Moral indignation is no substitute for moral information, not least on the subject of homosexuality, and therefore two recent books are recommended. The first, which is free from preoccupations with the circumstances of criminal proceedings or clinical treatment, is an examination of the family background, social behaviour, and activities of one hundred and twenty-seven cases; that they amount to a representative sample is not claimed, yet they do help to dispose of some popular misconceptions, for instance, that male homosexuality spells effeminacy or that seduction has any appreciable effect on the perpetuation or development of the condition. The second is a revised edition of a summary account of the modern evidence, mainly anthropological, biological, and physiological, together with suggestions for treatment.

Yet among the items in the bibliographies, 134 and 203 respectively, only two are directly concerned with morals, and through no fault of the authors. Have, then, the English theologians failed to fill a gap which affects perhaps one Englishman in every twenty-five? Or have they good reason?

Let us reflect that however much a misfit a homosexual may appear to some systems of reference, to an interior theology devoted to the growth of friendship with God and our neighbour he is not a queer or an odd man out, but one with the rest of us, heir to the same original sin and the same promise, beset by temptations and fortified by the graces which arc fundamentally the same for him and for us.

Jacob’s ladder leads from earth to heaven: but the angels in his vision ascended and descended. It was a two-way traffic that he saw. The patriarch’s vision and its sequel were crucial for the destiny of the Jews. But they are, too, a primary statement of what the sacred means. The episode provides a cardinal text for the rites of consecration in the Roman liturgy, for Jacob, when he awoke from sleep, poured oil on the stone on which his head had rested and called the place Bethel, the house of God. A vow is made, and the symbol of it is the anointed stone, ‘set up for a title’ in the place where God has been.

The sacred, in this primeval sense, always speaks of God to man. Something has been set aside and offered to God: something sealed and ratified, usually by rites of consecration. It declares now a reality other than its own, for the thing—metal, stuff or stone—has been taken out of the context of profane use to point to a mystery itself inaccessible to man.

St Thomas, in his long and perceptive discussion of the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law, points out that ‘the divine worship regards two things: namely, God who is worshipped; and men, who worship him. Accordingly God, who is worshipped, is confined to no bodily place; wherefore there was no need, on his part, for a tabernacle or temple to be set up.

The attitude of Christendom towards Islam is part of a story much older than either of the two religions concerned; though Christianity being one of them gives the story certain important differences. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental, and also invigorating, factors of early civilizations was their habit of holding themselves superior to any other culture: of seeing themselves as the unique bearers of all that was best. This sense of superiority might be deemed essential to the process of advancing civilization at all: the process of wresting an area of order, and of grace, out of the mists of errant wildness. It was based on an obvious truth: one’s own patch was cultivated; so far as could be seen, the rest was not. Moreover, the rest was inimical. The patch of enlightenment and perfection needed protection. For this it had its exclusive deities. In course of time, associated with the obvious superiority of the area of life they guarded, these deities became The Deity in the mind’s of their protégés. When there was awareness of other patches of civilization, rivalling the one which had been thought unique, each considered its god the only True God, for now the gods were at war. Contests and comparisons between civilizations were contests between religions and, as the degree of polemic fervour in favour of the one civilization against the barbarisms without, of the one religion that is true against the others that are false, is indicative of the vitality of the polemicists’s cause, in later ages the sterner Christian attitude to its rival may be taken to show a degree of advancement in Christianity absent from Islam.