In moments of religious doubt, which [Martin Luther] King[, Jr.] had experienced and always would, a preacher who could not talk about salvation could always talk about the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. If racial justice was not God's cause, it was at least a moral one. It did not bother King a great deal to hear religious conservatives say that the Social Gospel was too secular to be religious, but it was quite another matter to hear [theologian Reinhold] Niebuhr say that the Social Gospel did not touch the evil in the world and was therefore not moral. Hitherto, King and his Negro friends at Crozer [Seminary] had been able to drift along toward their degrees, thinking that if they performed as well as whites in school, preached the Social Gospel, helped as many Negroes as possible to rise to full skills behind them, and all the while encouraged the racial enlightenment of progressive white people, then they could make a contribution toward social justice whether or not their religious qualms subsided. If Niebuhr was correct, however, any Social Gospel preacher was necessarily a charlatan, and the Negroes among them were spiritual profiteers, enjoying the immense rewards of the Negro pulpit while dispensing a false doctrine of hope. Such a prospect deeply disturbed King, who already felt guilty about his privileges compared with the other Negro students at Crozer. Daddy King's unabashed pursuit of success embarrassed him, and he would always be extremely sensitive about money. The shocking implication of Niebuhr's book was that Daddy King was correct in his emphasis on sin and honest in his belief that the minister should try as hard as anyone else to get ahead. By this light, the Social Gospel offered King little more than the chance to become a hypocrite. Niebuhr was turning against a strain of political and religious idealism that had been building since the epiphany of Count Leo Tolstoy, whose eyes had locked on three familiar words from the Sermon on the Mount: "Resist not evil." "Why had I always sought for some ulterior motive?" asked Tolstoy. "`Resist not evil' means never resist, never oppose violence; or, in other words, never do anything contrary to the law of love." In his old age, the great Russian novelist was transformed into the intellectual father of modern pacifism. His book The Kingdom of God Is Within You had a profound influence on young Mohandas Gandhi when he was a student in England. Toward the end of Tolstoy's life, Gandhi corresponded with him and named his first commune, in South Africa, Tolstoy Farm. In his book, Niebuhr attacked pacifists and idealists for their assumption that Gandhi had invented an approach that allowed religious people to be politically effective while avoiding the corruptions of the world. For Niebuhr, Gandhi had abandoned Tolstoy the moment he began to resist the color laws in South Africa. Gandhi's strikes, marches, boycotts, and demonstrations were all forms of coercion, which, though nonviolent, were contrary to the explicit meaning of "Resist not evil." Niebuhr applauded what Gandhi was doing but not the sentimental interpretations that placed Gandhians above the ethical conflicts of ordinary mortals. For Niebuhr, such a belief was dangerously self-righteous as well as unfounded. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1988, pp. 84-86