Man finds himself thrust into the world, surrounded by sorrow, injustice and poverty, and, if he contemplates these conditions without knowing the purpose of the Lord in sending him here, he may exclaim with Schopenhauer, "If God made the world, I should not care to be God." But the Gospel testifies to the mercy and wisdom and goodness of the Lord, for in it we learn that the very conditions of which the philosopher complains are designed to develop the attributes for the full growth of which the spirit is given the schooling of mortality. Let us consider. We are here cut off from any understanding of our pre-existent state or any knowledge of the hereafter, and must perforce accept the providences of the Lord and His designs for our future welfare on trust, and so the attribute of faith is developed. Furthermore, notwithstanding all the failures and sorrows and trials of life, we are impelled by an innate self-renewing power to press onto the end, thus exercising hope. Dr. Johnson has well said: "It is necessary to hope, though hope should be always deluded; and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction." And, again, all our environments, as children, as husbands or wives, as parents, as brothers or sisters, as rulers, as ruled, as king or shepherd, as neighbors, as citizens, call our our affections; and, so is love developed. The attributes of faith, hope and love, or, as Wagner has it, in his "Simple Life," confidence, hope and kindness, are, moreover, ever spoken of by inspired writers as those most to be cultivated. And, too, these qualities and the means for their exercise are universal. They obtain alike with all classes, in all ages of the world. Man, therefore, is placed upon the earth to develop spiritually, in faith, in hope and in love, but most of all, as is consonant with the part that sentiment played in the inception of the Gospel, in love. Accordingly, Paul exclaims: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." [45] Further and final evidence as to the importance of the cultivation of love is found in the reply of the Savior to the lawyer who asked, "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" for, "Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." [46] That there is a reason, and what the reason is, for the paramount importance of the cultivation of the attributes of faith, hope and love in the present stage of our progress, is disclosed in a remarkable passage in the Book of Mormon. It reads as follows: