Wisdom's description of the "just person" was fulfilled in the person of Jesus and in many of his followers, the saints. "To us he is the censure of our thoughts", says the author, summing up the challenging presence of the saint in the midst of a society that has no place for holiness.

Saints "censure our thoughts", by reminding us of the need to cultivate virtues that will reduce the evil that besets our world and so work steadily and seriously towards the promotion of truth and justice. This world needs an alternative future, one which is radically different from our present reality. Only just people, people whose "life is not like that of other men, whose ways are different" can generate that alternative future.

Politically and economically our world is polarized along a line stretching from right to left, from extreme capitalism to extreme communism, from the extremely rich to the extremely poor.

Simply moving along this line in one direction or another, all becoming either richer or poorer, will not bring about an alternative future. We must strive somehow to eliminate this polarization altogether. This "somehow" evades our grasp, but whatever can be imagined can be achieved.