I. THE ORIGIN OF THIS HOPE. It grows directly out of his reverence for God. He feels his God has charms that must win the hearts of men; that He has activities which lead Him to seek and to save the lost; that His Spirit is breathing everywhere upon the face of the great world; that God is not content to be without His children or to leave them in the far country, and accordingly, believing in God he believes in man; and his eye, filled with Divine light when it looks on man, catches some Divine features in man, traces a family likeness; and he speaks of "man whom God has made." If you despair of the success of the Gospel in heathen lands, it is not because you know man, it is because you do not know God. If you knew Him — that His heart is as large as all His attributes, that in His vast family there is no one beneath His care, or thought, or love, that His love touches all, and His kingdom rules over all — that knowledge of God would dispel doubt and loose your neck from the bands of poorer fears: and, revering God, you would hope for man — I have not yet done with the question of the origin of the hope, because there is a little more shown us by the psalm itself. For both this reverence for God and this hope for man have again their root in the psalmist's penitence; and we do not get at the bottom of the matter till we get to the broken spirit and the contrite heart; that gives him reverence for his Maker and faith in his brother man. Looking up he sees a Father, and looking round he sees the golden age coming on apace, mankind waking to truth, ready to accept it, erring only because they do not know it. He sees no gulf fixed between man and God here, and no despair necessary or inevitable. He lives in adoration and in hope.

II. THE HOPE ITSELF. It is a hope that there will be one universal religion; that however diverse in constitution, temperament, training, experience, sooner or later truth will dominate over all error, and grace rule all hearts, and mankind belong to Christ. It is a great hope. Even the philosopher, the historian, the man of science might rejoice in that; much more we who know the value of each individual spirit in the sight of its Maker. Let us look at it.

1. All the holiest men in all ages have cherished this hope. The devout has never been a narrow heart — never. It enlarges all thoughts when we get into the realm of communion with our God. Moses had breadth of view when he said, "There shall be one law to you and to the sojourner that dwelleth with you," and taught that God was the God of the stranger. David had no narrowness. Again and again in all his psalms you see precisely the same feeling as is exhibited here. You know how Isaiah dwelt in expectation of the distant isles coming to Jehovah, the rams of Nebaioth coming up on His altar, people coming from the north and the south, and the land of Sinim pressing into the house of His glory. You know how Ezekiel had the missionary spirit in him, how he describes the river of the water of life deepening as it flowed, and carrying to every land the life of healing with which it was charged. You know how Paul argued. Through all his epistles there is but one great argument advanced, that the Gospel is to be a world-wide message, that Christ is not second Abraham, but second Adam — head of mankind, and that as death has come upon all men, so the grace of God through Jesus Christ will come upon all men unto salvation. You know John's vision: "I beheld, and lo, a great multitude out of every nation," etc.

2. This hope has been justified largely by past experience. That creed of Israel was once the creed of a single man. It lay in the heart of Abraham, who found it. Although trained as a heathen, as an idolater, as a worshipper of other gods, following the inward voice he found the great God. He gave the creed to Isaac, Isaac to Jacob, and these to a few others. In two or three centuries it had received sufficient acceptance to become the living thing about which a nation crystallizes, and which can be embodied in a marvellous law infinitely ahead of anything then existing. It finds more adherence still, better acceptance in the days of David, still more in the times of the prophets, and still larger acceptance amidst the discipline and the furnace of the Babylonish captivity, till in the time of Christ it was the creed of a great people scattered throughout the world, and leavening all nations where they were scattered. That is an instance only; from one man, this creed spread till it animated a people. And the same thing has been going on ever since. The creed of the Church of Christ — that God is love and man should be — is brief and clear. There seemed but little hope of its being accepted. All nations resisted, as you and I did when it first came to us. It was too good news to be true. The Jew despised it, the Roman tried to crush it, and the warlike tribes of the nations turned away from it as something that would enfeeble their manhood. But it passed from heart to heart, from city to city, till it became the creed of the great Roman Empire, and has gone on and on until to-day it is the creed of three hundred millions of people, and these three hundred millions the strongest part of the earth's inhabitants.

3. The welfare of mankind is bound up in its realization. Raise the man and you raise his whole condition. Reform from the heart outward, and you secure an effective reform which you cannot secure if you begin at the other end. All good work is God's work, and will win His reward. But still the great work is that which gives the man his manhood, which sets him free, which gives him an immortal hope. Give him that, and you give him thrift and self-respect, and civil liberty, and the power of mastering everything that is adverse in his condition. The welfare of mankind is bound up in this hope.

4. The realization of this great hope tarries because of our indifference. We decline to be our brother's keeper. We eat our morsel of the bread of life alone.

(R. Glover.)