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The Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, were extraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their working out; and while they inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universe fabulous perspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents and powers which gave a new dimension to experience.
Though the tendency to read philosophy into the Bible is as old as Philo, from whom it was borrowed by Clement of Alexandria and Origen and by them handed down to the other Patristic writers, and though in the Jewish middle ages too, from Saadia down, the verses of the Bible were employed to confirm views adopted from other considerations; though finally Abraham Ibn Daud in the matter of exegesis, too, anticipated Maimonides in finding the Aristotelian metaphysic in the sacred scriptures, still Maimonides as in everything else pertaining to Jewish belief and practice, so in the interpretation of the Bible also obtained the position of a leader, of the founder of a school and the most brilliant and most authoritative exponent thereof, putting in the shade everyone who preceded him and every endeavor in the same direction to which Maimonides himself owed his inspiration.
Gregory the Great; and the utterances of St. Basil, St. Ambrose, and St. Jerome are similarly examined in 'The Alleged Socialism of the Church Fathers, by Dr. John A. Ryan. The patristic texts are also fully examined by Abbé Calippe in 'Le Caractère sociale de la Propriété' in La Semaine Sociale de France, 1909, p. 111.
Their soul, so largely inarticulate, might be overlaid with churchly habits and imprisoned for the moment in the panoply of patristic dogma; but pagan Christianity always remained a religion foreign to them, accepted only while their minds continued in a state of helpless tutelage. Such a foreign religion could never be understood by them in its genuine motives and spirit.
It is in the incarnate Word of God that the patristic writers find expressed all that man is able to comprehend, and all that he needs to know in this present world, of the Divine Nature, and it is His words that confirm their confidence in that "innate opinion" of the existence of God, of the presence of which in every man they were so sure.
He came to this country at the end of the seventeenth century, received a royal pension, took priest's orders, and continued with indefatigable labour his patristic studies.
His idea was to show how the vast fabric of scholastic theology had grown up, particularly what contributions had been made to it in the Middle Age. The traditional dogma is a structure reared upon the logical terminology of the patristic and mediæval schools. It has little foundation in Scripture and no response in the religious consciousness.
The Fathers abound in texts contrary to slavery, but have we not seen a great number of texts contrary to property? The closeness of the analogy between the patristic treatment of slavery and of property appears forcibly in the following passage of Lactantius: 'God who created man willed that all should be equal.
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.
Society then felt the evils which attended this new condition of things, and it was driven, according to this patristic idea, to search about for remedies in order to restrain the anarchy which threatened to overwhelm the very existence of the race. Hence was introduced first of all the notion of a civil authority.
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