to the "perilous" liberal doctrine that sin is merely a "lag of nature," to be "progressively eliminated as man climbs the evolutionary ladder." Niebuhr's theology, he noted in another essay written when he was a doctoral student, furnished a "persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man's existence." His own experience with a "vicious race problem" in the South, he added, made it "very difficult ... to believe in the essential goodness of man."

The Christian injunction to love your enemy did not imply such a belief, as King understood it. The enemy deserved to be loved not because he was good but because he was the object of God's love, like all sinners. The brotherhood of man rested on common weakness and frailty. Pacifism, for King, dictated a constant struggle against the self-righteousness that so often tempted its practitioners. As Niebuhr had shown, man was a "being in need of continuous repentance," and pacifists were not exempt from this generalization. They too needed to cultivate the "habit of perpetual repentance," which "preserves us from the sin of self-righteousness."

King's student essays at Crozer and Boston University, as quoted in John Ansbro's study of his intellectual development, show a depth and seriousness beyond his years. He did not exaggerate when he later referred to his "fondness for scholarship." After completing his doctorate, he weighed several teaching offers before deciding to return to the South as a minister. His teachers pronounced him a "scholar's scholar," capable of "creative and prominent" work in theology or the history of religion.

One measure of his intellectual independence and maturity was his unwillingness, notwithstanding his efforts to reconcile liberal theology with Christian realism, to accept the extravagant theories of progress advanced by his teachers. According to Brightman, personalism entailed an "affirmation of the possibility of infinite progress." Man's capacity for goodness made it impossible to set "any limit" to the "inexhaustible possibilities of progress." Davis cited the decline of patriarchy, the abolition of slavery, the growing subordination of property rights to human rights, the abolition of child labor, the substitution of medical treatment for

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