"I Have a Dream" Sermon Accused of Plagiarism

Honestly. Try to set out a positive religious viewpoint in a sermon, and all the nit-pickers and nay-sayers are out nit-picking and nay-saying. If not nay-picking and nit-saying.

Some have said my sermon last night, "I have a Dream", was plagiarism. That I have stolen one of the greatest passages of religious sentiment in the English language and passed it of as my own. That if you lay my sermon alongside the original it is practically word for word.

Well, I will not be abashed or abowed. If people would rather criticise a few minor similarities than grasp the uplifting vision, that is up to them. I will stand by my words, whether they are mine or - purely accidentally and without any plagiarist intent - also someone else's. My defence is that my thoughts were noble and accidentally intertextual.

But these are my thoughts, this is my spirit, this is my story, this is my song. Here I stand, I can do no other. As I said, in the most criticised part of my sermon:

"If you see the wonder of a fairy tale
You can take the future even if you fail
I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see."