Haggai 2:8

But this is not the fault of gold and silver. Let us suppose that someone of tender heart has found a treasure. The kindness of his heart works, does it not, so that hospitality is shown to strangers, the starving are fed, the naked clothed, the needy assisted, captives redeemed, churches are built, the weary are refreshed, the quarrelsome pacified, the shipwrecked set on their feet again, the sick cured—material resources distributed on earth, spiritual ones stored up in heaven? Who does all this? The good and kindhearted person. What does he do it with? Gold and silver. Whom is he serving when he does it? The one who says, "Mine is the gold and mine is the silver." Now, brothers, I think you can see what a great mistake it is, what lunacy indeed, to project onto the things which people misuse the offense of the people who misuse them. If gold and silver, after all, can be blamed simply because people warped by avarice and neglecting the commands of the Creator are carried away by an abominable kind of lust for these things that he brought into being, then let us blame every single creature of God, because, as the apostle says, some perverse people "worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever." Let us also blame this sun, which these same Manichaeans, as we all know, not understanding that it is a creature, never cease to worship and adore as though it were the Creator—or at least some sort of part of him.

Surely the glory of the house of the New Testament is greater than that of the old because it was built of better materials, namely, those living stones that are human beings renewed by faith and grace. Yet precisely because Solomon's temple was renovated—was made new—it was a prophetic symbol of the second Testament which is called the New. Accordingly we must understand the words God spoke by Haggai's mouth, "And I will give peace in that place," as referring to the place for which the temple stood. Since the restored temple signified the church, which Christ was to build, those words can mean only "I will give peace in that place [the church] which this place [the rebuilt temple] prefigures." (All symbols seem in some way to personify the realities of which they are symbols. So, St. Paul says, "The rock was Christ," because the rock in question symbolized Christ.) Not, however, until the house of the New Testament receives its final consecration will its greater glory in relation to the house of the Old Testament be made perfectly clear. This will take place at the second coming of him whom the Hebrew text calls "the desire of all nations." Obviously his first coming was not desired of all nations, for unbelievers did not even know whom they should desire to come. In the end too, as the Septuagint puts it with equal amount of prophetic meaning, "the chosen of the Lord shall come from all nations." Then, truly, only the chosen shall come, those of whom St. Paul says, even "as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world."

Riches, gold and silver, are not the devil's as some think, for "the whole world of riches is for the faithful man, but for the unfaithful not a farthing." But nothing is more faithless than the devil. God through the prophet says plainly, "Mine is the silver, and mine is the gold." Only use it well and there is nothing blameworthy in silver; but when you abuse a good thing and are then unwilling to blame your own conduct, you impiously put the blame on the Creator. One can even be blessed by money.

(Chapter 2, Verse 1 and following) In the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the prophet Haggai, saying: Speak now to Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, saying: Who among you is left who saw this temple in its former glory? And how do you see it now? In comparison with it, is this not in your eyes as nothing?

When David and his princes offered vast sums for the service of the house of God, they acknowledged, It is all thy own, and of thy own, Lord, have we given thee, 1 Chron. xxix. Therefore God needs not sacrifice, for every beast of the forest is his, Ps. l.