they almost daily slay so many persons as there are dying poor whose subsidies they keep close in their own possession.' [Footnote 1: _Comm. on Ps. cxviii._, viii. 22.] [Footnote 2: Ps. cxii. 9.] [Footnote 3: _Lib. Reg. Past._, iii. 21.] The third class of passages to which reference must be made is composed of the numerous attacks which the Fathers levelled against the abuse or wrongful acquisition of riches. These passages do not indicate that the Fathers favoured a system of communism, but point in precisely the contrary direction. If property were an evil thing in itself, they would not have wasted so much time in emphasising the evil uses to which it was sometimes put. The insistence on the abuses of an institution is an implicit admission that it has its uses. Thus Clement of Alexandria devotes a whole treatise to answering the question 'Who is the rich man who can be saved?' in which it appears quite plainly that it is the possible abuse of wealth, and the possible too great attachment to worldly goods, that are the principal dangers in the way of a rich man's salvation. The suggestion that in order to be saved a man must abandon all his property is strongly controverted. The following passage from St. Gregory Nazianzen[1] breathes the same spirit: 'One of us has oppressed the poor, and wrested from him his portion of land, and wrongly encroached upon his landmarks by fraud or violence, and joined house to house, and field to field, to rob his neighbour of something, and has been eager to have no neighbour, so as to dwell alone on the earth. Another has defiled the land with usury and interest, both gathering where he has not sowed and reaping where he has not strewn, farming not the land but the necessity of the needy.... Another has had no pity on the widow and orphans, and not imparted his bread and meagre nourishment to the needy; ... a man perhaps of much property unexpectedly gained, for this is the most unjust of all, who finds his very barns too narrow for him, fining some and emptying others to build greater ones for future crops.' Similarly Clement of Rome advocates _frugality_ in the enjoyment of wealth;[2] and Salvian has a long passage on the dangers of the abuse of riches.[3] [Footnote 1: _Orat_., xvi. 18.] [Footnote 2: _The Instructor_, iii. 7.] [Footnote 3: _Ad Eccles._, i. 7.]