The will is not free to strive toward whatever is declared good. - Martin Luther King Jr.

God is still around. One day, you're going to need him. The problems of life will begin to overwhelm you; disappointments will begin to beat upon the door of your life like a tidal wave. And if you don't have a deep and patient faith, you aren't going to be able to make it. I know this from my own experience.

It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some thin rationalization to clothe the obvious wrong in the beautiful garments of righteousness. The philosopher-psychologist William James used to talk a great deal about the stream of consciousness. He says that the very interesting and unique thing about human nature is that man had the capacity temporarily to block the stream of consciousness and place anything in it that he wants to, and so we often end up justifying the rightness of the wrong. This is exactly what happened during the days of slavery. Even the Bible and religion were misused to crystallize the patterns of the status quo. And so it was argued from pulpits across the nation that the Negro was inferior by nature, because of Noah's curse upon the children of Ham. The apostle Paul's dictum became a watchword: Servants, be obedient to your master. And then one brother had probably studied the logic of the great philosopher Aristotle. You know Aristotle did a great deal to bring into being what we know as formal logic, and he talked about the syllogism, which had a major premise and a minor premise and a conclusion. And so this brother could put his argument in the framework of an Aristotelian syllogism. He could say, All men are made in the image of God. This was the major premise; then came the minor premise: God, as everybody knows, is not a Negro. Therefore, the Negro is not a man. This was the type of reasoning that prevailed.

It is always necessary that the substance or essence of a person be good before there can be any good works and that good works follow and proceed from a person who is already good. Christ says in Matthew 7:18: “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.” ... The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.