"The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

from Martin Luther King, Jr – Letter From Birmingham Jail on Rap Genius

Lines from the first act of Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral. They are spoken by Archbishop Thomas Becket after a “tempter” (a figure reminiscent of the biblical Temptations of Christ) has urged him:

You hold the keys of heaven and hell.
Power to bind and loose: bind, Thomas, bind,
King and bishop under your heel.
King, emperor, bishop, baron, king…

Becket muses:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:
Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

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