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Coping with Communism in this light demands great patience and moral staying power. Theologian Niebuhr is as worried as many Western Europeans that Americans do not possess those qualities in sufficient measure. Without faith, the classic U.S. idealist is the modern man who hovers between "subjection to the 'reason' which he can find in nature and the 'reason' he can impose on nature." He is now frustrated, fearful and impatient with his first experience of a great historical struggle which he cannot control. Warns Niebuhr: "There is no simple triumph over this spirit of fear and hatred. It is certainly an achievement beyond the resources of a simple idealism. For naive idealists . . . could not bear to be reminded that there is a hidden kinship between the vices of even the most vicious and the virtues of even the most upright."
He summarizes: "The ironic elements in American history can be overcome only if American idealism comes to terms with the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historical configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue ... That idealism is ... too certain that there is a straight path toward the goal of human happiness, too confident of the wisdom and idealism which prompt men and nations toward that goal."
*Who was recovering in Manhattan this week from a cerebral thrombosis suffered in February. *Islam in the Middle Ages, like Communism, was near enough to its adversary in its preachments to confuse many good people. Liberals who confused democracy and Communism during the '303 can take comfort from the fact that Dante, writing The Divine Comedy 700 years after Mohammed's death, still mistakenly placed the prophet among the Christian "sowers of schism."