His poetry and drama are suffused with Scriptural allusions and inspiration, and after his retirement at the age of 65 he spent the rest of his long life meditating on Scripture and commenting on it. Here he makes an impassioned plea for immersing ourselves in the Old Testament, seeing it, as the Church and Fathers do, as messianic, pointing always to Christ. The Old Testament must be given back to Christians.
Nothing is more necessary nor more urgent.
Christians must be given that half of their heritage of which they are being deprived, this Promised Land running with milk and honey from which they have been expelled, but which belongs to them. They must be shown that in this magnificent work of the Holy Spirit, of the Wisdom of God, is to be found, not a confused mass of disparate material half eaten away by time, but a superb monument the ages have not altered and which is still offered to us today, virginal and intact, in all its sublime and profound composition, in its original signification, in the invitation that it extends, as powerful today as ever, to our heart, our intelligence, our imagination, our sensibility, and our need of love and beauty. I mean the Vulgate. If I had my way it would form the basis of the education of children, as the poems of Homer, which they excel, once did for Greek youth. What happiness to admire with a free and open heart our God and Creator, who is no less, nay is infinitely more, in this vivifying word directly addressed to us, than He is in the radiant profusion of nature.