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Of Paul's three things that abide, hope is the one of which we are now most conscious of our need. Never before in our experience has hope been so much the center of our inner life and the heart of our religion. Our mood alternates between hope and depression, hope and fear; and we look to our religion to make hope strong, and turn to our sacred book to seek secure grounds and satisfying expressions for our hope. We hope for the winning of the war. We hope for the safety and the home-coming of those we love. We hope for a new world-order organized to make war impossible, inspired by a spirit of coöperation and good will between classes and between nations. We hope as never before for an assured and abundant life after death. We put these hopes in some relation to each other, weighing one against another, subordinating one to another. And when we seek their right relationship and look for their ultimate grounds, we ask what Christianity has to say and to do about them. What is Christian in these hopes that are filling the mind and heart of the world? The importance of this question is very great. The future of the world depends on the truth and the strength of the hopes that now inspire and direct men's purposes and efforts. The future of the Christian religion turns in no small measure on its ability now to keep the hope of mankind high and pure, free from self-seeking and from material interests, and true to the ultimate reality of things, and to give this hope confidence and prevailing strength.

Christians are not at one over the question what, as Christians, they have a right to hope for. Most evidently is this the case between us and our enemy. We differ in things hoped for; and it is perhaps not too much to say that the truth of our hope and the strength of our hope constitute and measure our spiritual equipment for the winning of the war. The Germans are fighting for their hope of national expansion and domination, for their dream of a new world empire of the chosen and fit people of God. We cannot question the strength of this hope of theirs, and its powerful influence toward bringing itself to realization. We and our Allies are resisting these nationalistic and arrogant hopes, and are appealing to the contrary hope of an inclusive human brotherhood, in which good will shall prevail between nations, and hence right and peace. The hope that is truer, more in accordance with the nature of things, the nature of man, the will of God, and the hope that is most deeply felt and most loyally served, with most conviction and most sacrifice, will prevail in the end. That is the hope that will come true. Ours is inevitably a religious hope, for it is universal in range, big as the world, and needs not only every power of ours but the Power not ourselves to bring it about. It is for every one who holds it intensely, in a real sense, a hope in God and a hope for God. But is it certain that it is also a Christian hope, a hope in Christ and a hope for Christ?

There are, not only between us and our enemy, but among ourselves, radical differences as to what a Christian should hope for in the present world crisis. There are those who search the Scriptures for predictions of the Kaiser and his overthrow, and see in the anti-Christian philosophy and in the anti-Christian arrogance and cruelty of his militaristic state, a sign that the end of this evil world-age is near, and that Christ will come quickly and set up his reign on earth. And there are those to whom such literalism in the use of Scripture and such externality in the hope for Christ's coming are intellectually impossible and untrue, and religiously harmful. To them the meaning of the Bible is to be found in the tendency and spirit of its teachings, and their hope is for the presence and rule of the spirit of Christ and the dominance of his principles in the common life of humanity. This involves a radical difference in the hope of Christians for a new world, a new human society, and in the ways in which this hope will affect their motives and efforts. There are also deep-going differences in regard to the hope for a life after death. That many are looking eagerly for material, "scientific" proof through physical communications from the dead, while many, on the other hand, are feeling that immortality belongs to the race and not to the individual, and that the sacrifice of the young and the strong finds its only and sufficient end and justification in the new humanity they die to create, indicates that Christ has not yet brought life and immortality to clear light for humanity. Such differences are not to be desired. If Christianity is to be the religion of the present eager and pressing hopes of mankind and give these hopes elevation, truth, and victorious endurance and enthusiasm, Christians should be clear and united in the contents and character of their hope.

Among these hopes of mankind there can be no doubt which one has the first place in the minds of the intellectual leaders and the actual rulers of the allied nations. Never before has a truly prophetic note been so clearly sounded by leading men of affairs, and by the press and the leaders of public opinion, as well as by the poets and preachers to whom prophecy naturally belongs. From all sides we have expressions of a hope which four years ago was judged to be the dream of impractical idealists, the hope for a new order of human life, in which good will and mutual coöperation shall take the place of suspicion and competitive struggle. We need not be blind to whatever motives of self-interest may have entered into the action of this or that one of our Allies in undertaking the war. The outstanding fact remains that while the German Government appeals to the self-assertion of the German State and seeks its aggrandizement through force at the expense of its neighbors, the allied governments appeal to national self-sacrifice for the sake of international redemption. It is to this appeal on behalf of the rights, the freedom, the happiness of mankind, that our soldiers respond; for humanity, not for national gain, that our peoples are prepared to give and to suffer. This hope takes concrete form in the word Democracy, and in the idea of a League or Federation of free, democratic nations, bound together for the defense of human rights, for coöperation in all that concerns human welfare and progress, and the repression of every attack upon the peace of the world. So viewed the war becomes definitely a war to end war, and as such it is engaged in and supported by peace-loving peoples, against the nation that glorifies war and would perpetuate it.

Is this great hope Christian? Is Christianity the religion which a hope so high and so difficult needs if it is to keep its height amid the many influences that tend to lower it, and if it is to prove possible and become actual in spite of powerful forces that work against it? It is not self-evident that Christianity will prove equal to this which is clearly the greatest task that the present imposes upon it. There are many who doubt its adequacy; many who see that it has brought division and warfare, and think it unfitted to create unity; many who see that it has withdrawn from the world, and think it unadapted to provide the moral principles and spiritual energies of the new social and political world-order. It is for us who believe in the sufficiency of Christ to prove that he alone provides those religious and moral principles and forces without which no democracy, still less any federation of democracies, can stand.

The ideal of human brotherhood which the war has revealed as the deepest desire and faith of men and has put before us as a goal that we must now set out to reach is of course old in its beginnings, and for a generation it has been taking ever stronger hold on the minds of men. Prophetic utterances of this ideal could be quoted in abundance. A striking example is a saying of Alexander Dumas in 1893: "I believe our world is about to begin to realize the words 'Love one another,' without, however, being concerned whether a man or a God uttered them. … Mankind, which does nothing moderately, is about to be seized with a frenzy, a madness, of love." And Tolstoy's comment on this at the time of the Russian revolution, in 1905: "I believe that this thought, however strange the expression, 'seized with a frenzy of love,' may seem, is perfectly true and is felt more or less clearly by all men of our day. A time must come when love, which forms the fundamental essence of the soul, will take the place natural to it in the life of mankind, and will become the chief basis of the relations between man and man. That time is coming; it is at hand."

The world war seems like a violent contradiction of the truth of such prophecies. It seems for the time to have made love inadequate as a summing up of morals and religion. We almost feel that the Sermon on the Mount must be kept in reserve for other times. The war has made love itself a hope. We renounce it for a time that we may resist a power that threatens to destroy it altogether and put selfishness and cruelty on the throne of the world. But the war has not in fact disproved the faith that God is love and that love is the supreme law and power among men. It has made mankind more conscious of its ideal of community and fellowship, and seems to be carrying us faster toward the realization of human brotherhood than peace and prosperity were doing. The greatest and most widely approved sentences of President Wilson's war papers are those that give expression to "what the thinking peoples of the world desire, with their longing hope for justice and for social freedom and opportunity." On the anniversary of our entering the war, Gilbert Murray declared that England needed our help in battle, but even more in upholding their true faith. "Americans instinctively believe … in freedom, peace, democracy, arbitration, and international good will. … When the war is over there will be a world to rebuild, and the only principles on which to rebuild it are these principles." Germany denies the truth of these principles, but in doing so it denies human nature and derives from physical nature a state-ethics of struggle and the survival of the strong. It denies the prophet of Galilee, and looks for its example to Rome. Sometimes it has seemed as if the German denial of humanity and affirmation of material and brute force were in danger of justifying itself by the only test they admit, that of physical success. Where can we look for help toward a living faith in liberty and brotherhood over against the powerful demonstration we are offered of faith in material force and in the progress of nations through aggression and tyranny? We must look no doubt first of all to our own souls and oppose to the faith in physical and animal nature a faith in human nature and in the truth of its best instincts and ideals; and then to those who know best and most worthily express the human soul and the reality of its spiritual possessions. Not from the Bible alone, and not only from Christ are such reassuring testimonies to be gained; and we are not renouncing the unique value of the Christian religion when we find that the faith and hope which it teaches are the faith and the hope of the universal heart of man.

The poet laureate of England made his special contribution to his nation's needs in time of war in the anthology, "The Spirit of Man." "Our country," he says, "is called of God to stand for the truth of man's hope." "Truly it is the hope of man's great desire, the desire for brotherhood and universal peace to men of good will, that is at stake in this struggle." From the miseries and slaughter and hate of war, "we can turn," he says, "to seek comfort only in the quiet confidence of our souls; and we look instinctively to the seers and poets of mankind, whose sayings are the oracles and prophecies of loveliness and loving kindness." They help us gain the conviction our time most needs, "that spirituality is the basis and foundation of human life," that "man is a spiritual being, and the proper work of his mind is to interpret the world according to his higher nature, and to conquer the material aspects of the world so as to bring them into submission to the spirit."

But the Bible also is a witness to just these convictions and contains prophecies of just such hopes. Bridges includes very few citations from the Bible, chiefly because it is so well known, but also because "this familiarity implies deep-rooted associations, which would be likely to distort the context." Alas, for these associations, for the interpretations that confuse and the prejudices that blind the readers of the greatest literature of spirituality and of hope which the world contains. In spite of this, the Bible will be looked to by multitudes for guidance and support in those hopes on which the future turns, while the poet's fine work will be prized by few. It is only too possible to fail to find in the Bible its testimony to that "hope of man's great desire of brotherhood and peace" which constitutes the most living religion of our time; and this failure will mean loss to the hope itself of its most powerful support, and loss to the Christian religion of contact and sympathy with the most urgent spiritual need and aspiration of men today.

The Bible does contain various and contradictory hopes, and can encourage expectations that are not in accordance with the best conscience of our age, nor with our knowledge of the way in which human progress is achieved. But there is nothing more instructive than the relation of these different hopes to each other as the historian understands them and there is nothing more worthy and inspiring than the language in which the most spiritual and the most universal of these hopes are expressed.

The original hope of the religion of Israel was that involved in the unique and exclusive relation between the nation Israel and Yahweh, its God. It was the hope of Israel's prosperity and power through the certain favor of Yahweh, and his intervening help in times of danger, most of all his help in the nation's wars. These were "the Wars of Yahweh." Both the strength and the defect of the Old Testament religion lie in this fundamental faith, the peculiarity and exclusiveness of the relation between Israel and its God. It inspired its early victories and created the kingdom of David. It sustained the nation amid calamities and enabled it to maintain itself when other small nations disappeared before the great world empires, and while these also came and passed. It was a natural and not unreasonable faith for its time, so long as Yahweh was only Israel's national God, even though he was believed to be better and stronger than the gods of other nations and destined to triumph over them; but when Israel's God was believed to be the one and only God of all the world the doctrine of Israel as his peculiar people must either lead to false claims and have bad effects upon temper and conduct, or else be reinterpreted and radically changed. Nothing can be more instructive as to the nature of religious hope than to follow out two main lines of development by which an adjustment was attempted between this primitive nationalism and the later, larger thought of God and the world.

The great prophets before the exile, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and after exile Deutero-Isaiah, were those through whom the faith was attained that Yahweh is the one and only God; and the modification of the national exclusiveness of Israel which they made was in the direction of its complete subordination to ethical and spiritual ideals. The one God of all was the God of righteousness, and of Israel only on the condition and for the end of righteousness. But an ethical in place of a national relation to God meant, if it was carried through consistently, a universal relation of God to all men as individuals, instead of a peculiar relation to one favored nation. Consistency was not reached, yet glimpses, sometimes clear momentary visions, of this individual, universal, ethical religion are to be found in the great prophets; and in them the Old Testament religion reaches its height. It is the prophetic denial of national claims and hopes, not the older and always prevalent assertion of them, that constitutes the reality and truth of the Old Testament hope. It is hope for Yahweh and his righteousness, not for Israel and its glory. It finds its highest expression in such predictions as Isaiah's promise of security to the humble and believing; and Jeremiah's expectation of the time when no special revelation will make known the will of God to a chosen few, but when everyone will have his own inward knowledge of God; and Ezekiel's belief that the new inward nature which every man requires if he is to do that will of God which he knows, will be achieved not only by his own free moral choice (18:31), but also by the divine spirit, the transforming presence and power of God (36:26, 27); and in Deutero-Isaiah's interpretation of the peculiar relation of Israel to the one God of all the world as that of Yahweh's Servant, his prophet to all nations, who brings light to the heathen and deliverance from bondage, and who effects this ministry even through his own shame and suffering for others' sins.

But there was a second still later way of adjusting the original nationalism of Israel's faith and hope to monotheism and the conception of a unity in nature and history; and this proved easier and more popular than the other. In late prophecy and apocalypse the hope of Israel's national and worldly prosperity and power takes on an unearthly character. Instead of righteousness and spirituality as in the earlier prophets, transcendence and heavenliness interpret or displace the primitive hope. The heavenly region to which apocalyptic prophecy transferred Israel's hope was a refinement of the physical, but it was still essentially physical, a region whose riches could be as sensibly enjoyed and as selfishly desired as the palace and throne of an earthly kingdom. The heavenly powers by which this hope was to be realized were divine, yet they were essentially material forces. The prophetic hopes at their highest rest on human nature at its highest, on the conscience and reason of man recognized as the will and thought of God. But the apocalyptic hope, though it strains language to magnify the contrast between its two worlds, the earthly and the heavenly, the present and the future, does not succeed in making them really different. Supernaturalism always fails to find the real difference between man and God and so the way in which the difference is to be overcome. This supernaturalism of the apocalypse is seen also in the ways in which the hope is revealed. The seer interprets in literal or artful ways the language of prophetic scriptures regarded as divine oracles, or he is translated in ecstasy to heaven and shown the secrets of the upper world and the future. The coming of this new heavenly world men may pray for, and the time of its coming they may seek to discover from sacred writings and traditions and from the signs of the times, but only divine powers can bring this evil world to an end, and only from heaven where they already are can descend, in heaven's own time and way, the scenery and the actors in the last great drama of history. There is in this hope no strong ethical appeal, no prevailing sense that in the inward region of the heart and in its instincts and desires and wills, God's presence is to be found and his work for man experienced. Moreover this hope for a new heavenly world means no hope for the present world. It is evil and must grow more evil until God intervenes to destroy it and brings down from heaven the realm of good. To renounce the world and withdraw from it is the course of wisdom and holiness. As a way of adjusting Israel's national hope to monotheism it is not comparable with the prophetic way of ethics and inwardness. It is still Israel, or the true Israel, that is to inherit the world to come; and at its coming the world empire must first of all be overthrown, for the new kingdom, heavenly and supernatural though it is, is enough like the kingdom of Greece or of Rome to require its fall and to take its place. The apocalyptic hope is the end of Old Testament prophecy, but not its height. It was no doubt in some sense fitted for its times, hard times, always, when the evils of life seemed irremediable. It knew the need of divine help, and it encouraged endurance and fidelity even to death. But it was not grounded in the nature of men, and it was mistaken in its conception of the nature of the world. It never quite escapes this inherent falseness and confusion in its fundamental assumptions.

It cannot be hard to pass judgment on the relative value of these three main hopes of the Old Testament. The primitive hope for God's special favor to his own peculiar people who are destined to have dominion over all others would have seemed, before the war, safely outgrown by humanity. If the world still needed a demonstration of the danger and falsity of any nation's belief in its peculiar excellence and in its exclusive right and destiny to rule, and the intolerable morals and preposterous religion that finally result from such claims, the aggressors in the present war have supplied it, and the rest of the world is united in the resolve that no further demonstration of this hope be undertaken. The early histories of the Old Testament and parts of its laws, its psalms and even its prophecies, contain expressions of just this belief in a peculiar people, for whom God made the world, and to whom the right belongs, secured by the divine favor and promise, to rule over all other nations. Some of the inferences and consequences of this faith that now shock the world, something of the hatred and the cruelty toward foreign peoples, the exaltation of vengeance, the arrogance and the inhumanity, find unreserved expression in this literature. But the meaning of the Old Testament is to be found in the denial and overcoming of this doctrine and of its results.

In regard to the two ways in which this denial and correction were chiefly undertaken, there can be no question where the greater value and truth are to be found. The prophet's criticism of the national hope and reinterpretation of it as the hope for righteousness really struck at the heart of the materialism and selfishness of the popular national hope, its false pride and its denial of trust and of good will toward mankind. But the apocalyptic modification of the older hope, though it fitted it for a wider view of the world and of history and a deeper experience of the power of evil, did not correct those moral and spiritual faults which were inherent in the older hope. There is no generosity, no faith in human nature, no sense of the present prevailing rule of God and power of good, no thought of the "secret of inwardness" and "the method of self-renouncement," in the religion of the apocalypse. The righteous kernel of Judaism, the holy few who feared the Lord, expected an invasion of divine forces on their behalf, the destruction of their oppressors and their own elevation to angel-like natures and God-like authority and blessedness. It could hardly be expected that they would exhibit Isaiah's virtue of humility, or Jeremiah's of inwardness and satisfaction in the communion of the soul with God, or Deutero-Isaiah's impulse to turn their present lowliness to greatness by ministry to those who persecuted them and even by death for others' transgressions. The greatest of the apocalypses are no doubt the canonical ones, Daniel and Revelation; and they are great in their confidence in the divine government of the world, and in its final vindication, and in their assertion of the martyr virtues. But they do not believe in man, and in God in man, though their belief in a God above is heroic. They do not hope for the world, or find God in the world; nor do they feel that they are in any sense responsible for the evil of the world and for its salvation from evil. Righteousness and blessedness belong only to heaven, and can come only from heaven to earth, and only by an act of God which will bring the present world to a sudden end. The faults of materialism and of self-interest which belong to the naïve nationalism of Israel's beginnings are still present in the conscious and sophisticated other-worldliness of the apocalyptic hopes, and reveal the inner untruth of a supernaturalism which reckons in terms of place and time, and looks above and ahead instead of about and within for the Kingdom of God.

The post-canonical apocalypses of Judaism fall within the period beginning with the attempt of Antiochus IV to make the Jews Greeks, and the successful resistance of the Maccabees and their establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom, and ending with the Jewish-Roman wars, the destruction of Jerusalem and the suppression by Hadrian of the final Messianic, political uprising under Bar Cochba; that is, from 108 BC to 135 AD It is of the highest importance to note that Christianity took its rise in the midst of this period, and that the apocalyptic hopes which these events encouraged and which in turn partly shaped the events, formed the immediate environment and inheritance of the new religion. The question as to the nature of the hope of the New Testament becomes therefore largely the question of the place which Jewish apocalyptical expectations had in the new religion and in the mind of its founder.