subject of property was in some way opposed to the teaching of the early Church and of Christ Himself.  Thus Haney says:  ’It is necessary to keep the ideas of Christianity and the Church separate, for few will deny that Christianity as a religion is quite distinct from the various institutions or Churches which profess it....’  And he goes on to point out that, whereas Christianity recommended community of property, the Church permitted private property and inequality.[1] Strictly speaking, the reconciliation of the mediaeval teaching with that of the primitive Church might be said to be outside the scope of the present essay.  In our opinion, however, it is important to insist upon the fundamental harmony of the teaching of the Church in the two periods, in the first place, because it is impossible to understand the later without an understanding of the earlier doctrine from which it developed, and secondly, because of the widespread prevalence, even among Catholics, of the erroneous idea that the scholastic teaching was opposed to the ethical principle laid down by the Founder of Christianity.

[Footnote 1:  Op. cit., p. 73.]

Amongst the arguments which are advanced by socialists none is more often met than the alleged socialist teaching and practice of the early Christians.  For instance, Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie contains the following passage:  ’Mais quand on s’enfonce serieusement et ardemment dans la question de savoir comment la societe pourrait etre organisee en Democratie, c’est-a-dire sur les bases de l’Egalite et de la Fraternite, on arrive a reconnaitre que cette organisation exige et entraine necessairement la communaute de biens.  Et nous hatons d’ajouter que cette communaute etait egalement proclamee par Jesus-Christ, par tous ses apotres et ses disciples, par tous les peres de l’Eglise et tous les Chretiens des premiers siecles.’  The fact that St. Thomas Aquinas, the great exponent of Catholic teaching in the Middle Ages, defends in unambiguous language the institution of private property offers no difficulties to the socialist historian of Christianity.  He replies simply that St. Thomas wrote in an age when the Church was the Church of the rich as well as of the poor; that it had to modify its doctrines to ease the consciences of its rich members; and that, ever since the conversion of Constantine, the primitive Christian teaching on property had been progressively corrupted by motives of expediency, until the time of the Summa, when it had ceased to resemble in any way the teaching of the Apostles.[1] We must therefore first of all demonstrate that there is no such contradiction between the teaching of the Apostles and that of the mediaeval Church on the subject of private property, but that, on the contrary, the necessity of private property was at all times recognised and insisted on by the Catholic Church.  As it is put in an anonymous article in the Dublin Review:  ’Among Christian nations we discover at a very early period a strong tendency towards a general and equitable distribution of wealth and property among the whole body politic.  Grounded on an ever-increasing historical evidence, we might possibly affirm that the mediaeval Church brought her whole weight to bear incessantly upon this one singular and single point.’[2]