hy 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 pass