(4) The evangelical virtues. — In the NT there is no regular discussion of the nature of virtue, and no formal classification of virtues. The Greek philosophers, while they dittered in their views of what constituted the chief good, were agreed in accepting what are known as the four cardinal virtues — prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice — as the basis of their classification. This division, from the time of Plato onwards (and he appears to assume it as famili.ar), is generally accepted as exhaustive, and other virtues are made
to fall under these heads. But although this classi- fication must have been familiar to a large number of the early Christians, and although it had been adopted in the Book of Wisdom (8"), it is not men- tioned in the NT. The cardinal virtues reappeared in Christian literature from Origen onwards, and were exhaustively treated by Ambrose, Augus- tine, Gregory, and medifeval writers, but this kind of discussion does not make its appearance in the Apostolic Age. Such lists of virtues as that which occurs in Gal 5--'' are clearly not intended to be exhaustive or scientific, and the nearest approach to a system of virtues is made by St. Paul in 1 Cor., where he exjjounds what became known as the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. These three are also closely associated in Bo 5^"^, 1 Th r-^-, and Col 1^"*; and two other NT Avriters (He 10--'-^ and 1 P l^^'-) mention them in conjunction in a suggestive manner. It seems that they were generally recognized as moral or spiritual states characteristic of the Christian life. And the reason for this appears to be that they are regarded as the means by which the Christian is brought into personal relation with the historical facts, and Avith the new life brought by them into the world, which have been spoken of above as the point on which the Christians of the first age centred their atten- tion. The insistence on these spiritual virtues brings out two distinct characteristics of the ethical thought of the Apostolic Age, which are nowhere defined or discussed in the NT, but which neverthe- less appear to be consistently implied. These char- acteristics are a new doctrine of the end of man, and consequently a new criterion of good and evil, and a new view of human nature.
(a) These three virtues all take a man outside himself, and make it impossible for him to be merely self-regarding. They bring him into close relation not only with his fellow-men but with God. So union with God becomes the highest end of man. This union, moreover, is not absorption : whatever may have been the case of some later Christian mystics, the most mystical of the early writers, St. Paul and St. John, never contemplate anything but a conscious union with God, in which the whole in- dividuality of man is preserved. * From first to last the Christian idea is social, and involves the con- scious communion between man and man, between man and God. And no state of things in which the individual consciousness disappears will satisfy this demand ' (Strong, op. cit. p. 88). Faith, hope, and love all relate to a spiritual region above and beyond this present life, but the existing world is not ex- cluded from it. The Kingdom of God, Avhich oc- cupies 60 large a place in the thought of the Apostolic Age, is regarded as future and as tran- scendental, but it is also regarded as having come already, so far as the rule of Christ has been made efi'ective in this life. Thus a new standard for moral judgments is set up : those actions and events are good which advance the coming of the Kingdom, and those are evil which impede it.
(b) Further, the evangelical virtues assume a unity in human nature which i^re-Christian sj-stems of thought failed to recognize. Greek thought either regarded human nature as unf alien, or it adopted more or less an Oriental view of evil as im- manent in matter. When evil could not be ignored it might be ascribed either to ignorance or to the imprisonment of the soul in an alien environment. In neither case could human nature be regarded as a whole which in its OAvn proper being is harmonious. The body and the emotions which are closely con- nected with it were looked upon as things which must either be kept in strict subjection to the in- tellect, or, as far as possible, be got rid of altogether. In earl^' Christian thought, on the other hand, hope and love are mainly emotional, and faith is by no
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ETHIOPIANS
means exclusively intellectual. In St. Paul's use of the tenn it includes a strong element of emotion — it ' worketh through love ' (Gal 5*) ; and it is almost more an act of the A\'ill than of the intellect. And although asceticism played a great part in some departments of later Christian thought, in the Apostolic Age there can be no doubt of the import- ance assigned to the body. The conspicuous Chris- tian belief in the resurrection of the body assumes a very different point of view from that of Oriental or even of Greek philosophy. It is clear that the first generation of Christians regarded human nature as fallen indeed, but as capable in all its parts of restoration, and they believed that none of its parts could be left out from the salvation of the whole.