Page:The Power of the Spirit.djvu/54

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THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT
49

how courage is needed for right counsel, not less than for right action, how the highest form of power is after all intellectual as well as moral, and how inseparable in all right undertaking are Counsel and Might. It is really the same with every activity of life, with the decisions that put us on our way, with every direction we pursue, with every result we accomplish.

There remain the three related gifts, which we often think of simply as wisdom, but which are analysed for us as Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge. Many people must have asked why so much of the six divisions is devoted to the intellect, and whether after all they are not but different words for the same thing, or at most different aspects of the same quality. And I think that religious teachers have been apt to fall into vagueness when they expounded these three gifts.

They are really entirely distinct, and have nothing in common but their intellectual nature.

The Jews were not a metaphysical race, and the prophets spoke by intuition rather than by ratiocination, the genius of Christendom has also been intuitive, like all genius. But intuition is nothing unless it corresponds with what is; and this is what philosophy can explain to us. Philosophy tells us that there are three human desires, three things that can each be rightly sought only for its own sake—Goodness, Beauty, and Truth; and