to which it was sometimes put. The insistence on the abuses
of an institution is an implicit admission that it has its uses.
Thus Clement of Alexandria devotes a whole treatise to answering the
question 'Who is the rich man who can be saved?' in which it appears
quite plainly that it is the possible abuse of wealth, and the
possible too great attachment to worldly goods, that are the principal
dangers in the way of a rich man's salvation. The suggestion that
in order to be saved a man must abandon all his property is strongly
controverted. The following passage from St. Gregory Nazianzen[1]
breathes the same spirit: 'One of us has oppressed the poor, and
wrested from him his portion of land, and wrongly encroached upon his
landmarks by fraud or violence, and joined house to house, and field
to field, to rob his neighbour of something, and has been eager to
have no neighbour, so as to dwell alone on the earth. Another has
defiled the land with usury and interest, both gathering where he has
not sowed and reaping where he has not strewn, farming not the land
but the necessity of the needy.... Another has had no pity on the
widow and orphans, and not imparted his bread and meagre nourishment
to the needy; ... a man perhaps of much property unexpectedly gained,
for this is the most unjust of all, who finds his very barns too
narrow for him, fining some and emptying others to build greater ones
for future crops.' Similarly Clement of Rome advocates _frugality_
in the enjoyment of wealth;[2] and Salvian has a long passage on the
dangers of the abuse of riches.[3]

[Footnote 1: _Orat_., xvi. 18.]

[Footnote 2: _The Instructor_, iii. 7.]

[Footnote 3: _Ad Eccles._, i. 7.]

The fourth group of passages is that in which the distinction between
the natural and positive law on the matter is explained. It is here
that the greatest confusion has been created by socialist writers, who
conclude, because they read in the works of some of the Fathers that
private property did not exist by natural law, that it was therefore
condemned by them as an illegitimate institution. Nothing could be
more erroneous. All that the Fathers meant in these passages was that
in the state of nature--the idealised Golden Age of the pagans, or the
Garden of Eden of the Christians--there was no individual ownership of
goods. The very moment, however, that man fell from that ideal state,
communism became impossible, simply on account of the change that ha