Catholic are often thought to be balancing uneasily between God and Mammon. In this book specially written for the series, Christopher Hollis describes the Church’s teaching on economics and the effect the Church has had and ought to have had on the development of the world’s economy. He begins his survey with the Gospels and the early Christians’ experiment in communal sharing of goods against the background of the teaching of the Jewish law on property. Subsequent chapters discuss the practice of the early Church, the teaching of the Fathers, the problem of slavery, and the economic structure of medieval Christendom and its condemnation of usury and the amassing of superfluous wealth