That there was social inequality is as certain as it was inevitable, for that is in the very constitution of human society. But this, as M. Luce has pointed out in regard to France, and Professor Janssens in regard to Germany, in no way detracted from the frank and full acknowledgment of the Christian brotherhood. Again and again in the sermons of the fifteenth century this truth, with all its practical applications, was enforced by the priest at the altar, where both poor and rich alike met on a common footing--“all, poor and rich, high and low, noble and simple, have sprung from a common stock and are children of a common father, Adam:” “God did not create a golden Adam from whom the nobles are descended, nor a silver Adam from whom have come the rich, and another, a clay Adam, from whom are the poor; but all, nobles, rich and poor, have one common father, made out of the dust of the earth.” These and similar lessons were constantly repeated by the religious teachers of the pre-Reformation English Church.
Equally definite is the author of the book of popular instruction, _Dives et Pauper_, above referred to. The sympathy of the writer is with the poor, as indeed is that of every ecclesiastical writer of the period. In fact, it is abundantly clear that the Church of England in Catholic days, as a _pia mater_, was ever ready to open wide her heart to aid and protect the poorer members of Christ’s mystical body. This is how _Pauper_ in the tract in question states the true Christian teaching as to the duties of riches, and impresses upon his readers the view that the owners of worldly wealth are but stewards of the Lord: “All that the rich man hath, passing his honest living after the degree of his dispensation, it is other men’s, not his, and he shall give full hard reckoning thereof at the day of doom, when God shall say to him, ‘Yield account of your bailywick.’ For rich men and lords in this world are God’s bailiffs and God’s reeves, to ordain for the poor folk and to sustain them.” Most strongly does the same writer insist that no property gives any one the right to say “_this is mine_” and that is “_thine_,” for property, so far as it is of God, is of the nature of governance and dispensation, by which those who, by God’s Providence “have,” act as His stewards and the dispensers of His gifts to such as “have not.”[329]