And to knowledge, temperance This virtue consists in a confirmed habit of ruling all the affections, passions, and appetites of our nature in a proper manner, by placing our affections on proper objects; by restraining our angry, peevish, envious, and unholy tempers, and by using moderation in gratifying our appetites. Christian temperance, indeed, includes the voluntary abstaining from all pleasure which does not lead to God, extending to all things inward and outward, and implying the due government of our thoughts and imaginations, as well as of our desires and designs. It is the using the world properly: so to use all outward, and so to restrain all inward things, that they may become a means of what is spiritual; a scaling-ladder to ascend to what is above. Intemperance is to abuse the world. He that uses any thing below, looking no higher, and getting no farther, is intemperate. He that uses the creature only so as to attain to more of the Creator, is alone temperate in all things, and walks as Christ himself walked; and to temperance, patience Bear as well as forbear; sustain as well as abstain; take up your cross, as well as deny yourself, daily; and the more knowledge you have, do this the more: the more steadily and resolutely renounce your own will; submit to, and acquiesce in, the will of God; and indulge yourself the less. Knowledge puffeth up; and the great boasters of knowledge, the Gnostics, were those that turned the grace of God into wantonness, being lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, and of course effeminate and unprepared to encounter any opposition, or to endure any hardship on account of truth and a good conscience. But see that your knowledge be attended with temperance, and your temperance with patience; and to patience, godliness Its proper support; a continual sense of God's wisdom, power, and goodness; of his holiness, truth, justice, and mercy; of his presence and providence, with a reverential, awful, filial, and loving fear of, and confidence in him. Otherwise your patience may be pride, surliness, stoicism; but it will not be Christianity. And to godliness, brotherly kindness Sullenness, sternness, moroseness, are not consistent with genuine godliness. Sour godliness, so called, is of the devil. Of Christian godliness it may always be said:
“Mild, sweet, serene, and tender is her mood,
Nor grave with sternness, nor with lightness free;
Against example resolutely good,
Fervent in zeal, and warm in charity.”
And to brotherly kindness, love The pure and perfect love of God and of all mankind. The apostle here makes an advance upon the preceding article, brotherly kindness, which seems only to relate to the love of Christians toward one another.