concede this point without making the larger concession that an "uneasy balance of power" was no more satisfactory than utopian efforts to eliminate conflict altogether. Liberals took enough Christian realism from Niebuhr to counter the charge of sentimentality but not enough to make them see why a politics of compromise, unredeemed by a "spiritual discipline against resentment," led to a dead end. Bennett foresaw that Niebuhr's impact on American liberalism would be less drastic than some people feared. Liberals needed to cultivate a "more realistic view of human nature," according to Bennett, without falling back "uncritically upon traditional modes of thought." Niebuhr's "contribution" lay in his ability to provide theological realism without pessimism and political retreat. "Through [Niebuhr] more effectively than through any one else the European criticism of liberalism is being mediated to American Christianity, and the dose is mild enough to be taken without too much risk of complications."

Niebuhr's analysis of the "endless cycle of social conflict" challenged the whole ideology of progress, the most dubious legacy of the social gospel; but his failure to press the point allowed liberals to disown an excessively optimistic view of human nature without giving up their belief in progressive moral improvement. "Those who put aside the hope of progress," Bennett said, "are just as wrong as those who believe in inevitable progress." The abolition of slavery, torture, dueling, human sacrifice, religious persecution, and child labor showed "how much real progress there has been in the public conscience." Shailer Mathews agreed that public opinion, thanks to the "educational influence of the Christian group," had achieved important advances—for example, a "more intelligent conception of punishment" that brought with it the understanding that "God is more than a sovereign, and his relations with the universe are not those of a seventeenth-century king." The "most thoroughgoing realist," declared F. Ernest Johnson, was the "most authentic herald of a new day." According to Chester Carlton McCown, "present disillusionment cannot destroy the facts of social evolution." "Progress has been and will be made," McCown maintained, after reviewing the case against it. "Electric light and power, the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio were impossible so long as men knew only the thunderbolt in the hands of Jupiter." Progress could no longer be attributed to a friendly providence, but the collapse of that belief forced humanity to depend on its

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