The title page of Lloyd C. Douglas, “What About Lent?” in The Christian Century, 2/3/1921.
The following is from an article by Lloyd C. Douglas in the February 3, 1921, issue of The Christian Century. The title of the article is, “What About Lent?” Douglas writes:
“One of the pet quotations with which we frequently embellish our remarks about human existence maintains that we do not live ‘in figures on a dial.’ It is an intriguing phrase, but fallacious. For precisely in this way to do we live – in figures on a dial. Solomon was entirely right when he said that men’s lives were ordered by seasons. There was a time to laugh, a time to weep, a time to jump into things impetuously, a time to reflect, a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to fight and a time to run. One gathers that this wise man felt the unsuccessful life was made so through failure to observe its appointed seasons.
“We upon whom there has been laid the responsibility of spiritual leadership should be more fully conversant than we are with the peculiar mental states induced by the changing seasons of the year. It is our business to know the difference between the prevailing moods of May and August. It is part of our task to understand the wanderlust provoked by the vernal equinox and the vagaries of autumnal melancholy. To secure such valuable information, we may not seek a more reliable source than the calendar for the ‘church year.’ It is to be believed that many of us have been failing to make full use of the greater festivals of Christianity – either neglecting them outright or subjecting them to purposes for which they were never intended.”
[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post.]
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Demotion of Death,” in the January 27, 1921, issue of The Christian Century.
The following is the conclusion of Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921, issue of The Christian Century. He is talking to an audience largely of ministers, sharing his experiences visiting the sick. He writes:
“Not infrequently, we are called into consultation by some person whose days are numbered. Here one needs expect to find no cowardice, no whimpering, no hysterical rebellion against an unfriendly fate; but a type of courage that makes one marvel at the superb possibilities of the human spirit when confronting destiny with the heroism of faith. And if we would do our congregations an estimable service, we might tell them something of our experiences and observations – just to hearten them for their own vicissitudes. Surely this is much better than to be everlastingly bombarding them with the indictment of cowardice and faithlessness.
“A few days ago, I talked with a man who had – just that day – been given notice. He was a man of forty. The surgeons had just informed him that his case was inoperable; that he had, probably, three months to live. He told me about it with no more agitation than if he had been informing me of a trip he expected to make, early in March, to some foreign country. There was no sigh of resignation; no repetition of the phrase, ‘Thy will be done,’ which is so often the plaint of the passively desparing; no queries why a good God could have permitted this thing to come upon him. He had just one problem: how to make the very most of the next ninety days! How to get the most out of them; how to put the most into them!
“And he made me proud, that day, that I was privileged to be of the same order of Nature as he. I told him so. I felt myself fairly shaken with emotion as I realized myself standing in the presence of a soul so fine-grained, so endowed with spiritual courage, that it could meet a crisis – the Crisis – with such poise and serenity! In the light of such experiences, I know that there is latent in the human soul possibilities still undreamed of. We are in a process of spiritual evolution. We have come up from crude beginnings, and we have attained to a grandeur of spirit that stirs us deeply whenever we contemplate these vast soul-gains! It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall be made clearly manifest to us, and we see Him as He is, we shall be like Him!”
An excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Demotion of Death,” Christian Century, 1/27/1921.
The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921 issue of The Christian Century. He is talking to an audience largely of ministers, reminiscing about how harrowing funerals used to be. He writes:
“Little by little that which is mortal has abated its erstwhile interest for him who has lost his dearest friend; and gradually the whole event is being invested with the spiritual and immortal.
“The home of bereavement is, more and more, emulating that high spiritual courage which Christianity teaches. No other person is so aware of this as the minister, to whom this fact is increasingly made manifest. Whatever may be the peculiar advantages of our profession, none is so fraught with great value as the opportunity we have to see how other people conduct themselves in time of trouble! Of course, the layman knows something about this. He stands by his best friend in an hour of trouble and sees, that day, a glimpse of the radiant glory of the human soul in one of its high moments – and the remembrance of it will outlast all the other observations of his life! This may happen to the layman once, twice – a few times, perhaps – in a lifetime. In our business, such revelations are so frequent that they come to be classed as ‘all in the day’s work.’ I do not mean that we ever get used to it, or that the frequency of such experiences dulls our consciousness of the absolute grandeur of the human soul when empowered by this high spiritual courage; but we see it so often that we understand it is not a rare gift bequeathed to an occasional rare spirit, but rather that it is a sort of built-in capacity of the normal soul!
“And – sometimes – when I see that men and women are able to go under fire; and accept the losses of the very dearest possessions of their lives; and how they face, with a sense of victory and mastery, bereavements that fairly tear up the intricately knotted affections of years – smiling through it all – I stand in a kind of reverential awe before this virtue that lifts men out of the category of terrestrials and shows them to be sons of God!”
[Douglas will conclude this essay in my next post.]
An excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Demotion of Death,” Christian Century, 1/27/1921.
The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921, issue of The Christian Century. He is talking to an audience largely of ministers, and has just finished saying how Christ’s crucifixion changed people’s attitudes toward death. He writes:
“From that day, there has been growing up in the soul of men a new and peculiar kind of spiritual courage that has demoted Death from his erstwhile position as enemy of mankind, to the office of warder at the gates of a city which only they regard with dread who have become so infatuated with the material things of life that they know that when they leave these things, they leave their all!
“There is no human happiness at all comparable to that of ‘walking fearlessly.’ One may truthfully speak of this raw spiritual courage as the finest grace of the evolving soul because it permits men to travel unafraid even of the valley of the shadow. What significant gains in this field have been registered even in the past three or four decades! I am not an old man, but I have seen marked changes in the attitude of my own generation toward the mysterious agency that men call death. I can easily recall the most intrusive and painful emphasis that used to be placed upon all the somber trappings, significant of mortality, when a house had been bereaved; the hysteria; the uncontrolled grief; the tightly-closed shutters; the whispers of the neighbors as they tiptoed about through the gloom; the long-drawn-out cruelty of funeral rites, and the too often harrowing effect of their words who had been called in to offer official comfort, and to whom a funeral, where no mortal fainted under the soul-racking discussion of loneliness on the one hand and worms on the other, was very poorly executed, indeed. And do you not remember the shock as you used to hear the heavy spadefuls of clods spattered upon the pine box lid as a grisly accompaniment to the ancient words of the committal service – that almost incredibly dismal and despairing rite which even the heathen in their blindness would probably repudiate as an awful thing to do!”
The title page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Demotion of Death,” Christian Century, 1/27/1921.
The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921 issue of The Christian Century. He writes:
“The world was old, weary, and jaded before there was vouchsafed to the race, through the words and deeds of Jesus, that which would dispel the gloom of life at the point where the shadows had ever rested most darkly. The Hebrew prophets spoke of death – when, rarely, they spoke of it – as a mystery too vast to be encompassed by human thought or phrased in human speech. The spiritual leaders of other peoples rose to their very highest points of faith when expressing the vague hope that the soul might persist. But all men walked uncertainly as their slanting shadows lengthened toward the east. Solemnly did they respect their obligation to preserve the bodies of their fathers, hoping that their children would deal no less considerately with theirs – but, beyond the sepulchre, there waited nothing more than was comprehended by an undefined wish.
“Thus, life lacked the buoyancy, the zest, the zeal, the urge, that came upon it by way of his spiritual contribution who has become known to the civilized world as Master and Lord. Not until he came was victory proclaimed at that part of life which surely is the most important of all parts of it! Not until he came did the soul become the motive power of life; lasting through all changes; superior to all changes; containing an indestructible spark that was as supreme over the body as the body was supreme over its clothes!
“Consistent with his own belief, this man of the vision splendid went to his own death with a serenity that made them marvel who had been so disinterested in his tragedy that they gambled for his robe. Not a tremor was in his voice as he declared to his sorrowing disciples, ‘Let not your heart be troubled. In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ Not a trace of agitation in his tone as he remarks to the fearful crowd, that lined his way to the hill Golgotha, ‘You need not weep for me! If you weep, let it be for yourselves and your generation.’ Ah – to what heights did the evolving soul of humanity arise that afternoon when he hung, dying, to whom death was but a guide to a land uninvaded by sorrow!”
From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is the conclusion of “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has been saying that it is the pastor’s responsibility to make sure the church’s music is good. He continues:
“It goes without saying that the preacher should have a fair working knowledge of hymnology. it is somewhat important that he should be able to read New Testament Greek; but far more important to this job than Greek is a fine sense of discrimination in the selection of hymns. He ought to know whether it is more uplifting for his congregation to sing, ‘Pull for the Shore, Sailor,’ or ‘Lead On, O King Eternal.’ It ought to make a difference to him whether his people sing, ‘Brighten Your Corner’ or ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’ He should understand the relative values of ‘Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?’ and ‘Jerusalem the Golden.’
“And he must keep close to that choir! He must attend rehearsals and lend encouragement to all worthy effort. He must dare to administer tactful and constructive criticism. The fact – for it is a fact – must be kept constantly before that choir that its service is of signal importance to the life of the church. Some preachers pray for the choir, just before the service begins. That is as it should be. Most choirs need it. But whatever means the minister employs to teach his musicians the significance of their task, they should be made aware of it as a solemn obligation. Are your Sunday services lifeless and poorly attended? Look behind you!”
From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has been saying that it is the pastor’s responsibility to make sure the church’s music is good. He continues:
“Now there are a few facts that every preacher really ought to know about choir anthems. First, the choir must never attempt anything that is too difficult to be rendered well. It is much better that the quartet should spend two hours trying to get together on ‘Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross’ – and then sing it with an eye single to one purpose – than to invest an equal amount of time on ‘The Radiant Morn’ – and tote it to the shambles. Every quartet wants to sing ‘The Radiant Morn.’ There are about a dozen church quartets on the Western Hemisphere that have any warrant for making the adventure. It is much more effective for the choir to learn ‘Hark, Hark, My Soul,’ so that it can sing it with good interpretation than to butcher Tchaikowsky’s ‘O Come, Let Us Worship,’ or Gounod’s ‘Sanctus.’
“In the next place, the choir should not attempt to present a new anthem every Sunday. That means nothing else than that the piece has been given only brief rehearsal. Possibly all that these loyal folk have achieved in that one rehearsal is a scrappy knowledge of the harmony. As to its interpretation, they have had not chance to attend to that. They just grind it out – happy if they all contrive to get through at the same time. It is much better if the choir should plan to present one new anthem each month, and repeat old ones frequently. The best choirs do it. If the piece is good, it will bear repetition. If it is not, it should never have been done in the first place. Quite to the contrary is the repeated sermon! Any sermon that the parson can repeat with a feeling of assurance that his congregation will not recall it never was worth preaching. Is that not a fact? When you preach an old sermon, do you pick one of the big ones that made everybody sit up? You do not? We are right, then, about this, as usual. It is not so of the anthem. The congregation likes an old anthem, if it is well done. Preachers who are poor readers of the Scripture Lesson should select obscure passages. The people have heard the familiar ones done well, and cannot forget about it.”
I will share Douglas’s concluding remarks in my next post.
From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has been saying that it is the pastor’s responsibility to make sure the church’s music is good. He continues:
“If the minister will give some attention to this matter in his study and in conference with good musicians, he will discover, perhaps to his surprise, that a great deal of the strictly high class music of Christianity is not difficult of execution. He should find out what these anthems and solos are, if his choir is composed of persons who lack the talent and training to adventure with more complicated scores. It may be with the best intent in the world that he proposes to the choir that it attempt the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ which is, as he says, a very wonderful thing. But unless his chorus is made up of trained vocalists, he has placed his friends in a position from which it will be quite difficult to escape with credit to themselves and the cause they would like to serve. He should know exactly what grade of music his choir can successfully negotiate, and see to it that the musical library of his church is supplied with the best there is of that grade. He should have a complete list of the titles of these numbers in his study. When he plans a service, he should inform the choir director what special music is demanded by his sermon theme.
“How little coordination there is in most of our churches, of the sermon and the music! Sometimes the choir director doesn’t have the faintest idea what the sermon is about, and preacher doesn’t know (or care) what the choir is going to sing. He picks his hymns at random, without regard to their fitness or tunefulness. Occasionally he does this at the last minute. The choir has no notion what hymns are to be sung. No rehearsal of them has been had. And then this fellow will get up and babble about a wicked world that will not come out to church! Why should it? What is he doing to make the church more attractive? Complains about the size of his salary. In what other business could he earn more, if he went at it in the same way that he prepares for Sunday?”
Douglas has more advice for pastors on this subject, and he’ll share it my next post.
From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has been saying that it is the pastor’s responsibility to make sure the church’s music is good. He continues:
“If the preacher is careless whether or not his church ever commands any attention and respect, let him put up with what he has had vouchsafed unto him. But if he hopes to make something of his church, he must deal with his music problem firmly. He must boldly announce that his church will have good music, or none! Far better to have no music at all than what passes for the same in far too many of our Protestant churches. And where does the responsibility rest, at last? With the choir? Not at all! With the music committee? Not a bit of it! It resides with the manager of the whole institution – the preacher. When the music is bad, the congregation is depleted; when that happens, who gets the blame? The choir? The music committee? Not for a minute.
“No; it is the preacher’s business, after all. He may pretend to wash his hands of it and lay the responsibility elsewhere; but verily he has his reward (which, likely as not, involves a move to some other locality where he stands a good chance of swapping the worst chorus-choir on the face of the earth for the awfullest quartet that ever jangled discords). Here shows up the importance of the preacher’s knowing something about music himself. He should be in a position to speak to his choir in a tone of authority. It is not enough that he should be vaguely conscious that the noise behind him on Sunday is raucous and infuriating; he should know exactly what the trouble is, and spare no pains to mend it.
“This demands of the preacher that he should have acquired some musical training. It is not very important that he should be a ‘practical musician.’ Indeed, it has happened that a preacher’s ability to sit down on the organ bench and demonstrate precisely how he would like to have a certain passage rendered has earned him an enemy guaranteed to hate him and his to the third and fourth generation. If the preacher is a good organist, he can well afford to keep this one candle of his under a bushel. And if he has a trained voice, he had better use it to talk with. The preacher-soloist who steps from the pulpit to the choir and back again had better take a day off and decide which of these two very excellent callings is his – and put all of his time on the vocation he decides to retain.
“But it will never be against him, in the opinion of the choir, if he reveals the fact that he knows good music from trash. How many preachers like to draw a chuckle from the choir by deprecating their complete ignorance of the devotional and inspirational music of the church – as if it were something to grin about! Just about as funny as if the doctor should remark that he had never taken any interest in clinical thermometers! And all this foolishness of asepsis in surgery! Of course, the preacher intends this pleasantly as a pretty little compliment to the choir for knowing so very much about something concerning which even he knows nothing; but it’s a poor joke, any way you take it.”
But Douglas’s comments weren’t all negative. In my next post, I’ll share his encouragement to ministers on this subject.
From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has just finished saying that the public has better taste in music than most ministers are willing to admit, and that makes it harder for them to listen to poor music at church. He continues:
“Unfortunately, too many churches have been specializing in poor music. The reasons for it are legion. Two or three of them will bear mentioning. The trouble may be, for example, with the choir leader. Not to speak too abstractly, permit me to present Sister Iontha Place. Miss Place began directing the choir at the tender age of twenty-two, just after her return from the year she spent at the Tophole Conservatory. That was in the early summer of 1901. [Twenty years earlier, in other words.] Because she has been at it so long, and also because her brother is the heavy contributor, Miss Place must be retained. By virtue of her position, she may sing solos if she wishes so to do. And she wishes so to do – almost every Sunday. Miss Place flats abominably. There is only one satisfying tone taken in the whole of her performance – the final syllable of ‘Amen.’ There are ten persons in her choir – the sort that could be expected to become and remain party to such an enterprise. Every Sunday there is a sugary little anthem about ‘Behind the Beyond is Somewhere,’ or ‘His Old Mother’s Rocking Chair.’ And other stuff like that.
“Now, Rev. R. H. Pepper, a real preacher with a real message, has become aware that he can never make anything of his church so long as this state of things persists. He wants to know what he is to do. For, as has been said, Miss Place is the esteemed sister of Deacon G. Rowling Place, and in most excellent health. Your duty is plain, Pepper. It is not a pleasant job; but – somehow – you must contrive to displace the misplaced Miss Place (begging a thousand pardons!). Nobody envies you the task; for this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. But you can’t preach against that music. You must either change matters at that point, or be resigned, or resign!
“Have another? Well; meet our good friend, Mr. Onestop, the genial organist who has been playing for nothing (a just wage for services rendered) during the past thirteen years. Whenever the suggestion has come up to the board of trustees that Brother Onestop be given a big birthday dinner in celebration of his retirement as organist, somebody has remembered that Onestop really has been doing the best he could – which even the frenzied admit – and absolutely without recompense. This latter is to be kept carefully in mind. A new organist will add another annoying item to the budget; and the board’s pet motto is, ‘Budge not the budget!’
“These well-meaning people do not realize that they would be doing Percy Onestop a kindness by shielding him from any further rough criticism and contumely behind his back. And, as to the economics involved, Onestop’s gratuitous service at the organ is the most expensive item in their whole blessed and unbudgeable budget! If there are any tears to fall, let them be shed in behalf of our brother, the preacher, who has become the ungrateful legatee of such a bequest as Onestop. What shall he do? In the midnight watches, he asks himself, ‘What shall I do?’ He must get rid of Onestop. It would be positively wrong for him to poison the fellow; but he can easily request the rendition of certain musical numbers which are quite out of Onestop’s reach. If the man has any sense at all, he will see the point. If not, it can be explained to him by the aid of a map and lucid footnotes. But Onestop must go!”
In my next post, Douglas will say more about the role of the pastor in insuring that his church offers good music.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 