Although concerning a prophetic reading you ought rather to have consulted more learned priests — among whom I myself do not dare to profess to be — yet I desire to satisfy your command at least by obedience, even if I cannot answer by learning. Thus what you command to be shown to you is, even in its text, not to say in its exposition, lengthy; and it demands a greater leisure of disputation than the succinct speed of an epistolary reply admits. And therefore I answer with as much brevity as I can, that what you appended, from the prophet Isaiah, at the end of the page addressed to me was long ago — that is, at the time of the Lord's incarnation — fulfilled. For when he says: 'Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem' (Isa.
(Isa. 2:3), consider more diligently whether there yet remains any authority of a law to be promulgated that ought still to be awaited. Certainly, after the Word of God which was made flesh, so that by the nativity of a body He might dwell among us, if yet another word is still to be hoped for from Jerusalem, then that of which we spoke above is not the only one. Hence, without hesitation, in the passage which you have proposed, the Word of the Father, Christ, and the Christian law was preached. For since there are two laws, that is, the Jewish, which preceded, and ours, which follows, and since the old one was already being spoken of even in the times of the prophets, you see that by Isaiah this one only is announced, which arose by the calling of the Gentiles through the teaching of Christ the instructor.
Whence there follows, 'and he shall judge in the midst of the nations, and shall rebuke many peoples'; whom our Lord, out of all the kindreds of the earth, has established within one Church by judging, and converted by rebuking. But as to what he says, 'they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks,' although it can for a while be understood of the bodily age of the Lord, in which an unshaken, quiet peace flourished throughout the world, yet this is more evidently fitted to the Christian faithful, in the greater number of whom there is lacking, and has been lacking, that use which the malice of the first birth had armed for man's destruction, so that the second birth may convert it to the uses of salvation and to life-giving cultivation. For since in the Gospel it is foretold concerning the end of the age:
'Nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom' (Mark 13:8): and from these very signs of evils we gather that the end of the world now almost impends. Unless what I said above be taken figuratively of catholics, I know not why, after the end of the age, the blunted edge of weapons should be changed into mattocks and plowshares. But that which you commanded to be appended at the very bottom of the reading — that is, 'every man shall rest under his own vine and under his fig tree' (cf. 1 Kings 4:25) — I suggest is neither in the same reading, nor pertains to the cause about which you consulted. Yet in ancient times, by the alternating difference of merit, it was frequently either granted to the Jewish people for the amendment of sin, or again taken away for the chastisement of the faults that followed.