The Enchiridion 7
7 The Creed and the Lord’s Prayer Demand the Exercise of Faith, Hope, and Love PL 40, 234
For you have the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. What can be briefer to hear or to read? What easier to commit to memory? When, as the result of sin, the human race was groaning under a heavy load of misery, and was in urgent need of the divine compassion, one of the prophets, anticipating the time of God’s grace, declared: “And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered.” Hence the Lord’s Prayer. But the apostle, when, for the purpose of commending this very grace, he had quoted this prophetic testimony, immediately added: “How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed?” Hence the Creed. In these two you have those three graces exemplified: faith believes, hope and love pray. But without faith the two last cannot exist, and therefore we may say that faith also prays. Whence it is written: “How shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed?”
Symbolum et oratio dominica complectuntur fidem, spem et charitatem. Nam ecce tibi est Symbolum et dominica oratio; quid brevius auditur aut legitur? quid facilius memoriae commendatur? Quia enim de peccato, gravi miseria premebatur genus humanum, et divina indigebat misericordia, gratiae Dei tempus propheta praedicens ait, Et erit; omnis qui invocaverit nomen Domini, salvus erit (Joel II, 32): propter hoc oratio. Sed Apostolus cum ad ipsam gratiam commendandam hoc propheticum commemorasset testimonium, continuo subjecit, Quomodo autem invocabunt, in quem non crediderunt ? propter hoc Symbolum. In his duobus tria illa intuere: fides credit, spes et charitas orant. Sed sine fide esse non possunt; ac per hoc et fides orat. Propterea quippe dictum est, Quomodo invocabunt, in quem non crediderunt?