mass of ecclesiastical legislation providing specific prescriptions for the conduct of the faithful. And this legislation dealt with the economic as well as with other provinces of social activity.'[4] [Footnote 1: _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, vol. i. p. 465.] [Footnote 2: Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, vol. ii. pp. 2-3.] [Footnote 3: _Ibid._, p. 67.] [Footnote 4: _Op. cit._, p. 27.] The teaching of the mediæval Church, therefore, on economic affairs was but the application to particular facts and cases of its general moral teaching. The suggestion, so often put forward by so-called Christian socialists, that Christianity was the exponent of a special social theory of its own, is unfounded. The direct opposite would be nearer the truth. Far from concerning itself with the outward forms of the political or economic structure, Christianity concentrated its attention on the conduct of the individual. If Christianity can be said to have possessed any distinctive social theory, it was intense individualism. 'Christianity brought, from the point of view of morals, an altogether new force by the distinctly individual and personal character of its precepts. Duty, vice or virtue, eternal punishment--all are marked with the most individualist imprint that can be imagined. No social or political theory appeared, because it was through the individual that society was to be regenerated.... We can say with truth that there is not any Christian political economy--in the sense in which there is a Christian morality or a Christian dogma--any more than there is a Christian physic or a Christian medicine.'[1] In seeking to learn Christian teaching of the Middle Ages on economic matters, we must therefore not look for special economic treatises in the modern sense, but seek our principles in the works dealing with general morality, in the Canon Law, and in the commentaries on the Civil Law. 'We find the first worked out economic theory for the whole Catholic world in the _Corpus Juris Canonici_, that product of mediæval science in which for so many centuries theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics were treated....'[2] [Footnote 1: Rambaud, _op. cit._, pp. 34-5; Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, vol. ii. p. 8.] [Footnote 2: Roscher, _op. cit._, p. 5. It must not be concluded that all the opinions expressed by the theologians and lawyers were necessarily the official teaching of the Church. Brants says: 'It is not our intention to attribute to the Church all the opinions of this period; certainly the spirit of the Church dominated the great majority of the writers, but one must not conclude from this that all their writings are entitled to rank as doctrinal teaching' (_Op. cit._, p. 6).]