Hermas warns the rich about vainly spending their resources on their own pleasures: “God gave wealth to the rich,” he says, “not for luxury but in order that they might come to the aid of the afflicted and of widows and orphans.”
Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:27
Shepherd of Hermas (second century) early Christian writing quoted in Beginning to Read the Fathers by Boniface Ramsey (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012) 183.