Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/37

 THE CATHOLIC SOCIAL-REFORM MOVEMENT 23

and by this law they are to be rigorously judged, both in this world and the next.

These are the principles, say the Catholic publicists, that have ever guided the church of God in her social and economic action and legislation. Under the patriarchal dispensation the foundations were laid for all the beneficent institutions that the Gentile world has ever possessed; and so far as justice, and friendship, and order reign in any pagan land, this is due to the tradition inherited from the church of God in prehistoric times ; reinforced, indeed, by the dictates of instinct and reason, and the influences of common grace, to say nothing of divine reve- lations, the possibility of which among the pagan peoples is not denied. The Mosaic law carefully safeguarded the interests of every element among the chosen people, as well as of " the strangers within their gates," and some of its provisions are so strikingly beneficent that their value is appreciated even by some of the social reformers who deny the sacred character of the books in which it is recorded.

The Catholic church has, ever since the time of the apos- tles, constituted a vast democracy, in the sense of an independ- ent society, which exists for the benefit of all its members, but especially for that of the classes less favored by fortune. The community life of the church of Jerusalem, in its first years, the deaconries found in every large city, the bodies of widows and virgins who were such powerful auxiliaries in the work of the ministry, the granaries and storehouses scattered throughout the Roman empire, the institutions associated with them, such as the almonry (7rTQ);)^eiW) and the hospice (|ei'o8o;;^€(W), and the legislation against usury and other forces of oppression which received so large a share of the attention of the early ecclesiastical councils, are only a few among the many striking illustrations of the church's constant preoccupation, from the very outset, with the rights and interests of the poor and humble.

After the destruction of the Roman empire the church entered upon the work of building up a new civilization con- formed to the laws of nature and reason, and animated by the