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Good morning. Last Saturday on Dartmoor more than 3000 people joined a rally to protest a high court judgment, obtained by a landowner, which denied what had been until then the accepted right to wild camp throughout much of the national park. On the one side is the landowner asserting the rights of property, on the other, those who claim the right to enjoy one of the last bits of wild England. I can honestly declare that I have no personal interest in this matter, since the idea of wild camping on a moor on a cold January weekend - as some of the protesters had intended to do - fills me with dread rather than delight. But this raises a number of questions echoing practical issues which troubled Christians from earliest times. You could say that Christians have had a slightly bad conscience when it comes to property. On the one hand, it was admitted that property was no bad thing - on the contrary, the existence of property brought order and restraint to our grasping and acquisitive tendencies, encouraging industry, stewardship and creativity, while also allowing us the untroubled enjoyment of the things on which our lives depend: food, clothes, shelter and the like. On the other hand, however, the Christian imagination was always haunted by the image of the ideal community depicted at the beginning of the book of Acts, which held all its goods in common - and when Augustine and others wrote rules for monasteries, they strictly banned their monks from owning any private property. Property was left in place in the outside world, but Christians never really believed in the notion of private property as some think of it - that is as something which is mine to do with exactly as I wish. And surely this is a crucial point - Imagine an art collector who, on a whim, uses a Rembrandt to light a fire - They would hardly expect the rest of us to shrug our shoulders and say 'well it was theirs'. And In recent years we have become increasingly aware that any right to private property needs to be balanced against the right to common property which we all might claim in clean air and water, for example. I guess this may sound radical to some - but the thought is that if Property has its rights, the right to the enjoyment of private property should be regulated - certainly insofar as it denies or threatens what belongs to the common good. Most of us, however, are property owners of one sort or another. And all of us have a responsibility, in life and in death, to consider how our use of what we call our property might also more appropriately serve the wider community. Augustine put it with characteristic directness: 'the superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you possess superfluities, you possess what belongs to others.'