peace reign
unbroken, and are met with a cold gust of indifference or with an icy
wind of hate. The reality of our happy communion and the depth of our
love will be tested by the patience of our long-suffering. Love
suffereth long, is not easily provoked, is not soon angry. He has little
reason to suppose that the love of God is shed abroad in his heart, or
that the Spirit of God is bringing forth fruit in him, who has not got
beyond the stage of repaying hate with hate, and scorn with scorn. Any
fool can answer a fool according to his folly, but it takes a wise and a
good man to overcome evil with good, and to love them that hate; and yet
how certainly the fires of mutual antagonism would go out if there were
only one to pile on the fuel! It takes two to make a quarrel, and no man
living under the influence of the Spirit of God can be one of such a
pair.

The second and third members of this triad--kindness, goodness, slide
very naturally into one another. They do not only require the negative
virtue of not retaliating, but express the Christian attitude towards
all of meeting them, whatever their attitude, with good. It is possible
that kindness here expresses the inward disposition and goodness, the
habitual actions in which that disposition shows itself. If that be the
distinction between them, the former would answer to benevolence and the
latter to beneficence. These three graces include all that Paul presents
as Christian duty to our fellows. The results of the life of the Spirit
are to pass beyond ourselves and to influence our whole conduct. We are
not to live only as mainly for the spiritual enjoyments of fellowship
with God. The true field of religion is in moving amongst men, and the
true basis of all service of men is love and fellowship with God.

The third triad--faithfulness, meekness, temperance--seems to point to
the world in which the Christian life is to be lived as a scene of
difficulties and oppositions. The rendering of the Revised Version is to
be preferred to that of the Authorised in the first of the three, for it
is not faith in its theological sense to which the Apostle is here
referring. Possibly, however, the meaning may be trustfulness just as in
1 Corinthians xiii. it is given as a characteristic of love that it
'believeth all things.' More probably, however, the meaning is
faithfulness, and Paul's thought is that the Christian life is to
manifest itself in the faithful discharge of all