ffered keenly, and protested with the
greater violence as they still remembered the golden age of the nomadic
life. Until the time of Jesus the prophets are but rebels who surge from
out the misery of the people, proclaim its sufferings, and vent their
wrath upon the rich, to whom they prophesy every evil in punishment for
their injustice and their harshness. Jesus Himself appears as the
claimant of the rights of the poor. The prophets, whether socialists or
anarchists, had preached social equality, and called for the destruction
of the world if it were unjust. Jesus likewise brings to the wretched
hatred of the rich. All His teaching threatens wealth and property; and
if by the Kingdom of Heaven which He promised one were to understand
peace and fraternity upon this earth, there would only be a question of
returning to a life of pastoral simplicity, to the dream of the Christian
community, such as after Him it would seem to have been realised by His
disciples. During the first three centuries each Church was an experiment
in communism, a real association whose members possessed all in
common--wives excepted. This is shown to us by the apologists and early
fathers of the Church. Christianity was then but the religion of the
humble and the poor, a form of democracy, of socialism struggling against
Roman society. And when the latter toppled over, rotted by money, it
succumbed far more beneath the results of frantic speculation, swindling
banks, and financial disasters, than beneath the onslaught of barbarian
hordes and the stealthy, termite-like working of the Christians.

The money question will always be found at the bottom of everything. And
a new proof of this was supplied when Christianity, at last triumphing by
virtue of historical, social, and human causes, was proclaimed a State
religion. To ensure itself complete victory it was forced to range itself
on the side of the rich and the powerful; and one should see by means of
what artfulness and sophistry the fathers of the Church succeeded in
discovering a defence of property and wealth in the Gospel of Jesus. All
this, however, was a vital political necessity for Christianity; it was
only at this price that it became Catholicism, the universal religion.
From that time forth the powerful machine, the weapon of conquest and
rule, was reared aloft: up above were the powerful and the wealthy, those
whose duty it was to share with the poor, but who did not do so; while
d