"Compare two photographs: Charles Baudelaire and this angular, harsh-faced professor of the Union Theological Seminary, who for years was pastor of a congregation of automobile workers in Detroit. The eyes of both have the same intensity, the same bitter integrity. Like Kierkegaard, Niebuhr is not merely "painfully sincere" but downright cadaverously sincere. The spiritual demands of his outspoken sermons indict not only the dead rottenness behind a godless hedonism but also the self-deception behind a facile, overconfident idealism."