HOPEFULNESS AND OPTIMISM.
TN that beautiful sermon on Hope, with which the Dean of St. Paul's closed the Cathedral services of the year 1885, in the midst of so many and such great anxieties, both political and ecclesiastical,—a sermon just republished with his Advent sermons by Messrs. Macmillan,—he remarks that in times of gloom, "to hope seems to us like deluding ourselves ; we call it optimism,—an instinctive dislike to pain, a determination not to see the cruel truth." The Dean is right ; and not only do we in times of gloom call hopefulness optimism, but at all times we call optimism shallow ; though " shallow " is the last adjective which we should be disposed to apply to that spiritual hopefulness which, as the Dean describes it, is the fruit of a serious discipline of the will, founded on faith, and pressing the imagination into the service of faith till we can actually realise what faith only refuses to doubt. What, then, is the difference between this kind of hopefulness and optimism,— the former a temperament only possible to men of earnest faith, and even to them difficult ; the latter a tempera- ment usual enough amongst men of no particular faith, and asking for no effort even in them ? We should de- scribe the difference between hopefulness and optimism, thus, that true hopefulness, hopefulness that has its source in faith and its fruit in charity, has no disposition at all to ignore evil auguries,—nay, sees them with even painful vividness ; and this by virtue of the vividness of its appre- hension of the light which casts the shadows ; for seeing the light, it necessarily sees the shadows also. The optimistic temperament, on the other hand, sees neither the thick darkness nor the bright light, but only the watery pallor which is a com- promise between the two, and which is the optimist's eqnivalent for sunlight. Optimism takes hold of the plausible grounds, instead of the true grounds for expecting good,—the plausible grounds being hardly ever identical with the true ones. Hope of the deeper kind discerns its bright visions often through a vista of the most lowering clouds, and could hardly, indeed, fasten its gaze on the light, but for the cloud-vista through which it gazes. Thus it certainly was with that hope of Israel, which, as the Dean of St. Paul's says, makes of the Bible one long exhorta- tion to look forward with rejoicing, in spite of series after series of the most cruel disappointments. The Prophets of Israel did not ignore these disappointments. On the contrary, they were always asking such questions as that which opens the book of the greatest of the Prophets,—" Why will ye be stricken any more ? ye will revolt more and more : the whole head is sick and the whole heart faint." No one would have accused such a prophet as that of optimism. He saw the evil around him in its darkest colours. He was all but overwhelmed by the volume of it. He treated some of those very signs of the times out of which ordinary men would have drawn the highest comfort, as the most ominous. "Bring no more vain oblations ; incense is an abomination unto me." "Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth : they are a trouble unto me ; I am weary to bear them." And yet it is this same prophet who goes on immediately to announce that the victory of the spiritual cause at the shrine of which all this conventional and false worship had been offered, is certain, and that all the nations shall flow together towards the temple of him who is to be exalted above the hills in his perfect holiness. And exactly as it was with the greatest of Jewish Prophets, so was it with the greatest of Christian A postles. He, too, depicted the groaning and travailing of Creation in the darkest colours, and he too counted the evil which he felt so keenly and described so vividly, as not worthy to be compared with the glory that should be revealed. We take it that this is the great test of the truest and deepest hope,—that it opens its eyes frankly to all from which it is naturally disposed to shrink, and never ignores for a moment that which tells against it; while true optimism only blinks at moral calamity, and endeavours by evading all distinct sight of it, to persuade itself that it is not evil but good.
For example, consider the way in which trim hope and mere sanguine optimism would look at the public anxieties of our present time. We are, indeed, often forced to contrast each of them with that prevalent pessimism which some of the most imaginative of our men of genius are trying to teach us,— which Carlyle, especially, was always trying to teach us. Perhaps the commonest subject on which conflicts of judgment arise between these various schools of thought, is the subject of the growing importance of popular opinion,—the growing esti- mate of popular intelligence and popular sentiment; the steady gravitation of real power towards the multitude, in whom it is hardly possible that there should be large knowledge ; the growing deficiency in the reverence for authority, unless that authority can persuade the people that it interprets truly their own wishes. We all know with what unmeasured scorn Carlyle, and those who tread in Carlyle's steps, have treated this superstition as to the power of multitudes—who are "mostly fools,"—to dictate to the men of fiery strength and high intelligence, how the people ought to be guided and governed. We are assured. by such teachers that wise men of average capacity would eagerly entreat to be governed by some one wiser than themselves ; and we are warned that the taste for adula- tion which the multitude exhibit is one of the most ominous signs of the down-rushing of society to decay and death. On the other hand, the optimist can see no superstition in this claim of the multitude to judge more justly and generously in the long-run, than even the ablest man judging out of the best resources of a solitary conscience and a solitary intelligence. The optimist points to the kindlier and milder features of the new age, to the infections character of generous sentiments, to the ease with which benignant views of human destiny spread among the masses, to the recoil of popular opinion from all hard and forbidding doctrines, to the ready effervescence of genial feelings and mutual confidence among the people. Now, what would the temperament which is hopeful in the deepest sense, in the sense of that hopefulness which springs from faith, say to this constantly widening and constantly deepening controversy P We think that a man of such temperament would say that it is hardly possible to exaggerate the dangers and evils which may not spring out of this growing confidence in the fiat of crowds and multitudes on all the deepest questions of human society, and still more from the disposition to flatter them into a great conceit of their own wisdom, if it were not that behind and beyond this timid gregariousness of popular opinion, there is a Divine power at work which can and does make popular opinion feel its own helplessness, weak- ness, and vanity as keenly as the humblest individual; and which often works even more effectually on the moral life of great societies in their organic unity, than on the individual consciences of those who make up those societies. The true hopefulness would not ignore one single trace of that helplessness of multitudes which would fain persuade itself that weakness and error, if congregated together in sufficient mass, may be taken for strength and wisdom ; but it would take care to recognise that wherever this mass of weakness and error is really found capable of an act of genuine trust in leadership marked by really noble traits, then, even though the trust should be misplaced, even though the nobility which excites it is im- perfect, there is something on which the ultimate Divine power will assuredly work to bring out the high qualities of national courage and national humility in a truer and nobler form than any which would have been possible under less developed. forms of national life. The optimist's view may be all wrong. The blunder resulting from democratic trust in a great leader may be one of the very worst of blunders, a blunder leading to national calamity of the gravest type. Yet the pessimist's view of the matter will be still more completely wrong. He will fail to see the light beyond the gloom,—the elevation and purification to which any people capable of a great and generous trust are almost sure to be led, even if that trust leads them through mis- fortune and confusion. It is quite true that individual weakness often only aggravates its own infirmities by following in the track of other individual weakness as profound, though less hesitating. But it is also true that the humiliation and humility of nations may result in a far greater good than any humility which is not thus wide-spreading in its range, and that great acts of national confidence in leaders believed on good grounds to be noble, are, even when they mislead, more likely to refine and strengthen the character of the nation so misled, than they would be if the conse- quences of that confidence rewarded the trust reposed, and proved its sagacity. The optimist may easily be put to shame before the pessimist ; and yet the ultimate hopefulness of a resolutely imaginative faith may be conspicuously justified.
Dean Church has pointed out in the fine sermon which has led to these remarks, that in various ages of the world, at a time when all was gloom, those who might have had the courage and faith to believe that a light would yet break through the gloom, would have been conspicuously justified by the event. Thus, Christians who saw the invasion of the Northern barbarians directed against the Roman Empire so newly Christianised, might well have despaired when they beheld the new fabric of civilisa- tion threatened with destruction at the very moment when it promised the highest fruit; and yet, as we know, they would have been wholly wrong. And so, again, as the Dean points out, in the tenth century, "when open wickedness and ignorance filled the high places of the Church, when all seemed so bad and so hopeless that men disposed of their goods as if the end of the world mast come with the end of the century, if any one had looked forward, in spite of all, to Christians again recognising their high calling, again preaching peace and charity, and leaving all to follow Christ,—to the return of a great intellectual tide of art and thought when now all was brutality and dark- ness,—would he not have seemed a dreamer ? Yet who would have been wrong and who right, the dreamer or the despairer ?" The dreamer certainly would have been right ; but not for his own generation, not for his own lifetime. And this is the difficulty of the truest hopefulness,—the hopeful- ness founded in faith,—that though it is sure to be right in discerning the breaking of the clouds, yet it has abso- lutely no assurance that that breaking of the clouds is near, or certain to happen within the range of foresight to which individuals and nations naturally look as, for them at least, final. As the individual man may feel sure that God's judgments are altogether righteous, though in this life he may never again emerge from the darkness they leave behind them, so the nation may feel sure that if they have gone wrong when they were striving to go right, they will yet reap the reward of that effort ; but they have no right at all to feel sure that they will reap it in prosperity in the immediate future. It is, as the Dean says, a duty to .be hopeful ; but it is not a duty to be hopeful that any particular enterprise will turn out well, for it. may be much better for us that that enterprise, whether individual or national, should fail. And, unfortunately, human minds are so limited, that hopefulness which is not bound up with particular events, is far from easy to us. Doubtless the best things will come to those who know how to wait and to earn ; but they may be, and often are, delayed till hope deferred makes the heart sick. That is the true moral of the Dean's beautiful sermon. But this sickness of heart, which to the optimist is sickness unto death, and to the pessimist is sickness mitigated only by exaltation in his own accuracy of foresight, is to the eye of Christian hopefulness, sickness which is sure of a final and complete recovery.
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