Character is marked by the following virtues:
- Wisdom enables us to act rightly using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight.
- Courage gives us the perseverance and patience to confront fear, agony, pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation to serve God and others. Moral courage is the ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition, shame, scandal, discouragement or personal loss. Physical courage is bravery in confronting death or threat of death.
- Temperance marked by self-restraint that enables moderation in all things providing a balanced life-style. Temperance is characterized as the control over excess as expressed through chastity, modesty, humility, self-regulation, forgiveness and mercy that involves limiting an excess of sexual desire, vanity or anger so that we have a balance in our choices Aristotle referred to this balance as the golden mean.
- Justice, the quality of being impartial or fair, involves a constant and permanent commitment to paying our debts to others and expecting even-handedness in return.
- Love—a strong affection for another that enables us to see things from another’s perspective. The Bible commands us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
- Faith—the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen.
- Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of a positive outcome. It is a confident expectation for the fulfillment of a cherished desire.