time of Gregory I. there were several hospitals in Rome; he mentions also hospitals in Naples,
Sicily, and Sardinia. These institutions were necessary in the greatly enlarged sphere of the church,
and the increase of poverty, distress, and disaster which at last overwhelmed the Roman empire.
They may in many cases have served purposes of ostentation, superseded or excused private charity,
encouraged idleness, and thus increased rather than diminished pauperism. But these were abuses
to which the best human institutions are subject.
Private charity continued to be exercised in proportion to the degree of vitality in the church.
The great fathers and bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries set an illustrious example of plain
living and high thinking, of self-denial and liberality, and were never weary in their sermons and
writings in enjoining the duty of charity. St. Basil himself superintended his extensive hospital at
Caesarea, and did not shrink from contact with lepers; St. Gregory Nazianzen exhorted the brethren
to be "a god to the unfortunate by imitating the mercy of God," for there is "nothing so divine as
beneficence;" St. Chrysostom founded several hospitals in Constantinople, incessantly appealed
to the rich in behalf of the poor, and directed the boundless charities of the noble widow Olympias.
St. Ambrose, at once a proud Roman and an humble Christian, comforted the paupers in Milan,
while he rebuked an emperor for his cruelty; Paulinus of Nola lived in a small house with his wife,
Theresiâ and used his princely wealth for the building of a monastery, the relief of the needy, the
ransoming of prisoners, and when his means were exhausted, he exchanged himself with the son
of a widow to be carried away into Africa; the great Augustin declined to accept as a present a
better coat than he might give in turn to a brother in need; St. Jerome founded a hospice in Bethlehem
from the proceeds of his property, and induced Roman ladies of proud ancestry to sell their jewels,
silk dresses, and palaces, for the poor, and to exchange a life of luxurious ease for a life of ascetic
self-denial. Those examples shone like brilliant stars through the darkness of the middle ages.
But the same fathers, it must be added, handed to the middle ages also the disturbing doctrine
of the meritorious nature and atoning efficacy of charity, as "covering a multitude of sins," and its
influence even upon the dead in purgatory. These errors greatly stimulated and largely vitiated that
virtue, and do it to this day.^374
The Latin word caritas, which originally denotes dearness or costliness (from carus, dear),
then esteem, affection, assumed in the church the more significant meaning of benevolence and
beneficence, or love in active exercise, especially to the poor and suffering among our fellow-men.
The sentiment and the deed must not be separated, and the gift of the hand derives its value from
the love of the heart. Though the gifts are unequal, the benevolent love should be the same, and
the widow’s mite is as much blessed by God as the princely donation of the rich. Ambrose compares
benevolence in the intercourse of men with men to the sun in its relation to the earth. "Let the gifts
of the wealthy," says another father, "be more abundant, but let not the poor be behind him in love."
Very often, however, charity was contracted into mere almsgiving. Praying, fasting, and almsgiving
(^374) See the numerous quotations from the fathers in Uhlhorn, p. 278 sqq. "Countless times is the thought expressed that
almsgiving is a safe investment of money at good interest with God in heaven." He thinks that "the doctrine of purgatory, and
of the influence which almsgiving exercises even upon souls in purgatory, determined more than anything else the charity of
the entire mediaeval period" (p. 287). The notion that alms have an atoning efficacy is expressed again and again in every variety
of form as the motive of almsgiving which is predominant above all others. Even Augustin, the most evangelical among the
fathers, teaches "that alms have power to extinguish and expiate sin," although he qualifies the maxim and confines the benefit
to those who amend their lives. No one had greater influence upon the Latin church than the author of the City of God, in which,
as Uhlhorn says, "he unconsciously wrote the programme of the middle ages."