mpatibility, between the profession of poverty and the fact of
possessing wealth. We claim that the one does not affect the' other,
that a religious may belong to a rich order and still keep his vow
inviolate. The vow in the religious is individual and personal; the
riches collective. It is the physical person that is poor; the moral
being has the wealth. Men may club together, put their means into a
common fund, renounce all personal claim thereto, live on a meagre
revenue and employ the surplus for various purposes other than their
needs. The personal poverty of such as these is real.

This is the case of the religious. Personally they do not own the
clothes on their backs. The necessaries of life are furnished them out
of a common fund. What remains, goes through their hands for the glory
of God and in charity to fellow-man. The employment to which these men
devote their lives, such as prayer, charity, the maintenance and
conducting of schools and hospitals, is not lucrative to any great
extent. And since very few Orders resort to begging, the revenue from
capital is the only means of assuring existence. It is therefore no
more repugnant for religious to depend on funded wealth than it was for
the Apostolic College to have a common purse. The secret reason for
this condition of things is that works of zeal rarely yield abundant
returns, and man cannot live on the air of heaven.

As to the extent of such wealth and its dangers, it would seem that if
it be neither ill gotten nor employed for illegitimate purposes, in
justice and equity, there cannot be two opinions on the subject. Every
human being has a right to the fruit of his industry and activity. To
deny this is to advocate extreme socialism and anarchy and, he who puts
this doctrine into practice, destroys the principle on which society
rests. The law that strikes at religious corporations whose wealth
accrues from centuries of toil and labor, may to-morrow consistently
confiscate the goods and finances of every other corporation in the
realm. If you force the religious out of land and home, why not force
Morgan, Rockefeller & Co., out of theirs! The justice in one case is as
good as in the other.

It is difficult to see how the people suffer from accumulated wealth,
the revenues from which are almost entirely devoted to the relief of
misery and the instruction of the ignorant. The people are the sole
beneficiaries. There is here none of the arrogance and self