[Footnote 2: _Histoire de la Science politique_, vol. i. p. 319.] [Footnote 3: P. 114.] [Footnote 4: P. 121.] When we turn to St. Thomas Aquinas, we find that his teaching on the subject of property is not at all out of harmony with that of the earlier Fathers of the Church, but, on the contrary, summarises and consolidates it. 'It remained to elaborate, to constitute a definite theory of the right of property. It sufficed to harmonise, to collaborate, and to relate one to the other these elements furnished by the Christian doctors of the first four or five centuries; and this was precisely the work of the great theologians of the Middle Ages, especially of St. Thomas Aquinas.... In establishing his thesis St. Thomas did not borrow from the Roman jurisconsults through the medium of St. Isidore more than their vocabulary, their formulas, their juridical distinctions; he also borrowed from Aristotle the arguments upon which the philosopher based his right of property. But the ground of his doctrine is undoubtedly of Christian origin. There is, between the Fathers and him, a perfect continuity.'[1] 'Community of goods,' he writes, 'is ascribed to the natural law, not that the natural law dictates that all things should be possessed in common, and that nothing should be possessed as one's own; but because the division of possession is not according to the natural law, but rather arose from human agreement, which belongs to positive law. Hence the ownership of possessions is not contrary to the natural law, but an addition thereto devised by human reason.' This is simply another way of stating St. Augustine's distinction between natural and positive law. If it speaks with more respect of positive law than St. Augustine had done, it is because Aquinas was influenced by the Aristotelian conception of the State being itself a natural institution, owing to man being a social animal.[2] [Footnote 1: Abbé Calippe, _op. cit._, 1909, p. 124.] [Footnote 2: See Carlyle, _Property in Mediæval Theology_. Community of goods is said to be according to natural law in the canon law, but certain titles of acquiring private property are also said to be natural, so that the passage does not help the discussion very much (_Corp, Jur. Can._, Dec. 1. Dist. i. c. 7.)]