to the death without denying each other's humanity—"to engage in social struggles with a religious reservation." Since the sources of social conflict could not be eradicated, it was "more important to preserve the spirit of forgiveness amidst the struggles than to seek islands of neutrality." ^*

Most of those who came to regard Niebuhr as a political mentor missed his defense of particularism and paid attention only to his analysis of its dangers. Since they shared his disbelief in the political efficacy of moral suasion and "intelligence," priding themselves on their political realism, they concluded that politics would always remain a matter of "checks and balances and countervailing forces," in the words of Michael Novak. Novak quotes Moral Man and Immoral Society on the "power of self-interest and collective egoism in all inter-group relations," which makes "social conflict an inevitability in human history." But this was only the beginning of Niebuhr's argument: one of its premises, not its conclusion. Novak wants to use Niebuhr's thought to justify familiar ideas about the importance of "institutions, habits and associations that will provide checks and balances against the ineradicable evils of the human heart." For Niebuhr, however, the irreducible need for coercion in politics defined the problem, not its solution. If politics consisted of nothing more than "checks and balances," the struggle of force against counterforce, it

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This is what Lincoln tried to accomplish, "with malice toward none," in his second inaugural, a striking expression of the "religious reservation" that characterized his conduct of the Civil War. "Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other." To invoke God in defense of slavery might seem "strange" to Northerners, Lincoln said; but "let us judge not that we be not judged.... The Almighty has His own purposes." Lincoln's statesmanship exemplifies the distinction between action and behavior, explained in chapter 4. Action issues from the capacity to initiate things, to make a new beginning, and it finds its fullest expression, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, in forgiveness. Action is to behavior what forgiveness is to tolerance.

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