Imbued with many Christ-like virtues, among them being meekness and lowliness of heart, a man whose faith in Christ brings forth good works, and whose hope for Eternal Life is shored up by his faith, offers a sacrifice to God which is acceptable to Him. If, on the other hand, a man is designing, ostentatious, and what he does is for display or show, to say the least, he is pharisaical; and will be like the early Christians who introduced pageantry and gaudy shows into the simple worshiping services of the Saints, he will gradually lose the vision he had through the eye of faith, and which once was bright and clear. Such a man we will find has become destitute of the greatest virtue God has infused into man-Charity.
Charity is ennobling to the soul. Mormon lists many qualities that are evident in one when that one is sort of effervescent with the Spirit of Christ. Without charity, one is nothing, for Mormon says: "Charity is the pure love of Christ," (v. 47) and without it "all things must fail." (v. 46) Without charity, man is but an animal; survival of the fittest is the theme of his existence, and birth, but an accident. Charity, that is love, makes the weak, strong, and the strong, stronger.
The word, Charity, as used by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 23, and as it occurs elsewhere in the New Testament, has not been fully understood by Bible readers. It means love, and particularly love of Christ. This is made clear in the Book of Mormon. It does not mean benevolence or alms-giving, etc. The doctrine which St. Paul inculcates is that eloquence, learning, faith, alms-giving, and even martyrdom, are profitless to the soul, unless they are fruits of our love of Christ. Moroni must have felt that the time would come when this explanation would be necessary. It has come. We need to be told that love of Christ must be the spring by which the spiritual mechanism of a Christian life is set in motion and kept going. We need to be told that the purity of this powerful emotion (charity-the love of Christ) will have to stand the test of the Last Day. It must not be mixed with pretense.
St. Peter must have had that same thought in mind, when he wrote: "Adding...to your brotherly kindness "philadelphia"-love, not charity as the King James Version has it. The original is agape. Scholars tell us that paganism knew only philantropia and philadelphia as between relatives in blood, but the agape, the love of Christ, as applied to Peter's brethren, is original with revealed religion, which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (See, Second Epistle of Peter, 1:7-11)