The passage: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
This sentence does more than say Charity is superior to Faith and Hope. It contains an important verb, “abideth,” which our translators rightly render so, in keeping with the context. St. Paul had been speaking of great gifts which, being signs of an imperfect state, would cease in a perfect one: Prophecies, Tongues, Gnosis. Even Gnosis he does not equate with Knowledge in its full sense, since his hope is to know even as he is known. It is the childish habit of seeing things only on one side, sometimes inverted, that is to disappear, along with the prophecies and divided tongues that belong to partial, infantine perception. But is there nothing precious to us now that will be precious to us always? Yes: Faith, Hope, Charity are not to disappear. These abide.
No attentive reader can miss this meaning in St. Paul’s words. Yet if we see it, we must give up notions that have become theological commonplaces among us. We are told it is the consequence of our exile from Heaven that we walk by Faith, not by sight, and that a time will come when Faith is lost in sight. So too with Hope: we are told it is to be drowned in fruition once we reach our inheritance. I do not deny there may be a truth hidden in this language, worth searching out. But we cannot arrive at that truth by flatly contradicting an Apostle, who is here magnifying Charity above Faith and Hope while saying, in plain words, that all three continue when partial things have vanished.
I. I will not give you my definition of Faith; no definition ought to satisfy you. I say this boldly because when the writer of Hebrews gives what schoolmen call a definition — so unlike theirs that they must immediately redefine it to make it intelligible — he at once translates it into life, going through the history of his people to show Faith in its actual exercises. From these deeds we learn how Faith is “the substance of things hoped for” and “the evidence of things not seen.” Consider any one of these deeds and you feel the force of the word Substance. This belief made Jewish fathers, lawgivers, prophets substantial men; it stood under them, bearing witness to a ground beneath itself. The recurring phrase “They put their trust in the Lord” explains how they became substantial. The earth they saw was fair and good; they had no complaint against its trees, flowers, fountains, sky, sun. But they could not find their own foundation in these, though they tried, by making them gods — and everything became capricious and uncertain. The things themselves were firm, but they who worshipped them had no firmness, being tossed by every change. Such things might be feared, even loved in some sense, but not trusted. Were they then driven back on their own thoughts and speculations, finding no rest in visible things? That was looser sand still, sometimes quicksand — “they sank in deep mire, where no ground was.” They could not trust themselves any more than the winds or waves. So “they cried unto the Lord” — out of the idols of sense, out of the mire within themselves — and He heard them, made them feel He was there, made them feel they might trust Him. They trusted, and were not confounded.
Thus Faith was the substance of their daily life, their strength in daily battles. But it was also, says the Epistle, “the substance of things hoped for”: what they did not yet possess, it made theirs. The unborn child, the promised seed as many as the stars, became integral to their existence no less than the flocks they watched by day. The Promiser was the same as the Giver; if they trusted Him for today, they might trust Him for tomorrow. The sense of truth and the sense of perseverance grew together in their minds, for the Lord could not lie — what He was now, He would always be.
The second clause of the definition follows naturally from the first: Faith is “the evidence of things not seen.” Truth, Righteousness, Mercy are not objects for the eye. The Jew was taught that a God of Truth, Righteousness, Mercy actually lived, was his Lord, and might be trusted. This trust, or Faith, conversed with invisible things which were, which it did not create any more than the eye creates what it sees. In both cases there is a revelation: the outward world reveals itself to the eye, God reveals Himself to Faith. Where the eye is blind, there is no revelation to it though the universe is revealing itself; where Faith is absent, there is no revelation of God though God is ever revealing Himself. Faith is the evidence in one case, as Sight is in the other.
When people speak of Faith being changed into Sight, what do they mean? Are Truth, Righteousness, Mercy to be translated into objects of sense — is God to become an object of sense? Have we fought against idolatry all our earthly lives, as the great sin that degrades God to the level of earth, only to become idolaters the moment our eyes close on this world — is that the heavenly reward? Or is Faith, as trust, to cease — is the glorified saint no longer to depend on God for all he has and is, given some higher security than unceasing trust?
Stated plainly, every devout man turns from these propositions with horror. Yet by not facing them squarely, by letting them hide under seemly phrases, great harm creeps into our souls. We fancy that eternal things will somehow come within range of our senses, becoming like the things of time; and we half suppose that, as reward for having trusted God’s promises here, a day will come when we possess something assured to us as lands or goods are — held not of God but as our own. These are fearful habits of mind to cherish, the more so because so congenial to our indolence and selfishness. Let us cast them off. Remember that when the Son of Man presented Himself in a body that could be seen and touched to those He called His brethren, it was to their Faith He appealed, their Faith His words and healings sought to call forth. When it did not answer, He said, “You know me not, though you see me; you do not come to me, though you follow me.” It was to Faith alone He revealed Himself, even when the senses seemed most capable of reporting on Him. And it must always be so: Faith must pierce through the robes of His visible Majesty as it once pierced through the robes of His humiliation. We must know Him in His own pure essential Nature, or there can be no delight in His presence. If adoration is not paid to the Lamb that was slain, it is not the adoration of the saints about the throne. And is not this the very difference between those whose garments are made white in the blood of the Lamb and those still stained with earthly foulness — that the one trusts absolutely, while the other’s trust is mixed with doubt? Some say they have assurance of attaining heaven’s bliss, and that without such assurance none can live a true human life. I would rather seek the honest sense possibly wrapped in such words than the hideous use made of them. If Assurance means Faith or Trust in a God who has reconciled the world to Himself and said to us in Christ, “I will be to you a Father; you shall be to Me sons and daughters,” then the more we hold to that Faith and fight all that assaults it, the clearer, healthier, manlier our minds will be. We shall do the works God has given us because we are sure they are His, not ours. Since the bliss of Heaven, I believe, must consist in entire freedom from the unbelief and suspicion that hinder sound action, comfortable intercourse, and inward peace here, such Faith, the more vigorously exercised, must be the right entrance to that bliss. But doubt, unbelief, even temporary despair would be a better exchange than an assurance grounded in some private privilege that the Incarnation and Death of Christ have not made the common inheritance of all, or than supposing that inheritance could be anything but a full discovery of Him whom our want of Faith and our wish for private felicity have kept us from seeing.
Let us believe, then, with St. Paul, that Faith must abide always with us if we are to be blessed creatures. No distinction belonging to God’s divine order can be abolished. Faith and Sight may both be perfected; invisible things may become more real and certain than things of sense — we may be sure they are the substances, apart from which sensible things would be mere shadows. Hereafter this world, full of unfathomed secrets, may disclose them to the purified searcher; every sense may put forth its fullest energy; the glorified body may be fit to understand the glorified earth. Faith and sight may become the divinest allies instead of the murderous antagonists they so often are now. But neither will usurp the other’s place; there will be no confusion of their functions. Such confusion belongs to our twilight; it will be scattered in God’s perfect Day.
- It has not been possible to speak of Faith without touching Hope, since Faith is “the substance of things hoped for.” I have lately connected Hope with the glory Isaiah says is to be revealed, which all flesh shall see together. What are these “things hoped for”? Are they the same as the Prophet’s glory? If so, consider how far fruition of such a Hope could extinguish it. Is not the Hope of God’s glory the hope of something infinite, always unfolding further to one in communion with it, and so always kindling fresh hope? Suppose a man reached a final pillar on his voyage of discovery and was told, “Now you know all; there is no further depth or height” — would not the hope he had nourished be frustrated rather than fulfilled? Would he not become a dwarfed, stunted creature, thrown back into the self-sufficiency God had delivered him from? The Hope that does not disappoint, that purifies, cannot be of this kind. It has Faith for its substance because it has God for its substance and its end. It comes from Him and can only be satisfied in Him.
Not that, being the ground and final satisfaction of Hope, He disdains lesser objects — all things shine in His light, glow with His life. But for that very reason even the pettiest creature must lie beyond the full comprehension of saints and angels; they must give up any ambition to fully grasp it, remaining ever filled with hope of apprehending a little more of the divine secret set before them for endless inquiry and wonder. It is the babyhood of existence that dreams of grasping water in the hollow of the hand or finding the end of the rainbow. In our manhood, seeing things as they are, we shall cry out — not in terror or shame, but in awe and thanksgiving and hope — “How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!”
- So we arrive naturally at the Apostle’s conclusion: “The greatest of these is Charity.” Had he said, as some do, “The only one that abides is Charity,” he would have taught, in effect, the Pantheistic doctrine that the creature is to sink and be lost in God. His actual reason for exalting Charity above Faith and Hope is that Faith and Hope point to His Being and Nature, while Charity constitutes it. That must be greatest without which the other two could not exist, without which they would have no object. A being who is not altogether Charity does not ask for trust — he bids his creatures distrust him, tremble, shrink from him. Such a being does not invite hope — he bids creatures despair, since he might at any moment loose the power to destroy them. Such a being is no fit object for Faith, which would always be seeking some other rest, forever flickering and uncertain. Nor is he fit object for Hope, which would always be looking to escape his cold atmosphere for some warmer region. Therefore, if Faith abides and Hope abides, Charity must abide. Because Charity is the fixed, eternal Substance, Faith and Hope have substance; because it cannot fail, they do not fail.
Perhaps this seems a perverse use of the word St. Paul has been discussing throughout the chapter — surely, you will say, it must mean the same in the last verse as in the first. But in the first verse he says, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal” — plainly speaking of human Charity. How can it be converted here into divine Charity?
This is an important question. What we want to know is how we can have that Charity without which we are tinkling cymbals — how St. Paul himself came to possess it. He speaks elsewhere of being saved by Faith and saved by Hope, speaking from his own experience: he knew he was lost in his own selfishness until he began to believe and hope in God. But Faith and Hope in what God? In a God of absolute Love, the God who revealed Himself on the road to Damascus, whom Paul then sought to serve by preaching Christ, His perfect Image. Only then did he, who had much knowledge and a Faith — of a gloomy kind — able to remove mountains, begin to have Love working in his heart. Faith and Hope, these saving powers, brought him into fellowship with something greater than themselves; he found them the conductors of its power, the unseen wires by which the life in the Father passed into those formed to be one body in the Son. God brings men into that body not that they may speak with tongues, remove mountains, or give their bodies to be burned — though He may call some to do any of these — but that, being baptized into one body, having one Faith, one Lord, they may receive the one Spirit, the Spirit of Love, and be stirred to do the works Love would have them do.
This is our teaching for the Sunday before Lent. What then should be the subject of our confession during Lent? We shall all own that the Love which bears all things, hopes all things, never seeks its own, has been weak in us — if it has had any hold on us at all. But what good is there in owning this? We cannot make ourselves love God by thinking how heavily He will punish us if we do not; we cannot make ourselves loving to our brother by calculating future gain from cultivating such affections. Our ordinary religious motives fail this test, proving as unpractical as they are coarse and grovelling. But if Faith and Hope stand to Love as I have described — substantial and good for us because Love is the Eternal Substance of God — then we may look on ourselves more humbly, less despondingly. We may give up the proud, idle dream of working ourselves into Love by artifice or calculation. We may discover that without Faith or Trust in God’s Love, it is impossible, by the laws of the universe, by the relation of creature to Creator, for there to be any Love in us at all. We shall discover too that this Faith must itself be God’s gift, that it could not exist in us unless His Love awakened it — and that thought, instead of creating uncertainty, becomes the beginning of confidence. If God desires Faith in us, He must plant it in us; by every act of His discipline He is planting it, bidding us trust Him — that voice never clearer than when it reminds us of our failures, neglects, heartlessness, selfishness. Every conviction of our want of Charity is a call to turn to His infinite Charity. The more hollow we are, the more we need what alone can fill the hollow; the more cause we see for despair in ourselves, the more we are driven to hope in the living God. So our confessions become sincere, our repentance one not to be repented of. We do not blame God for leaving us bare of what we need to please Him or live; we blame ourselves for not understanding His invitation to unbounded trust, His promise that what most threatens to destroy Hope will be made to keep it alive. We blame ourselves that when His Spirit of Love has been working to enter us, we have let another spirit, of self-seeking, possess and rule us instead. Such confessions do not lose themselves in vagueness: it is the round of daily life — omitted acts that might have helped our fellow-men, careless thoughts and habits that hinder us from helping them, reckless words and deeds that lower their moral life and ours — that God brings to mind, and through these we learn the mysteries of our nature and of His. Through these we are driven to feel the separation between us and His Charity, led to understand that the Atonement must be His work, not ours, led to feel that He can only be satisfied with us because He sees us in that Son who perfectly reflects His Charity, who believed and hoped in it through His humiliation and so endured the burden of our sins and death, who believes and hopes in it now and so presents the sacrifice of all His redeemed with the incense of His own perfect sacrifice to the Father. Through the sins that torment our daily life we learn the cause of all sin, in others as in ourselves: that it springs from suspicion of God and spreads in suspicion of one another; that the Spirit of God makes us aware of it because He is fighting it in each of us; and that if we yield to Him, He will drive out these great enemies and endue us with those three choicest blessings, Faith, Hope, and Charity, which are to abide with us and make us one with God and with our brethren for ever.