Immediately after the time of Christ the Christians in Jerusalem developed a communistic organization. "All that believed were together and had all things in common and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men, as every man had need." "Neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. Neither was there any among them that lacked; for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them at the apostles' feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need."[2] It is doubtless true that the participants in this communistic society believed themselves to be living according to the principles and precepts of Christ. Yet there is some evidence which would lead to the conclusion that perhaps this experiment was less a deliberate and reasoned out endeavor to organize a permanent society on a new economic basis, than an instinctive movement, entered upon under the influence of a belief in the immediately imminent second advent of Christ and therefore expected to be of only very limited duration. The collections subsequently taken up in other Christian communities 'for the relief of the poor saints in Jerusalem' would seem to lend color to this view of the matter. In St. Paul's teaching about property there is a fundamental inconsistency. He makes statements which taken separately are applicable to particular situations but which are not in harmony with one another. He loyally supported the established right of private property, even in slaves. But at another time he pronounced that property right depended upon service rendered. In one place we have: "Slaves obey your masters" in another: "If any will not work neither let him eat." But if a man's slaves obey him he can eat without working. There is no suggestion of communism in St. Paul's writings. If all the 'property passages' in the epistles are collected and read in connection with their contexts two facts come into prominence, First: Property institutions as such have only a relative validity. They are not viewed as ends valuable in themselves but are subordinated to religious ends, and the concept of an immediately imminent second advent lies at the base of this relative valuation.[3] Second: Economic arrangements of the existing social order, like similar political arrangements, are to be strictly conformed to, in spite of their merely relative validity, for fear of jeopardizing the more important religious movement.[4] St. Paul whether consciously or not, is, in regard to social institutions, an evolutionary revolutionist. He would doubtless have been the first to admit that his doctrine of human brotherhood, for example, would eventually overthrow his doctrine of slavery, supposing--as there is no ground for thinking he did suppose--that time enough elapsed for his doctrine of brotherhood