springs of such conquest. It needs also in our day an immensely more practical use of the principle of hope, a principle almost totally neglected in theology and made nothing of in our codes of conduct or in our creeds. Paul had a far deeper insight into the human heart and a vastly richer grasp on life. "Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three," said he.
Paul rendered a large service when he condensed the central ideals and principles of Christianity in this way. The human mind is very fond of formulas. If it had not been for some authoritative, simplifying word like this, we might have gone on to construct all sorts of prescriptions like the threes and sixes and tens and fifteens with which we are so familiar in Buddhism. And yet the service which Paul rendered is not without its dangers, for men are prone to simplify further and to see whether the three cannot be reduced to one, or to arrange the order and proportions of the three, or to contend alone for that which some one of them signifies at the expense of the other two. Paul's own words should have saved us from such folly, for he said quite clearly that one of these three was the greatest, "And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love." And yet his own doctrine elsewhere has been used to correct and to counteract his expressed judgment here, and through the years
