TIME publishes below extracts from three widely different reports from recent visitors to Europe. TIME & LIFE'S Winthrop Sargeant, who is primarily a cultural reporter, looked for signs of life in the arts, and found some. Paul Hutchinson, managing editor of the Christian Century (whose full report is published in the Century this week) found a political and spiritual bankruptcy, which, in a despairing mood, he pronounced incurable. Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading U.S. Protestant theologian (whose article appears in LIFE this week), is also gravely concerned over Europe's chances of survival, but after a realistic analysis of the danger of war between the East and West, found hope in a positive U.S. policy for meeting, and averting that danger.

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