To the unstudied eye, St. Matthew's gospel can seem a terse narrative, almost a historical document and not the tremendously spiritual (and doctrinal) storehouse that it is. In his second volume of meditations on Matthew (chapters 12-18), Erasmo Leiva shows Matthew's prose to be not terse so much as economical--astoundingly so given its depth. The lay reader can derive great profit from reading this. Each short meditation comments on a verse or two,...