A few months before his assassination in Memphis, April 4, 1968, Dr. King spoke to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference meeting in retreat at Frogmore, South Carolina, He was preparing them for the Poor People's Campaign scheduled for the spring of 1968. This is Dr. King's last thorough evaluation of “the movement” its prospects and problems, in our possession.

While the description of urban violence may seem dated, Dr. King's analysis of the causes and cures of urban injustice remains disturbingly relevant. His understanding of what was happening among youth as well as his understanding of American militarism is, for better or worse, equally pertinent. Especially important, in view of current claims that Dr. King was undergoing a fundamental change of political philosophy toward the end of his life, is his concluding affirmation of non-violence.

My title comes, of course, from Carl Becker's poignant and ironic book on the Utopian thinkers of the Enlightenment. The poignancy in Becker's work came from his sympathy for their ideal of a society transformed, a mankind fulfilled. The irony came from his pained perception that these eighteenth-century thinkers had made things absurdly easy for themselves, by supposing that the order of nature—correctly understood—contained the code for a benign society, without ancient tyrannies and traditional terrors. The optimism and self-confidence of the Enlightenment have long since vanished. Anguish, even desperation, mark the writings of the contemporary heirs of the Enlightenment, the Western European Marxists. The revolution seems always to recede over the historical hbrizon. It is far too early for another Becker to record their chronicle. History may, in the end, show them to be at least as successful as their spiritual ancestors and perhaps more so. I wonder, however, whether they may be imitating the eighteenth-century in one important respect.

The Bible has hard words for people who miss the time of God's vigitation. The fault is not God's, we are told, for he long ago warned us his spokesmen would appear in unlikely places and improbable disguise. The task of discernment is ours. History's record is one of missed visitations, from Jeremiah to Franz Jagerstatter, not to mention Jesus of Nazareth. Among those who take this business of discernment seriously the rumor is now about that God has done it again, this time in the form of a youthfully middle-aged Jesuit poet, priest, and prisoner. The less serious have picked up on the rumor, and excitement spreads. The way to Calvary is littered with books, magazine articles, T.V. specials, and a smashingly successful off-Broadway play (soon to be a major movie!), the offerings of a cheering crowd hungry for heroism.

Woodstock College, folded into the hills of Maryland, is a historic place—the first, and for long the best, Jesuit school of theology in this country. Its main building, hewn of native white stone over a hundred years ago, is very impressive, each wing of it backed by semi-detached high bell towers. The story goes that plans for the seminary had been drawn up and sent off to Rome for approval, but that construction had already begun when Rome sent back a query: Suntne angeli? (“Are they angels there?”). The plans had not included toilet facilities, which were belatedly concentrated, floor by floor, in the towers, whose steamed upper windows hold no bells after all.

One of my more sophisticated friends, a poet and fellow teacher at Dartmouth, is firmly convinced that Americans stopped believing in the doctrine of progress about 1920. “No doubt the majority of the uneducated still believe in it,” he concedes. “I imagine they see a slightly improved version of human existence as being issued by some kind of central committee of scientists every fall, just about the time the new cars come out. But no educated man, except maybe an occasional leftover Victorian, supposes any such thing.”

Rome hulks large on the landscape of our historical memory. Among history's hills and valleys the Roman Empire stands out, a craggy peak dominating the horizon. Our civilization, like others, springs from many nations and peoples, but ancient Rome and the empire its people created have a continuing fascination for present-day Americans. The mummies of Egypt intrigue us by their mystery, and the pyramids impress us by their sheer massiveness, but to most of us Egypt is but an historical curiosity to contemplate in a museum on a Sunday afternoon. Likewise, our memory of Greece is piecemeal and-fragmented, transmitted to us as a melange of literary and intellectual masterpieces. College students read Plato and Aristotle for philosophy, Euripides and Sophocles for drama, and Homer for epic, but Greece conjures no political or military grandeur as a people or an empire.