"Is The Universe Friendly?"
The question was posed in sermons by Martin Luther King (12/12/1965) and in sermons by his predecessor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Vernon Johns (VI, 6), on whom I am currently at work. Students oftheir rhetoric had noted that both preachers posed the question and wondered whether one borrowed it from the other or both borrowed it from someone else. What I found was that almost every major mainstream American Protestant preacher (MAPP) in the 20th century probably had a sermon, somewhere in his files, that posed the question:"Is the universe friendly?"
It was possible to determine that King was not dependent on Johns for the sermonic inspiration because there were two different traditions of attribution and reference for the question. In 1917, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who would become probably the 20th century's most influential MAPP (King, at least, thought so), published a sermon in which he posed the question. In subsequent decades, John Sutherland Bonnell, Charles Reynolds Brown, Halford E. Luccock, Ernest Fremont Tittle, and Leslie D. Weatherhead followed Fosdick with sermons that asked"Is the Universe Friendly?" You can be reasonably sure that they were borrowing it from Fosdick for two reasons: first, like him, they attributed the question to the 19th century English poet, literary critic, and psychic researcher, Frederic William Myers (1843-1901); and, second, like him, they usually referred to the question as"the riddle of the Sphinx," a phrase from Sophocles's"Oedipus Rex." Martin Luther King attributed the question to Frederic William Myers.
But there was a different tradition of sermonic attribution and reference for the question. In 1931, Vernon Johns preached a sermon at New York's Union Theological Seminary in which he asked:"Is the universe friendly?" Whenever Johns took that sermonic leap, he attributed the question – not to Frederic William Myers – but to the German zoologist and a-theist, Ernst H. P. Haeckel (1834-1919). Haeckel was an aggressive advocate of the theory of evolution, coined the German word which is translated as"ecology," and fathered the now discredited theory that"ontology recapitulates phylogeny." Referring to the title of Haeckel's book, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, Johns called the question – not"the riddle of the Sphinx" – but"the riddle of the universe." Following Johns, John Haynes Holmes, James Henry Breasted, the noted Egyptologist, and Charles L. Wallis attributed the question to Haeckel and called it"the riddle of the universe" or"the riddle of life."
It took a page and a half of single spaced text to document all of this. Incidentally, I never did find a source for either Frederic William Myers or Ernst H. P. Haeckel actually asking the question,"Is the universe friendly?" But you can imagine my surprise when I googled it recently. I got nearly 400 hits. Most of them attributed the question either to Albert Einstein or Gotthold Lessing! I was reminded of something Einstein actually did say:"Many things which go under my name are badly translated from the German or are invented by other people."