Note 63 — BOOK II THE LIFE OF A CHRISTIAN IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE FAITH

If the experiment of “communism” in the early Christian Church was ever tried, it was in the congregation of Jerusalem, and there it is clear that the results were simply disastrous; very soon the Church of Jerusalem was reduced to the direst straits. There are very many allusions to this state of things in S. Paul’s Epistles, where collections for the “poor saints in Jerusalem” are constantly mentioned; yet even in that Church, where apparently some attempt at a community of goods was evidently made, entire renunciation was evidently, as we see in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, never obligatory, but was ever purely voluntary.