Accordingly, the Christian layman may find it profitable to read this dissertation in the following order: first, the epilogue and the short summary (both at the end of this work); second, the conclusion (ch. 34); third, the introduction (ch. 1); fourth, the critical section (ch. 20-33); fifth, the chronological table (at the end of the work); sixth, the historical section (ch. 2-6); seventh, the doctrinal section (ch. 7-19); and lastly. the entire dissertation in the indexed order of its chapters.
Needless to say, the present dissertation does not claim to he an exhaustive treatise on all the aspects of communism, but merely a study of communist eschatology-an introductory survey of the communist doctrine concerning expected future events. Those interested in other aspects of communism are to be referred elsewhere-to Bochenski and Niemeyer’s excellent Handbook on Communism, for a general survey of the subject; to Burns’s Handbook of Marxism, for a compendium of the most important communist documents; to Possony’s A Century of Conflict, for communist revolutionary technique and for the military aspects of the problem; to Wetter’s Dialectical Materialism, for a survey of Soviet dialectical materialistic (diamatic) philosophy; and to the present writer’s own M.A. (Philosophy) dissertation Communism Versus Creation, for the analysis and refutation of Marxist-Leninist genesiology; etc. A reasonable grasp of communism, however, may readily be gained by simply reading the summaries at the end of each chapter of this present work in the order given in the index (q.v.)
