Page:The Net of Faith.pdf/659

225* tressing to him. And he goes on to say: Every life that is taken is taken by God. Who resists God must be killed. Whoever lives unjustly, rebels against God; and it is particularly the heretics and pagans who rebel against God. One must necessarily take away from them their physical life as well as their mortal soul. Eternal death must be the reward of sin, and it is more easily given with a physical death! So we ask the frog: is it allowed to go to war against the enemies of God? It is clear that in a just war all enemies of God must be killed. For if the frog says that one should not kill the enemies of God then the honor of God would be exterminated in retreat.

The iniquitous frog asks that the City of God be left defenseless and abandoned to robberies and violence. And, adds Master Albertus, if the worth of life should be the cause of no killing, then, it seems to us, much more worthy is the spiritual life; and the physical life should not be pardoned if the spiritual can thus be saved.

Albertus Magnus ( 1206?–1280), a German scholastic doctor and Dominican. He taught in various German towns, especially at Cologne, and at the University of Paris. He became provincial of his order and was, for a while, bishop of Regensburg. He outlived his most famous pupil, Thomas Aquinas. He published twenty-one folio volumes. He took as his special task the writing of commentaries on all the works of Aristotle; in addition he compiled extensive works on geography, botany, and zoology: His treatise on plants and animals is, according to Singer (,, New York: 1928), the best work on natural history in the Middle Ages. This "Doctor Universalis" became the authority for the thirteenth century.