The answer
St. Clement of Alexandria says, “Learn to walk in the true faith, to rest in God, and do not seek earthly fulfillments and temporal blessings. Do not deviate towards a vain earthly faith that depends on requests for signs and wonders in order to be fully established.68
And St. Augustine says, “For where are there those three, in order to build up which in the mind the whole apparatus of the divine Scriptures has been raised up, namely Faith, Hope, and Charity (1 Cor. 13:13), except in a mind believing what it does not yet see, and hoping and loving what it believes? Even He therefore who is not known, but yet is believed, can be loved.”69
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
68 St. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies in David Hazard, You Give Me New Life: A 40- day Journey in the Company of the Early Disciples: Devotional Readings (Bethany House, 1995): ch. 4.
69 St. Augustine of Hippo, On the Holy Trinity 8.4(6) (NPNF I/3:118).