From Sunday school—and from our entire culture ever since—I've learned the phrase "faith, hope, and charity" (or sometimes "love"). However, it has always remained an abstraction to me.
Now, while writing a review of W. L. Wilshurst's The Meaning of Masonry, I've come across his short gloss on the phrase, a gloss that makes the abstractions less abstract for me, by turning them into actions: attain, desire, seek. Moreover, it refuses to be "religious." Save for the word "God"—which can be replaced with any word you find right—it should, I think, be meaningful even to non-theists:
. . . Faith in the possibility of attaining the end in view; Hope, or a persistent fervent desire for its fulfilment; and finally an unbounded Love which, seeking God in all men and all things, despite their outward appearances, and thinking no evil, gradually identifies the mind and nature of the aspirant with that ultimate Good upon which his thought, desire and gaze should be persistently directed . . .
[Illustration from Wikimedia Commons]
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