mise." It lacked "fervency"—the "spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks." It was the "philosophy of the middle aged."

This outburst, dashed off in the impetuous indignation of youth, already announced one of the themes of Niebuhr's mature work, the positive force of "fanaticism." "Liberalism is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history," Niebuhr told the readers of the New Republic. Like Sorel, he believed that only "myths" had the power to inspire effective political action. Like James, he saw desiccation, in effect, as a greater menace than superstition and fanaticism. "Contending factions in a social struggle require morale," as he put it in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932); "and morale is created by the right dogmas, symbols and emotionally potent oversimplifications." Industrial workers would never win "freedom" if they followed liberals' advice to rely on "intelligence" alone. Nor would Negroes achieve justice in this manner. Liberals like Dewey mistakenly put their faith in moral suasion, education, and the scientific method. They imagined that "with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution." But science could not provide the nerve and will that enabled "disinherited groups" to resist injustice. In order to defeat their oppressors, they had "to believe rather more firmly in the justice and in the probable triumph of their cause, than any impartial science would give them the right to believe."

In 1919, Niebuhr still adhered to the liberal theology of the social gospel, notwithstanding his impatience with liberal politics. His first book, Does Civilization Need Religion? (1926), rested on a liberal version of the Protestant tradition. By 1932, however, religious liberalism had been shaken to its foundations by Karl Barth's reassertion of dogmatic theology. Niebuhr had reservations about the political implications of Barth's neo-orthodoxy, which seemed to him to write off the political realm as irredeemably corrupt; but he too came to accept original sin as an "inescapable fact of human existence," to reject the shallow optimism of liberal theology, and to acknowledge the impossibility of justifying religious belief on purely rational grounds. In the face of "nature's ruthlessness"— of the "brevity and mortality of natural life"—feelings of trust and gratitude (in other words, a belief in God) could not be defended by an appeal to reason, as Niebuhr explained in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics

-370-