III
The Unification of the Virtues.—While it is desirable, then, to exhibit the virtues in detail, it is even more important to trace back the virtues to virtue itself. A man's duties are diverse, as diverse as the various occasions and circumstances of life, and they can only come into being with the various institutions of his time, Church and State, home and country, commerce and culture. But the performance of these may be slowly building up in him a consistent personality. It is in character that the unity of the moral life is most clearly expressed. There must be therefore a unity of character underlying the multiplicity of characteristics, one single and commanding principle at work in the formation of life of which every possible virtue is the expression.
1. A unity of this kind is supplied by man's relation to God. Religion cannot be separated from conduct. If it were true, as Epicurus said, that the gods take no concern in human affairs, then not religion only, but morality itself would be in danger. As men's conceptions of God are purified and deepened, they tend to exhibit the varied contents of morality in their connection with a diviner order. It is, then, the thought of man's relation to God which gives coherence to the moral life, and brings all its diverse manifestations into unity.
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If we examine the Christian consciousness as presented in the New Testament, we find three words of frequent occurrence repeatedly grouped together, which may be regarded as the essential marks of Christian character in relation to God—Faith, Hope, and Love.
So characteristic are these of the new life that they have been called the theological virtues, because, as Thomas Aquinas says, 'They have God for their object: they bring us into true relation to God, and they are imparted to us by God alone.'[15]
2. These graces, however, cannot be separated. A man does not exercise at one time faith, and at another time hope or love. They are all of a piece. They are but different manifestations of one virtue. Of these love is the greatest, because it is that without which faith and hope could not exist. Love is of the very essence of the Christian life. It is its secret and sign. No other term is so expressive of the spirit of Christ. It is the first and last word of apostolic Christianity. Love may be called the discovery of the Gospel. It was practically unknown in the ancient world. Eros, the sensuous instinct and philia, the bond of friendship, did exist, but agapê in its spiritual sense is the creation of Christ. In Christian Ethics love is primal and central. Here we have got down to the bedrock of virtue. It is not simply one virtue among many. It is the quality in which all the virtues have their setting and unity. From a Christian point of view every excellence of character springs directly from love and is the manifestation of it. It is, as St. Paul says, 'the bond of perfectness.' The several virtues of the Christian life are but facets of this one gem.[16]
Love, according to the apostle, is indispensable to character. Without it Faith is an empty profession; {197} Knowledge, a mere parade of learning; Courage, a boastful confidence; Self-denial, a useless asceticism. Love is the fruitful source of all else that is beautiful and noble in life. It not only embraces but produces all the other graces. It creates fortitude; it begets wisdom; it prompts self-restraint and temperance; it tempers justice. It manifests itself in humility, meekness, and forgiveness:
'As every hue is light,
So every grace is love.'
Love is, however, closely associated with faith and hope. Faith, as we have seen, is theologically the formative and appropriating power by which man makes his own the spirit of Christ. But ethically it is a form of love. The Christian character is formed by faith, but it lives and works by love. A believing act is essentially a loving act. It is a giving of personal confidence. It implies an outgoing of the self towards another—which is the very nature of love. Hope, again, is but a particular form of faith which looks forward to the consummation of the good. The man of hope knows in whom he believes, and he anticipates the fulfilment of his longings. Hope is essentially an element of love. Like faith it is a form of idealism. It believes in, and looks forward to, a better world because it knows that love is at the heart of the universe. As faith is the special counteragent against materialism in the present, so hope is the special corrective of pessimism in regard to the future. Love supplies both with vision. Christian hope, because based on faith and prompted by love, is no easy-going complacence which simply accepts the actual as the best of all possible worlds. The Christian is a man of hope because in spite of life's sufferings he never loses faith in the ideal which love has revealed to him. 'Tribulation,' says St. Paul, 'worketh patience, and patience probation, and probation hope.' Hope has its social aspect as well as its personal; like faith it is one of the mighty levers of society. Men of hope are the saviours of the world. In days of persecution and doubt it is their courage which rallies the wavering hosts and gives others {198} heart for the struggle. Every Christian is an optimist not with the reckless assurance that calls evil good, but with the rational faith, begotten of experience, that good is yet to be the final goal of ill. 'Thy kingdom come' is the prayer of faith and hope, and the missionary enterprise is rooted in the confidence begotten of love, that He who has given to man His world-wide commission will give also the continual presence and power of His Spirit for its fulfilment.
3. Faith, hope, and charity are at once the root and fruit of all the virtues. They are the attributes of the man whom Christ has redeemed. The Christian has a threefold outlook. He looks upwards, outwards, and inwards. His horizon is bounded by neither space nor time. He embraces all men in his regard, because he believes that every man has infinite worth in God's eyes. The old barriers of country and caste, which separated men in the ancient world, are broken down by faith in God and hope for man which the love of Christ inspires. Faith, hope, and love have been called the theological virtues. But if they are to be called virtues at all, it must be in a sense very different from what the ancients understood by virtue. These apostolic graces are not elements of the natural man, but states which come into being through a changed moral character. They connect man with God, and with a new spiritual order in which his life has come to find its place and purpose. They were impossible for a Greek, and had no place in ancient Ethics. They are related to the new ideal which the Gospel has revealed, and obtain their value as elements of character from the fact that they have their object in the distinctive truth of Christianity—fellowship with God through Christ.
These graces are not outward adornments or optional accomplishments. They are the essential conditions of the Christian man. They constitute his inmost and necessary character. They do not, however, supersede or render superfluous the other virtues. On the contrary they transmute and transfigure them, giving to them at once their coherence and value.
[1] Phil. iv. 8; 1 Peter ii. 9.
[2] 2 Peter i. 5.
[3] Cf. Sir Alex. Grant, Aristotle's Ethics.
[4] Cf. Wundt, Ethik, p. 147.
[5] Green, Proleg. to Ethics, section 249.
[6] Idem.
[7] Matt. v. 1-16.
[8] Gal. v. 22-3.
[9] Col. iii. 12, 13.
[10] Phil. iv. 8.
[11] 1 Cor. xiii.
[12] 2 Peter i. 5.
[13] Strong, Christian Ethics.
[14] Mathieson, Landmarks of Christian Morality.
[15] Summa, I. ii.
[16] An interesting parallel might be drawn between the Pauline conception of Love as the supreme passion of the soul and lord of the emotions, and the Platonic view of Justice as the intimate spirit of order alike in the individual and the state, expressing itself in, and harmoniously binding together, the virtues of Temperance, Courage, and Wisdom.
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