Like most of the problems of modern life that of property is neither purely theoretical nor purely practical. We live in a transitional period in which profound social changes together with changes in the spiritual outlook of mankind have at once divorced legal institutions from their basis in the socio-physical life of men and have set in profound and dynamic movement desires and forces wholly disruptive to the compact life of a traditional social order. The challenge to the Christian thinker is taken up glibly enough at the level of pure theory, but an impatience is growing within the Christian body itself at the failure of theory effectively to modify and to change the system of dynamic disorder under which we live. In particular the defence of traditional property rights can and does lead to attitudes of pugnacious defence not of the traditional but in effect of the existing “order,” while a spirit of understandable but shrill and dangerous exasperation throws its hopes into one, and the most potent, of the forces of disruption. This does at least represent a real force for change rather than a system of hardened arteries through which the life of society cannot flow again; but in espousing the cause of Communism the loss for the Christian is the loss of a Christian mind. What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world for the workers and suffer the loss of his own soul? How terrifying a pedestal!