Comparative history is always a risk, and the present work exemplifies that risk as well as some of the rewards. It compares the movements among Czech Catholic and Russian Orthodox clergy, essentially parish clergy and seminary instructors, for reform of their respective Churches at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the Czechs the author somewhat artificially begins with 1848 so as to provide a pendant to the Russian 1905 revolution. He could just as well have started the Russian story with the 1860s, for reform currents analogous to those among Czech clergy began about that time in Russia. The issues under discussion are primarily the institutional ones of relations between the upper and lower clergy, relations of Church and State, and the reaction of the clergy to nationalism and political reform in their respective states. The outcome in both countries was a schism, the separation of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church in 1920 and the formation of the Living Church in the Soviet Union in 1922. Some attention is devoted to the question of liturgical language and historical memory. Unfortunately the rigid structure imposed by the comparative framework results in occasional statements of the obvious: the conflict in Bohemia between priests and bishops, both groups celibate, was necessarily different from the dispute in Russia between married priests and celibate monk-bishops. In Bohemia the issue of church authority was mixed up with a struggle between disproportionately Czech priests of humble origin and non-Czech aristocratic bishops, an element lacking entirely in Russia. Schulze Wessel's theme is clergy, not the mass of believers except by implication, but the uninitiated reader would want to know why the Bohemian Germans (30 per cent of the population) produced fewer priests and were seemingly uninvolved in reform efforts, or what was the effect of the First World War on the Churches and religious life in the two countries. The two cases are not readily comparable: a vast empire with an Orthodox majority versus two provinces of a composite state. One wonders if the analogies that the author finds on the national issues, for example, were not simply the product of the nationalistic language that was common everywhere in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century rather than of any more deep-seated commonality between Russia and Bohemia. At the same time there are a number of useful observations, and it is often startling to realise that there were similarities between the religions of two countries in such different circumstances.