A Neglected Virtue

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

SOME persons are so lucky as to be born into the world in full possession of certain good things which others obtain, if at all, only by long and difficult effort. Sometimes it is external, material goods they are endowed with by Fortune’s or Nature’s gift, — wealth, health, and leisure: and sometimes it is certain intellectual powers or temperamental qualities, which are less visible and tangible prizes than the first, but even more serviceable and enduring.

I do not know of any one thing which. on the whole, conduces more to individual comfort, on the journey through the rough ways of this troubled life, than a hopeful temper, which to the poor is a mine of riches, and to the afflicted the sun that scatters the clouds of night. This temper of hope is one of the few things really worth envy. It often has no basis in religious faith, and has nothing to do with any processes of reason. It belongs to certain favored persons, like the shape of their nose or the color of their eyes, independently of their will or effort. They hope almost as they breathe, naturally and inevitably. They go through life, not as other mortals do, plodding on their feet or rolling in their carriage, but lightly wafted in a balloon ; drifting, it may be, with varying air currents, with temporary depressions or threatenings of disastrous collision, yet holding on a buoyant course, and not settling to earth till the gas supply is exhausted. Or we may perhaps figure them as never making descent at all, but rather as throwing out the ballast of the fleshly frame, and soaring upward till lost in the empyrean.

Theirs is the hope which, according to the poet, springs eternal in the human breast; and indeed there must be great force of it present in mankind at large, or the world would not go on. If the unhopeful ones were in the majority, there would come a general slackening and weakening in the world’s pulse of life, increasing in fatal ratio. But between the extremes of the few who always hope and the fewer who never hope are the great masses of men whom hope may desert but only intermittently, giving to their pathway light enough to guide their steps.

If we try to account for the singular persistency of hopefulness which some persons exhibit under continued tests of unfavoring circumstance, several things may be said. Their evenly cheerful and sanguine mood may be largely due to physical vitality; to a strength of nervous constitution that knows nothing of the nameless, indescribable disturbances of equilibrium produced by the sapping of nervous force. Again, the mind that sees all things in light, not gloom, often does so by virtue of its own deficiency. Lack of imagination serves a man’s comfort wonderfully well when it shuts his eyes to the misery of the world, so that while he knows of it, and in words laments it, he never realizes it, never feels it as his own. A prosaic quality of mind also lightens a man’s individual lot, Imaginative people, by an inward necessity, " look before and after ; ” they cannot live in the life of to-day only, but also in their life of yesterday and tomorrow ; the perspective of existence is lengthened infinitely ; and if to-day be sad, its gloom is darkened by the memory of past sorrow and the forecast of suffering to come. Sometimes they thus add unnecessarily to the burden of life ; they bear griefs by anticipation which in reality never come. But however unwise or even wrong this may be, it is as natural to the imaginative to suffer vicariously for the world and unreally for themselves as it is natural for the unimaginative to comfort themselves in their more bounded and brighter view. “Minds that have little to confer find little to perceive,” wrote Wordsworth, with one of his infrequent happy brevities of expression. It is not cold-heartedness that makes some persons less sensible than others to the miseries of mankind ; it is simply lack of ability to realize them fully.

There is one aspect of hope. I think, we are apt to overlook, which is that, for Christians at least, hope is of the nature of virtue. It is a religious man’s duty to hope, so far as it is possible, because hope for the world and himself rests on faith in the Almighty wisdom and goodness; and regarding it from this point of view, he may find it easier to hope than he would have supposed. Religion does not require of us anything impossible or irrational; and if we think a little, we shall remind ourselves that hope is rational. It may not go on in us in the automatic fashion it works in others, but we must remember the saying, “ It is a part of probability that many improbable things may happen.” We cannot hope without some ground for it, we say; and let us not forget to add that there always is ground for it. For hope is not sight, not fruition ; it is expectation and desire waiting hand in hand.

If a man cannot be judged happy till he dies, neither can he be pronounced quite unhappy till that event in life occurs.

For some of us the greater virtues are the easier of attainment. " And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three ; but the greatest of these is charity ; ” yet some of us find less difficulty in being faithful and loving than in being hopeful. The more credit to us if we resolutely put away the hindrances to hopefulness, try to learn the art of living in the present, — in it, not for it, — avoid the companionship of darker thoughts, and live much with the outdoor world and with little children.

There is much contagion of hopelessness in the air of our deeply questioning and faithless age. We owe it. to our fellows to show such hope as is in us. Courage many men are capable of who are not capable of hope. “ Hope evermore, O man ; for e’en as thy thought is, so are the things that thou seest.”