[Footnote 1:  Tract in Joh.  Ev., vi. 25.]

The socialist commentators of St. Augustine have strained this, and similar passages, to mean that because property rests on human, and not on divine, right, therefore it should not exist at all.  It is, of course true that what human right has created human right can repeal; and it is therefore quite fair to argue that all the citizens of a community might agree to live a life of communism.  That is simply an argument to prove that there is nothing immoral in communism, and does not prove in the very slightest degree that there is anything immoral in property.  On the contrary, so long as ’the emperors and kings of the world’ ordain that private property shall continue, it would be, according to St. Augustine, immoral for any individual to maintain that such ordinances were wrongful.

The correct meaning of the patristic distinction between natural and positive law with regard to property is excellently summarised in Dr. Carlyle’s essay on Property in Mediaeval Theology:[1] ’What do the expressions of the Fathers mean?  At first sight they might seem to be an assertion of communism, or denunciation of private property as a thing which is sinful or unlawful.  But this is not what the Fathers mean.  There can be little doubt that we find the sources of these words in such a phrase as that of Cicero—­“Sunt autem privata nulla natura"[2]—­and in the Stoic tradition which is represented in one of Seneca’s letters, when he describes the primitive life in which men lived together in peace and happiness, when there was no system of coercive government and no private property, and says that man passed out of this primitive condition as their first innocence disappeared, as they became avaricious and dissatisfied with the common enjoyment of the good things of the world, and desired to hold them as their private possession.[3] Here we have the quasi-philosophical theory, from which the patristic conception is derived.  When men were innocent there was no need for private property, or the other great conventional institutions of society, but as this innocence passed away, they found themselves compelled to organise society and to devise institutions which should regulate the ownership and use of the good things which men had once held in common.  The institution of property thus represents the fall of man from his primitive innocence, through greed and avarice, which refused to recognise the common ownership of things, and also the method by which the blind greed of human nature might be controlled and regulated.  It is this ambiguous origin of the institution which explains how the Fathers could hold that private property was not natural, that it grew out of men’s vicious and sinful desires, and at the same time that it was a legitimate institution.’