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that piety is the substance from which custom and law is spun, and
also that it is the impulse that gives inward assent to legality, con–
servatism prefers to make it the cornerstone of society. But by calling
it religion and allowing religion to come in with it, conservatism
leaves the door open to revolutionary forces. Hocking has pointed out
that "Worship is the radical and deliberate cult of revolution....
The will which has met its god confronts the world with new tables
of the law.... An honest religion is thus the natural ally of an
honest revolution."5 But the religious revolutionary differs from the
nihilist by remaining responsible to his religious and ethical ideals.
Another serious deficiency of conservatism in the realm of re–
ligious thought is its naive conception of original sin. Today almost
everyone chatters about original sin just as at one time almost
everyone accepted the idea of progress. By a curious transvaluation
and oversimplification, Reinhold Niebuhr, whose mind is really com–
plex, has strangely been transformed into an inverted Condorcet for
the 1950s. Nevertheless, if as Mr. Kirk, exegeting Edmund Burke,
tells us, "the human heart, in reality, is the fountain of evil," does
this judgment apply to the aristocracy too, or is that class less tainted
with sin than the masses? Why are many conservatives quick to
apply the category of original sin to presumptuous mass man, but
slow to apply it to the aristocrat? It is almost as if they believe that
aristocracy has been immaculately conceived.
Thus, all sorts of false deductions are made from the postulate
of original sin. Just as slavery was once deduced from and justified
by the idea of original sin instead of being identified with sin, now
authoritarianism is found implied in original sin. But sin or radical
evil in the sight of God may be ascribed to man because God is God
and man is man, and there is an infinite distance between them.
It is precisely this distance which brings about God's redemptive
activity through Mediation. Between man and man, however, and
between human groups and orders, the category of sin cannot apply
because their distances are relative and not absolute. Nothing is
changed even if the human order is considered as ordained by God.
The concept of radical evil before God cannot be translated to that
of being before earthly authorities. Thus, Martin Buber concludes,
5 Man and the State,
p .
431.
