Acts 2:17

‘A MESSAGE OF HOPE’

‘Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’

Acts 2:17

The New Testament exhibits no anxiety to make out a formal literal fulfilment of this promise. In such a sense, the seeing of visions is not a whit more frequent after Pentecost than before; much less has it become a permanent and solid endowment of the Church.

I. The promise remains.—What does it mean for us in the twentieth century? We catch a glimpse of the answer as we ask another question, What is the meaning of that great name of God—the God of Hope? Have we realised how much—for mere ardour and expectancy, for energy, courage, and buoyancy of heart—the world owes to the Christian faith? Men who have lost their faith have frankly confessed the horror of the alternative. German pessimism is its natural expression. The Church does believe that the darkest possible outlook, the most sordid misery, the foulest moral ruin, instead of entitling her to sit down benumbed and despairing, are but her call to achieve new triumphs for the Crucified.

II. Before the eyes of the Church there burns and glows the vision of a world far other than the world we see.—We look upon Europe armed to the teeth. We look at our own land—at the horrors of our cities after dark, and we dream of a purified, simpler, more generous nation. And we look for such changes not to alliances nor treaties between realms, not to laws and co-operative leagues at home, but to the deepening and cleansing of character, to the extension and strengthening of the Christian conscience, to a profounder realisation of the nearness of God to us all in Christ the merciful.

III. Such visions have made the Church the greatest and most practical power on earth, for ever dreaming but never sunk in day-dreams; the repeller of Islam, the emancipator of Africa, the educator of the poor, the champion of the masses, the one teacher of a reasonable socialism. And what she has done is the earnest and the evidence that she shall yet see greater things than these; since her high hopes are Divinely kindled, and to perceive them is the pledge that some day they shall come to pass, because He is ‘able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.’ And we are workers together with Him for these great ends.

Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘Here is an average mill-girl. Her life is spent in a crowded and noisy room, watching the revolution of a wheel, or tying a thread as often as it breaks. When this deadly monotony is over she retires to a crowded street under a smoky sky, to poor nourishment, a hard bed, and an early return to labour. A few sensational novels have unfitted her for the only domestic ties to which she can aspire. A few Bank Holiday excursions have shown her the mansions and parks, the carriages and conservatories which are (so she thinks) the daily joys of other women. If her health is precarious she contrasts with their December summers by a perfumed sea, her own shivering misery, the infirmary, perhaps the workhouse and the nameless grave. Then there comes to her that great change which is rightly called conversion. Her monotony becomes a discipline. Her loneliness is watched by the Supreme Being, her Father; her sorrows are shared by the King of Heaven, Who is Himself the Man of Sorrows; her life here is the shadowy vestibule to the city of God. Her obscurity is the disguise of an heir of God and a joint-heir with Christ. In her untaught bosom there begins to move a loftier emotion than ever stirred the sententious heart of Seneca. Multiply this experience by tens of thousands, and you begin to understand what a gulf stream to mitigate our climate is Christianity in the secular life of man.’