All 3 Uses
compel
in
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
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- Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.†
compelled = forced; or (more rarely) convinced
- An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.†
*compels = forces; or (more rarely) convinces
- By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself.†
Definitions:
-
(1)
(compel) to force someone to do something
or more rarely:
to convince someone to do somethingMost typically, compel describes an external influence forcing someone to do something, but it can also describe being driven by an internal desire. - (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)