Note 13 — Chapter V · ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS

For our ecclesiastical historian, the poverty is the main determinant on the side of early organization. With a note of profound pessimism, which alternates strangely with passages of professional eulogy of the Church, he notes that pauperism and philanthropy were going hand in hand already throughout the Empire before the advent of Christianity, rich men and municipalities proclaiming an “almost Christian sentiment” on the subject. “The instinct of benevolence was fairly roused. And yet to the mass of men life was hardly worth living. It tended to become a despair.”13 And he claims that the Christian practice of almsgiving—which he knows to have been warmly inculcated among the Jews, as it has always been in Eastern countries—was one of the conservative forces that “arrested decay. They have prevented the disintegration, and possibly the disintegration by a vast and ruinous convulsion, of the social fabric. Of those forces the primitive bishops and deacons were the channels and the ministers.... They bridged over the widening interval between class and class. They lessened to the individual soul the weight of that awful sadness of which, then as now, to the mass of men, life was the synonym and the sum.”14