Finally, the conception of the natural community of all possessions which originated with the Stoics was firmly fixed in a tradition by More's time, although it was not accepted by all the theologian philosophers of the Middle Ages. In that tradition communism lay a safe distance back in the age of innocence before the Fall of Man. It did not serve to contrast the existing order of society with a possible alternative order, because the age of innocence was not a possible alternative once man had sinned. The actual function of patristic civilian canonist scholastic communism was adequately set forth by St. Gregory almost a millennium before More wrote Utopia.

``The soil is common to all men. When we give the necessities of life to the poor, we restore to them what is already theirs. We should think of it more as an act of justice than compassion.''

Because community not severalty of property is the law of nature no man can assert an absolutely unalterable right to what is his. Indeed, of all that is his every man is by nature and reason and therefore by conscience obligated to regard himself as a custodian. He is a trustee for the common good, however feeble the safeguards which the positive or municipal law of property provides against his misuse of that share of the common fund, wisely or unwisely, entrusted to his keeping. In contrast to this Stoic patristic view, Utopia implies that the nature of man is such that to rely on individual conscience to supply the deficiencies of municipal law is to embark on the bottomless sea of human sinfulness in a sieve. The Utopians brace conscience with legal sanctions. In a properly ordered society the massive force of public law performs the function which in natural law theory ineptly is left altogether to a small voice so often still.