ding 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. 'T