Love Quote by Joseph Barber Lightfoot

“Eternal” is doing the heavy lifting here: not as a misty promise, but as a sorting mechanism. Lightfoot stacks three absolutes - truth, righteousness, love - and then argues that their durability is precisely why they win. It’s a moral physics: what lasts, triumphs; what is expedient, burns off.

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. As a Victorian Anglican theologian and bishop, Lightfoot spent his career defending Christianity’s credibility in an age newly intoxicated by historical criticism, evolutionary theory, and industrial modernity’s brutal math. Against that churn, he offers a criterion for confidence that isn’t “we’re right because we’re winning,” but almost the reverse: we can afford to lose battles, because the things that matter aren’t measured on the same clock. The line quietly rebukes both cynics and triumphalists. Cynics, because it insists the universe has a moral grain; triumphalists, because it relocates victory away from institutions and into qualities that can outlive any institution.

The subtext is also strategic theology. By pairing “truth” with “righteousness” and “love,” Lightfoot refuses a purely intellectual faith and refuses a purely sentimental one. Truth without righteousness becomes sterile; love without truth becomes indulgent; righteousness without love curdles into cruelty. The rhetoric works because it’s a cadence you can preach, but also a framework you can test: empires collapse, arguments age, reputations fade. What remains is the stuff that can be carried across generations without turning toxic. That’s not naïveté; it’s a long view disguised as a sentence.