punishment no more severe than for comparable offenses, and less harsh in secular sources.

This

"... it is noticeable that those who demand justice and sympathy for the homosexual frequently attribute his treatment by society and the law to malign and obscurantist ecclesiastical influences. . . The anti-ecclesiastical, and sometimes anti-Christian prejudice which unfortunately seems to have animated so many writers. on sexual topics inclined them to attribute instinctively to the Church every idea or development of which they disapproved... Let me at once make it clear that the Church cannot be exonerated from all responsibility for our present attitude responsibility, however, the Church cannot bear alone; it is not as if, throughout the last two millenia, reluctant legislatures had been forced by spiritual authority to enact laws and to prescribe punishments which they secretly detested. The Church taught and people universally believed, on what was held to be excellent authority, that homosexual practices had brought a terrible Divine judgment upon the city of Sodom, and that the repetition of such 'offenses against nature' had from time to time provoked similar visitations in the form of earthquake and famine. It was understandable, therefore, that by means both of ecclesiastical discipline and of the restraints and penalties of the civil law, steps should be taken to ward off the wrath of God..."

Particularly interesting, though sketchy, was his account of the Church's reaction to the Manichaean cults, who, thinking it a cardinal sin to bring children into this wicked world, allegedly condoned homosexuality as a lesser sin.

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After carefully tracing the development of canon law and other Church writings on the subject, Dr. Bailey follows the history of the law in England (taking time out to argue with Ellis' account of homosexuality among the Norman kings) and makes several specific recommendations for liberalizing that law.

Dr. Bailey regards the Christian tradition as essentially right in emphasizing the duty of the law to protect the young, and in its emphasis that the homosexual offender is a sinner for whom justice needs to be tempered with mercy, and as a guide to treatment of perverts and perversion. He feels that tradition to be quite erroneous in its ignorance of biological and psychological causes, in ignoring lesbianism, and in unjustifiably considering homosexual acts more serious than socially harmful heterosexual acts.

This is an important book, and altogether, a good one. Yet it seems to this reviewer, who admits his own amateurishness as a critic, that Dr. Bailey is far too much concerned with explaining away the Church's long-gone responsibility for the origin of a bias, where contemporary responsibility remain clear. It matters little if some Medieval rulers were more intolerant of homosexuals than their clerical counterparts, so long as most segments of the Church still have not learned to temper justice with mercy. Ellis' and Westermarck's slander against the Church retains more than a little truth and Dr. Bailey's study is badly cramped in its defensive position. But to a degree he does manage to correct the widely current notion that the Medieval

Church reacted always with one (malevolent) mind. The wrenching struggles constantly taking place within the Church, and the pervading secular influence, are all too easily lost sight of by those who desire to damn the Church.

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