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).]

There is not to be found in the writers of the early Middle Ages, that
is to say from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, a trace of any
attention given to what we at the present day would designate economic
questions. Usury was condemned by the decrees of several councils, but
the reasons of this prohibition were not given, nor was the question
made the subject of any dialectical controversy; commerce was so