Acts 4:32

Acts 4:32. And the multitude of them that believed. From the personal details connected with the leading followers of Jesus of Nazareth, related in the third and fourth Chapter s, from recounting their words, their great miracle, and the persecution which followed, the historian of the first days of the Church passes to the inner life of the new society, and shows how the same quiet peace, the same spirit of self-sacrifice which at first (see chap. Acts 2:44-47) prevailed, still reigned in the now greatly enlarged community, which now numbered, we are told (chap. Acts 4:7), 5000 men; and of the inner life of the Church in those early days, the writer of the history dwells on two particulars (1) the relations of believers one with another; (2) the relation of believers towards the outer world.

Of one heart and one soul. This expression was one significant of a close and intimate friendship. A harmony complete and unbroken reigned at first in the Church of Jesus: greed, jealousy, and selfish ambition were unknown as yet in the community, and this enthusiasm of love found its first expression in a voluntary cession of all possessions on the part of each individual believer in favour of the common funds of the society.

Neither said any of them that ought of the things that they possessed was his own, but they had all things common. The various points connected with the community of goods in the early Church, the confined area over which the practice extended, the many exceptions to the rule which existed even in the first few years of the Church's history, etc., are discussed in Excursus B of Chapter 2. This voluntary poverty was no doubt an attempt on the part of the loving followers of Jesus to imitate as closely as possible the old life they had led while the Master yet walked with them on earth, when they had one purse and all things common. The changed conditions after the ascension, at first they failed to see; the great and varied interests with which they soon became mixed up, the vastly enlarged society, and above all, the absence of the Master, soon rendered impracticable the continuance of a way of life to which they were attached by such sweet and never-to-be-forgotten memories. It is clear, then, that this was an attempt to graft the principle of a community of goods on the Church of Christ an attempt which utterly failed in practice, and which was given up altogether after a very short experience. This is indisputable, for we find all the epistles written upon the supposition that the varied orders of master and slave, of rich and poor, continued to exist side by side in the Christian community.

The rigid and unswerving truthfulness of the author of the ‘Acts,' in dwelling upon this grave mistake of the first years, seems to have escaped general notice. Long before the ‘Acts' were edited, the error was acknowledged and corrected; yet St. Luke makes no attempt to conceal or even to gloss over the mistaken zeal of those brave apostles and martyrs who laid so well and so faithfully the early stories of the great Christian Temple.

And this uncompromising truthfulness runs through the entire history; the early Chapter s tell us of the short-sighted policy which loved to dream of equality among men; the memoirs, as they proceed, conceal nothing: they tell us of the jealous disputes among the poor converts, the Greek and Hebrew Jews, the persecuting rage, the youthful ambition of Paul of Tarsus, the favouritism of Barnabas, the weakness and timidity of Mark, the narrow sectarian spirit of Peter. Nothing is veiled; the same calm unimpassioned hand writes in the same section of the glories and the shame of the early Church; then, as now, we see darkness alternating with light; we feel we are indeed reading a true history.