This concluding Letter calls but for slight remark,--of many portions we
feel _O si sic omnia_! That there is much sorrowful truth underlying the
unmeasured denunciations which have gone before few will care to deny.
Few there are who will not pray to be kept from the evils which the
writer discerns, and against which he inveighs. Such will be the first
to regret that the Letters, as they read them, seem to fall short of the
fulness of the Catholic Faith. "The holy teachers of all nations:" was
our blessed Lord but one of them? There is nothing in the Letters to
show that "the full force and meaning" of Gospel teaching is concerned
with anything beyond wealth, and comfort, and national prosperity, and
domestic peace. Preaching the acceptable year of the Lord is something
more surely than an invective against usury.
We read that in old times Bezaleel was filled for his own work with the
Spirit of God, but we do not read that he aspired to become a religious
teacher; and when we are told by one eminent in Art that a Church
nineteen centuries old has yet to learn that the "will of the Lord" is a
sanctification which brings comfort and wealth in its train, we think of
a Moses who esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the
treasures of Egypt, and then of a Paul who counted all things but loss
for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord.