The outer is ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods are instrumental--sicut quaedam adminicula, quibus adjuvanur ad tendendum in beatitudinum. ‘It is lawful to desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place, as though setting up our rest in them, but regarding them as aids the blessedness, inasmuch as they support our corporal life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue.’ Riches, as St. Antonino says, exist for man not man for riches.

Character is social, and society, since it is the expression of character, spiritual.

What we need is not truths which will serve us, but a truth which we may serve.

A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion.