interior and exterior. But man is, under God, the lord of this earth
and of the fulness thereof. He must pay tithe for that too by devoting
some portion of it to the direct service of God, to whom it all
primarily belongs. For "mine is the gold and mine the silver." (Aggeus
ii. 9.) Such are the words that God spoke through His prophet to
incite His people to restore his sanctuary.

6. It is therefore not true to say that the sole reason of outward
worship is to move the worshipper to interior devotion. It is not true
that St. Peter's at Rome, and Cologne Cathedral, and the Duomo of
Milan, with all their wealth and elaborate ceremonial, exist and are
kept up solely because, things of earth as we are, we cannot be
depended upon to praise God lovingly within the white-washed walls of
a conventicle, or according to the simple ritual of the Society of
Friends. We would not, even if we could, pray habitually among such
surroundings, where we could afford to better them. We have before us
the principle of St. Thomas (1a 2a, q. 24, art. 3, in corp.):

"Since man's good consists in reason as in its root, the more actions
proper to man are performed under the direction of reason, the more
perfect will man's good be. Hence no one doubts that it belongs to the
perfection of moral good, that the actions of our bodily members
should be directed by the law of reason, ... as also that the passions
of the soul should be regulated by reason."

This means, not merely that if the bodily members or the passions stir
at all, it is a good and desirable thing for them to be ruled by
reason; but further that it is a positive addition to human perfection
that they should stir and be active, provided reason guide them.
(_Ethics_, c. iv., s. i., n. 6, p. 45.)