[Footnote 1:  Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. i. p. 465.]

[Footnote 2:  Cunningham, Western Civilisation, vol. ii. pp. 2-3.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., p. 67.]

[Footnote 4:  Op. cit., p. 27.]

The teaching of the mediaeval Church, therefore, on economic affairs was but the application to particular facts and cases of its general moral teaching.  The suggestion, so often put forward by so-called Christian socialists, that Christianity was the exponent of a special social theory of its own, is unfounded.  The direct opposite would be nearer the truth.  Far from concerning itself with the outward forms of the political or economic structure, Christianity concentrated its attention on the conduct of the individual.  If Christianity can be said to have possessed any distinctive social theory, it was intense individualism.  ’Christianity brought, from the point of view of morals, an altogether new force by the distinctly individual and personal character of its precepts.  Duty, vice or virtue, eternal punishment—­all are marked with the most individualist imprint that can be imagined.  No social or political theory appeared, because it was through the individual that society was to be regenerated....  We can say with truth that there is not any Christian political economy—­in the sense in which there is a Christian morality or a Christian dogma—­any more than there is a Christian physic or a Christian medicine.’[1] In seeking to learn Christian teaching of the Middle Ages on economic matters, we must therefore not look for special economic treatises in the modern sense, but seek our principles in the works dealing with general morality, in the Canon Law, and in the commentaries on the Civil Law.  ’We find the first worked out economic theory for the whole Catholic world in the Corpus Juris Canonici, that product of mediaeval science in which for so many centuries theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics were treated....’[2]

[Footnote 1:  Rambaud, op. cit., pp. 34-5; Cunningham, Western Civilisation, vol. ii. p. 8.]

[Footnote 2:  Roscher, op. cit., p. 5.  It must not be concluded that all the opinions expressed by the theologians and lawyers were necessarily the official teaching of the Church.  Brants says:  ’It is not our intention to attribute to the Church all the opinions of this period; certainly the spirit of the Church dominated the great majority of the writers, but one must not conclude from this that all their writings are entitled to rank as doctrinal teaching’ (Op. cit., p. 6).]

There is not to be found in the writers of the early Middle Ages, that is to say from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, a trace of any attention given to what we at the present day would designate economic questions.  Usury was condemned by the decrees of several councils, but the reasons of this prohibition were not given, nor was the question made the subject of any dialectical controversy; commerce was so undeveloped as to escape the attention of those who sought to guide the people in their daily life; and money was accepted as the inevitable instrument of exchange, without any discussion of its origin or the laws which regulated it.