needy." Everywhere there is a doctrine of the mean
reflected through Cicero's _De Officiis_, the doctrine insufficiently
stated, as though it were a mean of quantity, and not that rightly
tempered mean which is the harmony of opposing moods. The poor are not
to be sent away empty. Those rejected by the church are not to be left
to the "outer darkness" of an earlier Christianity. They must be
supplied if they are in want. The methodic giver is "hard towards
none, but is free towards all." Consequently none are refused, and no
account is taken of the regeneration that may spring up in a man from
the effort towards self-help which refusal may originate. Thus after
all it appears that method means no more than this--to give sometimes
more, sometimes less, to all needy people. In the small congregational
church of early Christianity, each member of which was admitted on the
conditions of strictest discipline, the common alms of the faithful
could hardly have done much harm within the body, even though outside
they created and kept alive a horde of vagrant alms-seekers and
pretenders. Now in this department at least the church had become the
state, and discipline and a close knowledge of one's fellow-Christians
no longer safeguarded the alms. From Cicero is borrowed the thought of
"active help," which "is often grander and more noble," but the
thought is not worked out. From the social side the problem is not
understood or even stated, and hence no principle of charity or of
charitable administration is brought to light in the investigation.
Still there are rudiments of the economics of charity in the praise of
Joseph, who made the people _buy_ the corn, for otherwise "they would
have given up cultivating the soil; for he who has the use of what is
another's often neglects his own." Perhaps, as St Augustine inspired
the theology of the middle ages, we may say that St Ambrose, in the
mingled motives, indefiniteness, and kindliness of this book, stands
for the charity of the middle ages, except in so far as the movement
which culminated in the brotherhood of St Francis awakened the
intelligence of the world to wider issues.

In Constantinople the pauperism seems to have been extreme. The corn
supplies of Africa were diverted there in great part when it became the
capital of the empire. This must have left to Rome a larger scope for
the development of the civic-religio