With persons of this category, the passion for the victory of the good has acquired an unconditional and actual primacy over all other concerns; it has become, as it were, the form of their lives. What is the objectively right, the morally good, the valuable thing?—this query controls their orientation in all situations, relegating all desire for earthly goods and advantages into the background. It constitutes the self-evident rule of their attitude in regard to all objects; and it alone can evoke a passionate interest on their part. In a more permanent and universal sense, they suffer from the ocean of injustices and wrongs that fill the world. No personal success or happiness can dull the edge of their interest in the victory of justice or soften their pain at the triumph of evil.

Men and women of this kind are in constant danger of being misjudged; they are apt to scandalize many of their fellow beings. The reason is that their emphasis on the primacy of value tends to interfere with the quest of happiness that is natural to others. Their passion for the victory of the good constitutes a virtual menace to the framework of ordinary people’s lives. Their ardent pursuit of justice cannot but be misinterpreted by those enfolded in the tissue of their ego-interests.

Ordinary men will mostly try to construe the behavior of such persons of exceptional nobility in terms of some hidden ressentiments or other motives of disguised self-seeking—there being no other explanation for such a passionate “taking sides” that they can conceive of.

Yet, those whom the Lord in the Sermon on the Mount calls blessed are not such as hunger and thirst after justice in the sense of natural morality only, but such as hunger and thirst after the kingdom of God; such as “seek first the kingdom of God and His justice.” What they seek is not merely whatever is naturally valuable and as such glorifies God: it is (beyond that) the supernatural life, the victory of the God-Man Christ, the salvation of souls, the growth of the Mystical Body of Christ, and man’s transformation in Christ. Socrates, so nobly obsessed by his eternal quest for the naturally good, is still a far cry from St. Francis of Assisi with his insatiable hunger and thirst for the kingdom of God.

It is not enough for us to seek also for the kingdom of God, to labor among other things for the consummation of that kingdom, or to take interest in the problem of the kingdom of God occasionally only, that is, whenever it happens to carry with it a close reference to problems of our personal life. We must seek first the kingdom of God. Our search for the kingdom of God and His justice must be the consuming passion of our souls. The empire of Christ over our souls, as well as in all other souls, must become the paramount theme of our lives. Day and night we must be swayed by the burning desire that God be glorified in all things.