17 August: Boreham on Hope

The Craft of Hope
Whilst there's life, there's hope, we say. The Spaniards maintain that the proverb represents a truth standing on its head. They declare that whilst there's hope, there's life. There is some ground for their contention. Between wishful thinking and hopeful thinking there is all the difference in the world. Wishes are castles in the air, based on the stuff that dreams are made of. Hopes are founded on reason and reality.

In the classical painting, G. F. Watts represents Hope as a female figure, seated upon the globe, bending fondly over her broken harp. The light is dim and uncertain, but Hope is blind to the gloom, for her eyes are bandaged. Only one string remains, but to that single string she applies her skilful fingers, a look of infinite wistfulness and expectancy lighting up her beautiful face.

The point is that there still remains that solitary string. Without that string it would be possible only to wish. With it, it is possible to hope. On that surviving string, Hope finds a foundation for her felicity.

The Search For Symbols
Few abstract qualities have woven about them such a wealth of graceful symbolism. The ancients depicted Hope as an anchor. So did the sacred writers. So, too, did Bunyan. Bunyan's golden anchor adorned the walls of the Palace Beautiful. It so captivated the eyes of Christiana that the Sisters of the Palace made her a present of it. It is the prerogative of an anchor to penetrate the fluctuating and unstable quantities upon the surface of things, and to fasten itself upon fixed and constant elements concealed from human sight. The symbolism is reasonably satisfying. Its one defect is that an anchor strikes us as being too cold, too rigid, too metallic, to represent so warm, so human, so palpitating a quality as hope.

The biographers of George Augustus Selwyn, the pioneer Bishop of New Zealand, agree that the sturdy pathfinder's favourite expression when discussing recalcitrant cases among either the Maoris or the white men was: "Sow a little hope, my boy; sow a little hope-seed!" In contrast with the anchor, the symbolism of the seed presents an attractive theme for contemplation. Seed is alive. It is the world's oldest and divinest mystery. A sower is a man, bearing on his arms a basket of miracles.


The thought of seed fills the fancy with rainbow-tinted visions of secret fructification and endless multiplication. Hope deserves to be allied, not so much with inanimate things like harps and anchors, but with things that live and flourish and propagate their kind. Hope belongs of right to God's great out-of-doors, to the sea and the earth and the sky, to the lofty hills and the laughing valleys, to the fields and the woods and the streams.

Deathless Expectation
The choicest, sanest, and most engaging people whom most of us have ever met have been the people who have stuffed their pockets with hope-seed and have taken good care to have a hole in every pocket.

Women, particularly, are gallant hopers. Sir Luke Fildes' famous painting, "The Doctor," has been criticised on this ground. It represents the physician bending anxiously over the sick child; the mother sits in the background with her arms resting on the table and her face buried in her arms, the very personification of despair. The father stands in the foreground gloomily awaiting the doctor's verdict. Doctors say that the picture, however flattering to their profession, is untrue to life; in actual fact, the mother never surrenders as long as a breath remains in her child's body.

Hope never gives up, however sick or however sinful we may be. It holds on bravely to the very end. And even beyond. For it goes on pilgrimage to the grave, and, whilst watering the green mound with pardonable tears, refuses to regard death as a terminus. Those who have mastered the high craftsmanship of hope prove themselves to be the followers of One who went to the Cross with a smile of radiant expectancy upon His face, confident that beyond the darkness there is a light that can never be quenched and, beyond the tomb, a life that knows no ending.

F W Boreham

Image: Luke Filde's The Doctor