prophetic tradition, virtue is the truth that breaks the cycle of excessive optimism and disillusionment. It asserts the goodness of life without denying the evidence that would justify despair. Thus "Hebrew spirituality," Niebuhr argued, "was never corrupted by either the optimism which conceived the world as possessing unqualified sanctity and goodness or the pessimism which relegated historic existence to a realm of meaningless cycles."

Because the religious tradition founded on Hebraic mythology took history seriously, as mystical religion did not, it was always exposed to the temptation to historicize its central concepts, as Niebuhr pointed out—to read the myth of creation as an "actual history of origins when it is really a description of the quality of existence," to make the myth of the fall into an "account of the origin of evil, when it is really a description of its nature," or "to construct a history of sin out of the concept of its inevitability." It was just this historical misreading of Christian prophecy, as we have seen—of the doctrine of original sin in particular—that had opened the followers of Jonathan Edwards to liberal counterattack. When they argued that mankind inherited Adam's sin, the preachers of the "new divinity" soon found themselves in a conceptual tangle that could have been avoided if they had remembered, as Niebuhr now put it, that original sin was an "inevitable fact of human existence," not an "inherited corruption" that somehow made the sons responsible for the crimes of the fathers. Prophetic mythology threw a powerful light on history, but it was not to be confused with the actual historical record.

Neither was the Christian ethic to be taken as a literal description of the well-ordered society. The ethical teachings of Jesus referred to the relations between man and God. Thus Jesus exhorted his disciples to "hate" their parents, wives, and children and to give their loyalty to God alone. Such commandments, Niebuhr observed, could hardly guide social morality, where the claims of the family had to be weighed against other claims. "One is almost inclined to agree with Karl Barth that this ethic 'is not applicable to the problems of contemporary society nor yet to any

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