cult, Niebuhr said, "to find a more perfect and naive expression of the modern illusion that human reason will be able to become the complete master of all the contingent, irrational, and illogical forces of the natural world which underlie and condition all human culture."

He did not deny that particularism often took a "frantic and morbid" form, as in the Nazi cult of the Aryan race. But the left's indifference to the value of particularism made it easier for movements like National Socialism to pervert it. The left's blindness to the "perennial force and the qualified virtue of the more organic and less rational human relations" enabled the right to appropriate the symbols of organic solidarity for its own sinister purposes. Particularism was dangerous and needed to be criticized, but it could not be eliminated. "The effort to do so merely results in desperate and demonic affirmations of the imperiled values" that were inextricably associated with it.

Niebuhr found another example of this misguided search for unity— for an "absolute perspective which transcends the conflict" between competing loyalties—in Dewey's little book on religion, A Common Faith (1934). Dewey lamented the divisive effects of religion and urged the churches to become more truly catholic. They devoted too much of their attention, he thought, to the attempt to distinguish the saved from the lost, instead of recognizing that "we are ... all in the same boat." Niebuhr considered Dewey's plea for a "religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race" as an attempt to "eliminate conflict and unite men of good will everywhere by stripping their spiritual life of historic, traditional, and supposedly anachronistic accretions." Dewey's position exemplified the "faith of modern rationalism in the ability of reason to transcend the partial perspectives of the natural world in which reason is rooted." Dewey did not understand that competing loyalties were rooted in "something more vital and immediate than anachronistic religious traditions." The fervor they evoked could not be modified or resolved, as Dewey seemed to think, by a "small group of intellectuals" who enjoyed the "comparative neutrality and security of the intellectual life."

Forgiveness, not tolerance, furnished the proper corrective to the egoism and self-righteousness of groups, Niebuhr argued. "The religious ideal of forgiveness is more profound and more difficult than the rational virtue of tolerance." Niebuhr endorsed G. K. Chesterton's observation that tolerance is the attitude of those who do not believe in anything. Forgiveness, on the other hand, made it possible for contending groups to fight

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