JUST an the ecclesiastical leaders of the sixteenth century were confused by the beginnings of capitalism, so are they new confused by its ending. Not until the seventeenth century was the requisite adjustment made through the Christian doctrine of individuality, and now that the doctrine of individuality, has been dulled into the concept of individualism, we may expect the Christian doctrine of equality to orient the churches with a new economic society. So much had been pointed out by Leo XIII, but institutions are more sluggish than doctrines; Dr. Niebuhr has attempted to show the probable behavior of ecclesiastical institutions under the impact of an economic and political crisis.

His plea is for radical politics and religious conservatism, but he has not fallen into the facile synthesis which is becoming fashionable in our seminaries. He realizes that however close Christianity and Marxism may be in their fundamental assumptions and in their scale of values, the religious content of the one and the institutional weight of the other puts them at cross purposes. Both movements have been quick to follow the line of least resistance, but only in their agreement can a sane solution of our problems have the chance of survival.

Dr. Neibuhr insists that the Marxists will be hamstrung in their practical politics until they have abandoned their crusade against the churches, just as the churches will lose intellectual caste unless they reach a compromise with political revolution. He has not deluded himself in the hope that sweet reasonableness will actually prevail, nor has he succeeded in drawing up a program for the agreement which he sees as necessary. But he has accomplished another and scarcely less valuable task, by throwing the problem into sharp relief, and by forming the basis for an intelligent understanding of the relation between the dominant religious and political creeds of our time.

In his sharp analysis of complexity, neither losing himself in details nor grasping at easy generalizations, Dr. Niebuhr approaches that liber mirabilis, Cardinal Newman's "Arians of the Fourth Century." One of the easy generalisations which he has avoided is that of Christianity as a withdrawal from the politics of the actual world, a starry pre-occupation with the absolute which can find no channel into the particular. This is just the Platonic Christianity against which Aquinas waged so masterful a struggle; it is the Christianity which, in the phrase of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, regards the body as a kind of "negligible napkin", and its concerns as sordid and irrelevant. It is not Dr. Niebuhr's Christianity.

The path of Christian pessimism is steered with just as sure a success. Dr. Niebuhr maintains that its pessimism is one pregnant with political change, as the pessimism of Buddha is not, and he does not neglect to show the role which this pessimism should play in radical political theory. The old argument against collectivism, that it is a system which ignores human imperfection, is turned into the argument that collectivism is a system based on human imperfection. It is, says Dr. Niebuhr, the unreasoning impulse and brutality of human beings which makes collectivism the only safe economic solution. On the other hand, communist collectivism cannot be the last word; the classless state of Marx, with its absence of conflict may be a symbol in a revolutionary religion, but it is only a symbol. Communism, which may have to oppose Christianity as an institution, will have to revive it as a doctrine, and as a way of life, after its own victory is accomplished.

Dr. Niebuhr's survey of the breakdown of capitalism is able, and sometimes brilliant. But it does not contain the real body of his contribution to our political understanding. It is in his keen criticism of Marxism as a religion (for it is a religion, whatever its pretensions to pure science may be), and in his treatment of its relation, doctrinal and actual, to other and older religions that Dr. Niebuhr is on the most fruitful ground.