4. Patristic Teaching. — There is not space to do more than allude to the teaching of the Christian Fathers. Authorities on the subject are given at the end of this article : some of their more salient sayings will |be found in Nitti's Catholic Soclallxm., where their socialist character is exaggerated, and in Carlyle's Mediceval I'lditical Economy, vol. i., where this side is perliajis underestimated. The Patristic writings are, indeed, extremely difficult to estimate, because of the distinction between what was ideally right as belonging to God's plan {Jux natiirale) and what was right under present conditions (Jits (/en^iwrn) — a distinction which is characteristic of Cicero and Seneca as well as of the Christian writers of a later date. Thus the Fathers held that all men were naturally equal, but at the same time they accepted slavery, though indeed the manumission of slaves was a recognized Christian virtue. It was the same with private property. Extracts can be gathered from the Fathers which are as strong as anything in the writings of modern socialists ; for instance, Proudhon's famous saying, ' La propridtci, o'est le vol,' is almost exactly paralleled liy St. Ambrose's ' Natura igitur jus commune generavit, usur|mtio jus fecit privatum ' ((fe Off. i. 28). Put St. Ambrose does not mean that property is un- lawful, only that it is not a ' natural ' institution — it belongs to the. ;!(.>• (jenthnn. In the same way he does not advocate land- nationalization when he says, ' Deus noster terraui banc posses-
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sionem ominum hominum voluerit esse communem, et fructus omnibus ministrare : sed avaritia possessionum jure distribuit ' {In Ps. cxviii. 8, 22) ; but goes on to say that for this reason the poor have a /wsi claim on the rich to give them a share of what was meant for all. This maj' be taken as typical also of the earlier Christian writers. They assume the e.xistence of private pro- perty as an institution, and that it is not evil if rightly used ; but they do not consider it as belong-ing to the state of innocence —like slavery it is due to the fall into sin ; ' their whole thought,' Mr. Carlyle says, ' is dominated by the sense of the claims of the brotherhood,' and the Christian man is bound to use his pro- perty to relieve the wants of his fellow-man. This is alms- giving, but, unlike modern almsgiving, it is based on a definite principle of justice. An early example of this is in the Didache (iv. 8), 'Thou Shalt not turn away from him that hath need, but Shalt share all things with thy brother, and shall not say that aught is thine own : for if ye are partners in the immortal, how much more are ye partners in the perishable ? ' Here the refer- ence to the conmiunity of goods in Ac 432 jg obvious. Compare with it the ' AH is common with us, except women,' of Tertullian {Apol. xxxix.), or St. Justin's declaration, ' We bring all we pos- sess into a common stock, and share everything with the poor ' (Apol. i. 14). There are many passages in other Fathers, such as Chrysostom and Basil, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Oreat, which have a strong socialist character, and they all used language about the selfishness of the rich which would cause some offence if uttered from the pulpits of the present day. The fact that Clement of Alexandria took a different view in liis Quis Dives salvetur considerably increases the significance of the rest of the Patristic literature : he explains the command to the Rich Young Man in Mk 1021 in a purely allegorical sense, and protests that there is no advantage in poverty except when it is incurred for a special object, and that riches are serviceable if rightly used, and are not to be thrown away. That he should stand almost alone even in this much qualified defence of property is a remarkable fact.
If we turn from theory to practice, there is no doubt that the Church produced a profound social change in the Roman Empii-e, and was recognized from the first as based upon the principle of fraternity. In this connexion it is noteworthy that Lucian was struck as much by the social as by the theological aspect of the new religion — ' Their original lawgiver,' he re- marks, 'had taught them that they were all brethren one of another.' Membership in the Church meant the admission into a fellowship in which the rich man became poorer and the poor man richer ; in which the stranger, the outcast, and the slave were welcomed and loved as brothers. Harnack, in his Expan- sion of Christianity (i. bk. ii. c. iii.), describes this change, pointing out, amongst other things, that the principle of Labour was consistently put into practice. Following St. Paul's maxim (2 Th 310), the Church insisted, (1) that it was the duty of every Christian man to work, (2) that it was the duty of the Christian Society to see that there was work for all its members, and (3) that it was the duty of Christians to make provision for those who were not able to work. This fails to be pure State Socialism onlj' because the Church was not yet coterminous with the State.