persecution of the mentally ill, the protection of the elderly under Social Security, and the growing respect for human personality, in short, as "signposts of true progress." God's "great plan for this world" aimed at universal brotherhood, in which "every man recognizes the dignity and worth of all human personality." When Davis spoke of the "nemesis of all dictatorships," he meant that dictators fell "by the wayside" because they ignored the "directional signs of history," which pointed to a "world where all men will live together as brothers." King invoked the "goddess of Nemesis," on the other hand, not to support a theory of progress but to reaffirm the ancient intuition that "something in the very structure of the cosmos ... will ultimately bring about the fulfillment and the triumph of that which is right." He knew better than to historicize the concept of nemesis. He traced the conviction of fundamental justice in the order of being to something "deep down within," whereas Davis associated it with the "lessons of history."

Near the end of his life, King told his old Montgomery congregation that he was no longer an optimist, although he still had hope. The distinction between optimism and hope was implicit in many of his earlier statements as well. He had seen too much suffering to embrace the dogma of progress, even though he was always careful to explain that he objected only to theories of "automatic" or "inevitable" progress and to "false," "superficial" optimism. This was standard liberal rhetoric in the post‐ Niebuhrian age, and Boston University (together with his own political convictions) made King a post-Niebuhrian liberal. But liberalism was superimposed, in his case, on a deeper awareness of life's tragic dimension, rooted in the Baptist fundamentalism of his childhood and therefore antecedent to and not dependent on exposure to "neo-orthodoxy." "The most important source for King's thought," writes James Cone, "was unquestionably the black church tradition from which his faith was derived and to which he returned for strength and courage." He himself attributed his unshakable belief in a "basically friendly" universe to his "childhood experiences." ^* But his sense of "cosmic companionship" co-

____________________

*	These experiences, it should be noted, included not only the suffering and humiliation inflicted by membership in a persecuted racial minority, together with exposure to a religious tradition that insisted on the redemptive meaning of suffering, but a

-391-