Since the Departmental Committee (appointed reluctantly by the then Home Secretary Sir David MaxwellFyfe, just after issuance of the Moral Welfare Council's interim report in 1954) is concerned with both homosexuality and prostitution, this booklet includes a forthright chapter on the latter subject, with an interesting historical survey, and recommendations in the same spirit as those above.

Appended are extracts from the Interim Report and from Dr. Bailey's essay in the volume They Stand Apart (reviewed elsewhere in this issue), a compilation of statutes relating to homosexual offenses and prostitution and a further essay, The Pastor and the Homosexual, touching more directly the Church's duty to the homosexual.

Here it is baldly stated that only those priests who have acquired a genuine understanding of the subject should venture to counsel inverts. (At least one such priest should be available in every deanery.) Nor should priests undertake tasks requiring a psychiatrist. The genuine invert must be distinguished from those who are merely retarded emotionally. The invert must be helped to accept himself, and with God's help, to control and discipline himself, and to avoid eccentricities, escapism, homosexual companions (this is consistent with "accepting one's self"?), and to encourage masculine mannerisms and every symptom of sexual normalization. Regarding the practicing homosexual, the essay observes that "it may come as a shock to find Christians, and even clerics who consider that for them, homosexual prac-

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tices are allowable and not sinful." For these, it seems, "nothing short of conversion is required-however that experience may be conceived or defined. . ." Priests are also recommended to urge caution on parents or headmasters planning to bring charges against men involved with boys, lest in some cases the court may do greater harm to the boy and to the offender than the act itself.

Not accepting the arbitrary notion that God specially established the sex instinct as a function of Christian marriage (rendering all other varieties of expressed affection as illicit), this reviewer can only regard the quibbling about different levels and categories of sin as quaint, even though I appreciate the attempt to dispel that definite horror with which theology usually approaches the subject of homosexuality. The derivative recommendations that homosexuals must aim at continence (even if most difficult) and that practicing inverts must be "converted" (even if already Christian) seem to me purest pollyanna. The explicit assumption that "a satisfactory adjustment to life" is synonymous with effective sublimation of the physical impulse, appears both foolish and fraught with psychic danger, though it is perhaps a necessary corrolary of the orthodox Christian viewpoint on sex. Actually it would be too much to expect that Churchmen look objectively at their most basic assumptions, though they demand that and more of the homosexual. The recommendation that the homosexual should strive to perfect his "mask" strikes me as opportunist and unChristian, though

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