Poems & Letters 23

Your apostolate exercises the primacy granted by the Godhead, and that it holds the chief place in the universal Church it strives to show not by privileges alone, but by merits. Your chair adorns our religion, and your person adorns the chair. Hence, bound to your worthiness by a debt of generosity, I pay a vow of thanks through Him through whom these things came to be gifts, to be esteemed not by the price of quantity, but by the rewards of salvation. For you have enriched the poverty of the farthest world with the riches of sanctification, and you have touched the obscurity of the western sun with the light of a shining sunrise shared with us. The brightness of your gift has wiped from our provinces the rust of a torpid religion:

which, by the watering of an ever-flowing good, has rewarded our faith with contemplation, since, the inner sanctuaries of the heavenly treasures having been opened by your piety, we have beheld whatever we catholics are bidden to believe. Pray, for what remains, that you may have sent such things to worthy men; commend us to the mysteries which you have deemed fit to entrust to us. By these let our devotion be edified, our region be defended: so that, the saving pledge having been granted to us, those whom you did not deem unworthy of the earthly Jerusalem, you may render fit for the dwelling of the celestial and heavenly one.