l of all anxieties concerning material well-being. Personal
poverty--that is, the surrender of all personal claim to things the care
of which might break in upon the fixed contemplation of God--was
regarded as equally important for this purpose as obedience, chastity,
and the continued residence in a certain spot. It had indeed been
preached as a counsel of perfection by Christ Himself in His advice to
the rich young man, and its significance was now very powerfully set
forth by the Benedictine and other monastic establishments.

It is obvious that the existence of institutions of this kind was bound
to exercise an influence upon Christian thought. It could not but be
noticed that certain individual characters, many of whom claimed the
respect of their generation, treated material possessions as hindrances
to spiritual perfection. Through their example private property was
forsworn, and community of possession became prominently put forward as
being more in accordance with the spirit of Christ, who had lived with
His Apostles, it was declared, out of the proceeds of a common purse.
The result, from the point of view of the social theorists of the day,
was to confirm the impression that private property was not a thing of
much sanctity. Already, as we have seen, the Fathers had been brought to
look at it as something sinful in its origin, in that the need of it was
due entirely to the fall of our first parents. Then the legalists of
Rome had brought to this the further consideration that mere expedience,
universal indeed, but of no moral sanction, had dictated its institution
as the only way to avoid continual strife among neighbours. And now the
whole force of the religious ideals of the time was thrown in the same
balance. Eastern and Western monasticism seemed to teach the same
lesson, that private property was not in any sense a sacred thing.
Rather it seemed to be an obstacle to the perfect devotion of man's
being to God; and community of possession and life began to boast itself
to be the more excellent following of Christ.

Finally it may be asserted that the social concept of feudalism lent
itself to the teaching of the same lesson. For by it society was
organised upon a system of land tenure whereby each held what was his of
one higher than he, and was himself responsible for those beneath him in
the social scale. Landowners, therefore, in the modern sense of the
term, had no existence--there were only landholde