be nicer weather tomorrow.” “I hope we do better this year than last.” “I am hoping for a great future for everyone.” Speer calls us to a more strategic kind of hope, which sees beyond what is and, at the same time, inspires us to work toward that better future.
When Speer was writing, more than 100 years ago, practicality threatened this kind of thinking. Such strategic hope was for “dreamers” and diverted society from the real task at hand. There is a different danger in our day. In our pursuit of a better way of life, we regularly deconstruct what is without any practical plan for what will come after everything is torn down. If our hope is ever to bear the fruit of the better future we desire, short-sighted practicality and near-sighted deconstruction must be corrected by Speer’s Christian hope.
Speer argues that Christianity can expand our hope beyond what is while enabling us to conceive of and bring about things that have not yet been created.
So without further ado, chapter eight of Robert Speer’s “A Christian’s Habits,” The Habit of Hopefulness.
I. The Problem with Hope
What keeps you from hope?
To be a dreamer and a visionary is to lay one’s self open, in this practical day, to some scorn and reproach. “Oh, come now, be practical,” is the way we are met if we wander away from things that are, or seem to expect more from men than ordinary give-and-take conduct. The reformer in politics is laughed at and told that men are what they are and that they must be dealt with as we find them; that they are not open to high patriotic considerations, but must be moved by motives potent on their level; that the dream of a purified state in which men shall act disinterestedly for the good of the nation is a mere impractical dream. The purist in business seems to masses of men to be the same sort of visionary. “You cannot be a Christian in business,” some man says, “and succeed.” If you want to succeed you must act, not on the Golden rule of the gospel, but on David Harum’s version of it, ‘Do to the other fellow what he intends to do to you and do it first.’” Altruism, consideration for others who do not take care of themselves and hold their own, has no place in the business world, these men argue.
“The old Hebrew ideal had been the ideal of the seer, the man who could look on the greater things.”
The man who believes in an order of love, of thinking first of his brother’s interest and only afterwards of his own, such a man may be good material for citizenship in heaven, but he is not adapted to membership in the industrial society of this age. And the world smiles in the same way at the idealist in the Church, the man who believes in the unity of the Church and who longs to see that unity realized visibly, who wants to see Christ’s followers follow Christ, who does not see why the command of Christ which he said was fundamental, the command to love one’s brother better than one’s self, cannot be fulfilled, inside the Church, at least. All these are victims, the world thinks, victims of groundless hope. The world looks at them as Joseph’s brother looked at him, “Go to,” it says, “let us hear what this dreamer says.”1 Only it has not as much time as Joseph’s brothers had and it soon loses patience and leaves the dreamers to compare their dreams, while it goes on its practical way.
II. The People of the Dream
Is Christian hope conservative or liberal?
Nevertheless the dreamers have caught the true Christian secret of hope. On the day of Pentecost, Peter pointed out what had happened that day carried its own evidence with it, for it had been foretold by the prophets that when the Spirit of God should come, the old men should dream dreams and the young men should see visions. The people of the true light would be visionaries and dreamers. The old Hebrew ideal had been the ideal of the seer, the man who could look on the greater things.
“If that hope is disappointed the real investigator tries another and another. If that hope is disappointed the real investigator tries another and another. He will never give up hope. It is the necessary habit of his mind.”
The supreme habit which the nation acquired during the centuries of its education was the habit of hope, of expectation of the Messiah and of golden age. When the Messiah came, the Jews failed to recognize him and soon lost hope which passed on to Christians. The Christians now become the people of the dream, the men and women who saw the higher and the better things and believed they could exist here and now. Christianity proved itself to be of God by the brave way in which it closed its eyes to what prevented the coming of the best things in individual hearts and in the world by its blindness to the despair of the world and by its confident assertion that there was an order of God, that men could and must find it and that the kingdom of God must be on earth. It would not be discouraged or defeated. God lives, it said, and the world is his and he must have it and rule it, and even that which troubles men and seems to them unintelligible has some meaning which will some day appear. Through it good is to be wrought out and hope fulfilled.
III. The Importance of Hope
What value does hope add to your life?
Without hope scarcely anything that we possess that is really worthwhile would have come to us. All that is, in fact, was first in some one’s hope before it ever came to be in fact. The world itself existed in the hope of God before it came to be. “By faith,” says the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear.”2 In science the habit of hopefulness is absolutely indispensable. The man of science with a great problem, if he assumed that the problem could not be solved and refused to try any apparently hopeful solution of it, would never make any progress. All progress is made in science through the use of the “working hypothesis,” and the “working hypothesis” is only the hope of a solution to be found along a certain line. If that hope is disappointed the real investigator tries another and another. He will never give up hope. It is the necessary habit of his mind. It is also in art and architecture and poetry. What is wrought out by the artist, the architect, and the poet, is what is first hoped and dreamed, what he saw in the far-off reachings of his mind. In exploration it is hope alone that sustains men, the hope of the new land to be discovered, a new mountain or lake to be found or a river source at last to be traced up. Without an irrepressible hope in the soul there could have been no Livingstone, no Whitman, no Columbus.
HOW in God’s name did Columbus get over
Is a pure wonder to me, I protest,
Cabot, and Raleigh too, that well-read rover,
Frobisher, Dampier, Drake, and the rest.
Bad enough all the same,
For them that after came,
But, in great Heaven’s name,
How he should ever think
That on the other brink
Of this wild waste terra firma should be,
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
How a man ever should hope to get thither,
E’en if he knew that there was another side;
But to suppose he should come any whither,
Sailing straight on into chaos untried,
In spite of the motion
Across the whole ocean,
To stick to the notion
That in some nook or bend
Of a sea without end
He should find North and South America,
Was a pure madness, indeed I must say, to me.
What if wise men had, as far back as Ptolemy,
Judged that the earth like an orange was round,
None of them ever said, Come along, follow me,
Sail to the West, and the East will be found.
Many a day before
Ever they’d come ashore,
From the ‘San Salvador,’
Sadder and wiser men
They’d have turned back again;
And that he did not, but did cross the sea,
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
-Arthur Hugh Clough, “Columbus,” from The Poems and Prose Remain
Even when things seem to happen, they happen to the seekers, the seers, the men of hope.
IV. The Effects of the Habit of Hope
How much do history and poetry strengthen your view of the world?
All social, intellectual and moral progress results from the hope of better things than the things that are. A vision is a rent in the sky, a breach in the wall, a gateway through which larger things pour in. The dreamer is he whom Von Strumer describes in his lines in Richard Jeffries’ “Story of My Heart”:
Dim woodlands made him wiser far
Than those who thresh their barren thought
With flails of knowledge dearly bought,
Till all his soul shone like a star.
That flames at fringe of heaven’s bar,
Where breaks the surge of space unseen
Against Hope’s veil that hangs between
Love’s future and the woes that are.
There are men who realize that nothing that is can be accepted as the final thing until at last the perfect is come, the longed-for and the hoped-for best thing of God.
The strength of life is to be found in the depth and height of our hopes. Garibaldi and Mazzini dreamed of an Italy united and free and were strong to lead and achieve because the hope they cherished held them so firmly. And Horace Bushnell was so great a preacher because the habit of a mighty hope in the gospel enthralled his soul. He saw great things in God, and what he saw in God he strove to bring out in speech for men. All great preachers must be men of hope. The world cannot be won to despair. It is true that great multitudes of men hold to hopeless religions like Buddhism, but they cannot hold them contentedly. The outreaching of the soul for larger and better things cannot be easily suppressed. Men are waiting for a hopeful word, and the religion and the preachers who can speak it to them control the future. All great leaders of men must have somewhere to lead men. Their goal must be a hope, and the courage and patience of all struggle will depend on the faith and strength of our forward dream. A man without resources of his own takes up a tunnel scheme which has failed by the indomitable perseverance of his hope enlists other men and means, and the enterprise which connects two great states by a tunnel under a great river is at once called after his name by the publich which benefit by the victory of his hopefulness. The assurance that he would find that which he sought carried Livingstone through hardship enough to destroy any ordinary man of hopeless heart. Paul dreamed of a universal Church, and his hope accomplished itself over every obstacle of race and language. The hope that the Campbell’s would come, and a half-demented girl’s conviction that they were coming and that she heard their pipes, upheld the men at Lucknow, whom nothing but hope could save, until Havelock came. Our own teachers would have given us up long ago if it were not for their hope that in spite of ourselves we could become something.
V. Hope: The Best Thing In Life
How could the habit of hopefulness strengthen your spiritual journey?
The best things of our lives are not our possessions, but our hopes. We can be better men and women than we are. The divinest realities are the purposes of God for us which are not yet fulfilled, which are among our distant hopes. And in these hopes the comfort of life is to be found, the things which we have not attained as yet and cannot understand, but to which we hope to come. Our hymns and poems tell us this:
Far, far away, like bells at evening pealing,
The voice of Jesus sounds o’er land and sea,
And laden souls, by thousands meekly stealing,
Kind Shepherd, turn their weary steps to thee.
-Hark! Hark My Soul! Angelic Songs are Swelling! Frederick William Faber (1854)
So Faber puts it and so does Newman:
So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O’er moon and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.
-Lead, Kindly Light. 1834
And so F.W.H. Myers, in “St. Paul”
What can we do o’er whom the unbeholden
Hangs in a night with which we cannot cope?
What but look sunward and with faces golden
Speak to each other softly of hope.
No habit, after the habit of truth, is more necessary to man than the habit of hope. Whether or not we can acquire the habit will determine for us whether we shall be strong and glad, and leaders of men to better things.