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BOOK REVIEWS 615 simple faith in seeing the Devil's opposition to Christian progress. Did not Our Lord meet with a similar interference? They were saints, giants, loved and admired, the author magnanimously concedes, but the implication is that they were theological fools. The author pleads rightly for justice as far as developing countries are concerned. Do we not owe these missionaries a just assessment of their work? " The easiest way to start a mission was to collect orphans or ransom slave-children and then start a mission school." But will the author quote this as the constitutional policy of any missionary congregation? If the missionaries refused to save the lives of these children, would they be truly Christian? Not knowing that any and every religion has a salvific role, they were in a hurry to save souls and, like St. Luke, they counted the Baptisms. Rigid in their Western ways, they made no allowance for the vagaries of marriage systems in Africa. But Jesus was also rigid in his attitude to prevailing custom in Judea. There are many good things in the rest of this book. But as theology it is unsatisfactory. For theology is a continuity of intellectual understanding of the implications of our Faith. One gets the impression from the author that before the Second Vatican Council there was only erroneous theology of the mission, if any at all. Besides, a theology of mission should cover more than the end of missionary activity. Emphasis is given to statements made by Pope Paul in the presence of government officials in Africacourtesy exchanges at airports-but his explicit teaching on the priorities to be observed in missionary activity is not quoted. The missionary mandate of Our Lord is soft-pedalled. I wonder why? A Theology of Mission should consider also the means. From that point of view I consider Father le Joly's book, Proclaiming Christ, far more practical in its approach. St. Charles' Seminary, Nagpur, India Loms M. HuGHES, O.P. JERoME ToNER, 0. P. Approaches To Natural Law: From Plato To Kant. By FRANCIS H. ETEROVICH. New York: Exposition Press, 1972. Pp. 194. $6.50. The brevity of this book offers the advantage of broad treatment enabling the student to discern the larger contours and general continuity of the history of natural law theory. It follows the usual divisions of that history into classical, Christian, and post-scholastic, or modern, periods. Under the last of these are treated the empirical, rationalist, and idealist versions of natural law. The ambivalence of the term "natural law " is amply conveyed as successive philosophers are considered, as is also the bearing of their metaphysical and epistemological positions on their respective moral and juridical doctrines. 616 BOOK REVIEWS The advantage, however, is largely offset by a treatment which is in places oversimplified and inaccurate. The less than three pages devoted to the Roman law jurists are bound to confuse and mislead a reader not already familiar with Justinian's Institutes and the complications of its section on ius naturale. Justinian is twice mentioned as being himself a jurist-indeed "the greatest of all Roman jurists." (p. 43) The jurists themselves are first lumped together as understanding natural right to presuppose society (which would not be the case with Ulpian) and on the following page (44) are again collectively presented as sharing Ulpian's view of the difference between ius naturale and ius gentium. A bit further along we are told that the compilers of the Institutes " preferred not to distinguish ius gentium from ius naturale," while in fact it was the Institutes that canonized Ulpian's restrictive and awkward definition of ius naturale which, in its context, stands sharply opposed to ius gentium. Most of the confusion is owing, of course, to the compilers themselves. For after accepting Ulpian's understanding of natural as comprising only those activities common to man and animals, they went on immediately to incorporate Gaius's definition of ius gentium as stemming from "natural reason " (naturalis ratio) . Exception must also be taken to the handling of Suarez. Dr. Eterovich writes: Suarez takes a middle course in answering the question: " Is natural law only a preceptive or a...

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