Willett, Clark & Colby
Chicago: 440 South Dearborn Street
New York: 200 Fifth Avenue
1929
Copyright 1929 by
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Manufactured in The U. S. A. by The Plimpton Press
Norwood, Mass.--LaPorte, Ind.
_To
my friends
and former coworkers
in
Bethel Evangelical Church
Detroit, Michigan_
_Publishers’ Note_
The author’s reluctance to have this book published is all the more
reason for the publishers’ desire to have it see the light of day. The
author felt that the book would be regarded as presumptuous criticism.
It is natural that he would feel that way, for he is one of those rare
men who see more error in themselves than they see around them.
But what is presumptuous criticism? In “Human Nature and Its Remaking,”
W. E. Hocking writes:
“Is it not true that the entire interpretation of instinct as
will to power and of the will to power as a will to save souls,
or to recreate, or reform, or educate mankind, has in it more
than a trace of presumption? What it amounts to seems to be this,
that if the complete salvation of an individual will requires the
transformation of all its instincts into the will to save others,
we must be saved by saving; and it is very doubtful whether in our
unsaved condition we have any right to suppose ourselves competent
to save.... Historically speaking, the crux of Christianity is its
element of presumption.”
This book is both an illustration of and an effort to escape the note
of presumption of which Professor Hocking speaks. Perhaps the book can
be better understood in the light of Dr. Lynn Harold Hough’s dedication
of his book “Imperishable Dreams.” The dedication is: “To my friend
Reinhold Niebuhr, in whose words and writings the younger generation
has achieved an almost disconcerting sincerity and a penetrating power
of analysis which searches the conscience and refuses the comfort of
even the most delicate and gracious spiritual self-deception.”
This is sufficient comment to lead into the book itself. Supremely
human and simple in form, this is a book which _touches life as it
is_. A questioning and open-minded young minister reports what he
sees--what he hears--what he thinks. The reader watches. Page by page
the cynic--the same cynic that is in us all--is tamed--not broken,
not forced into compromises, but tamed by the release of impulses of
sympathy, of maturer observation, of sincere analysis.
There is fine poise of judgment and delicate balancing of values
throughout these _Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic_. This
book is not abstract religious and secular philosophy. It is a report
upon life and experience--upon America in the making. It is a book
without pretense. Authority and dogma are absent. The book reveals an
honest, unhampered and penetrating mind actually at work upon the vital
problems of American civilization in their Christian import.