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 had taken place in man’s own nature.  To this extent it is true to say that the Fathers regarded property with disapproval; it was one of the institutions rendered necessary by the fall of man.  Of course it would have been preferable that man should not have fallen from his natural innocence, in which case he could have lived a life of communism; but, as he had fallen, and communism had from that moment become impossible, property must be respected as the one institution which could put a curb on his avarice, and preserve a society of fallen men from chaos and general rapine.

That this is the correct interpretation of the patristic utterances regarding property and natural law appears from the following passage of The Divine Institution of Lactantius—­’the most explicit statement bearing on the Christian idea of property in the first four centuries’:[1] ’"They preferred to live content with a simple mode of life,” as Cicero relates in his poems; and this is peculiar