The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Slave of Church Machinery

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” The Christian Century, 4/14/1921.

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to his fellow ministers about how they are kept so busy on their work that they have no time or opportunity to be inspired themselves. He writes of the busy pastor:]

“Increasingly has he become enslaved to all the church machinery bequeathed to him by energetic predecessors, plus all the modern conveniences which he himself has installed, in the way of organizations, ‘to assist him in his work.’ Sometimes, when he sits down for a moment before the grate to catch his breath from the exacting labors of the day and contemplates that he must now hurry to the church, with all speed, to meet the executive committee of the Sunny Sons of Something-or-Other – knowing full well that he must adroitly suggest the business to come before the body, hypnotize some Sunny Son into making a motion and another into the act of supporting it and all of them into passing it; and that the outcome of the event will be a smilingly unanimous resolution empowering him to go out, single-handedly, and do whatever it was that he might have done at one-tenth the time and bother without supervising these parliamentary calisthenics – he wonders whether he hasn’t fed both hands, up to the very shoulders, into the rapacious maw of his own machine!

“But it is quite too late to remedy much of this. He has made his bed, and now he must lie in it. He has surrounded himself with cabinets, bureaus, commissions, principalities and powers – The Tri-Mu Fraternity, The Best-You-Can-Do Club, The Merry Matrons, and the Over-the-Tops – from which he may no more readily disengage himself than a mid-August fly with all six legs knee-deep in stickemfast.

“Thus engaged, weekdays, in parish and community duties which leave but little time unmortgaged, the good man is really in as serious need of spiritual rejuvenation on Sunday, the day of rest, as the most jaded beast of burden who appears before him at that time in the sanctuary. But – may he not derive much spiritual uplift from his own sermons? – someone pertinently inquires. Well, let us look into that for a moment.

“Sermon manufacture is a business. It is not exactly the same kind of business as selling gingham, shingling a roof, digging a sewer, or excising a tumor; but it is a business, and if the preacher doesn’t make a business of it his days will not be long in the land as a preacher. It is not an unusual experience for a minister to be so aflame with his subject that the research, composition, and delivery of his sermon develop him spiritually, so that he lives for days in the light and warmth of it. But this is by no means a weekly experience, even with the most ardent, if they themselves are to be believed.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

The Preacher’s Heart Hunger

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to fellow ministers about how they never get to hear any sermons other than their own. He has just described a typical conference of ministers, in which nuts-and-bolts presentations and requests for money predominate. He writes:]

“If this matter has been overstated, the exaggeration may easily be pointed out and denied by fellow-craftsmen who have failed to observe that the end and aim of most of our ‘inspirational’ conference addresses is fiscal rather than cardiac. One must never forget – and one isn’t at all likely to be permitted to forget – that it takes money, and lots of it, to operate the kingdom, as modernly constituted; but it also takes something else that money cannot buy. It is of this somewhat [in]tangible but highly important ‘something else’ that we need to think seriously these days.

“In the course of his daily activities, the preacher – commonly and erroneously presumed to possess singular opportunities for the culture of his own soul – is almost as beset with secular duties as the busiest man of affairs in his congregation. No cloistral seclusion is permitted him, and it is uncertain he would avail himself of such insular protection were it offered. The nature of his ministerial labors has altered so completely within the past two decades that he is no longer in the mood for that peculiar type of spiritual culture which distinguished our predecessors of a generation past. The modern minister gets little opportunity to develop what our elders used to call ‘piety,’ and so infatuated has he become with the newer features of his business that the very term ‘piety’ is not the most popular word in his working vocabulary. He shies off, uncomfortably, when he meets it, suspecting it of distasteful designs upon the length of his countenance and the manner of his speech or dress.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Agents of Spirituality

by Ronald R Johnson

“Occasionally we attend conferences with our fellow ministers and selected groups of devout laymen; but there the program consists mostly of the mere buttons-and-pins of church methods, the discussion of administrative problems, and consideration of workaday statistical reports. Not infrequently it turns out the that promised ‘inspirational address’ with which the conference was to reach its ennobling climax deftly maneuvers its way from the pulpit to the receipt of custom, where it attains to such magnificence of appeal that the baskets are passed again – this time in the interest of some undeniably worthy cause that had come ‘to the parting of the ways,’ and was ‘facing an hour of crisis,’ and ‘now throws down an heroic challenge to the sacrificial courage of the red-blooded!’ And so forth. Ad lib.

“But even this drench of distress on behalf of an excellent movement, involving the re-reconstruction of the preacher’s puny purse to the jeopardized philanthropy, does very little to assuage his heart-hunger for spiritual nourishment. To be sure, the traveling secretary of the bankrupt board tells him that the most effective spiritual tonic known to the profession is self-administered by the act of turning one’s pockets wrongsideout; but the preacher, however salutary may be the moral results of charity, or sweet the uses of adversity, still longs for some genuine inspiration, just once, that doesn’t find its ultimate goal in his jeans.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Hearing Sermons

by Ronald R Johnson

“Our profession seems pretty thoroughly committed to the belief that hearing the gospel preached week after week is so excellent a safeguard and stimulus to correct living that public morality is greatly influenced by the Christian pulpit. Sometimes the doubt is expressed that people who habitually deny themselves the moral and spiritual uplift from the pulpit may order their lives as becomes good Christian citizens. If this proposition has a leg to stand on, what is to become of us who never have a chance to hear the gospel preached, except as we ourselves interpret it, from one year’s end to the next?

“It is not the object of this writing to imply that preachers, as a class, are misbehaving themselves; for such is not the case. Although our ministerial ordination guarantees no immunity against the common weaknesses of mankind, the public expects us to exhibit a high-grade morality. That this demand has been met in a manner fairly satisfactory is evident from the respect generally accorded the clergy as leaders in the moral life of their communities. Once in a while, we are rasped to spluttering indignation over the front-page prominence given to the story of a moral lapse committed by some weak brother whose name had never meant anything until it had contrived to associate itself with odium; but, if we only stop to reason, this is a sort of awkward, left-handed compliment to our vocation. It means that ministers habitually carry themselves with such circumspection that a mistake on the part of any one of them, however obscure, deserves to be played up as sensational news. Were such delinquencies frequent, they would not startle the public; neither would they earn widespread advertisement.

“But it is not the purpose of this paper to discuss the preacher’s morals so much as to inquire somewhat concerning the means at hand for the conservation and development of his spiritual capacities and aspirations. As for the majority of us, we rarely have a chance to hear anything that inspires us to higher thinking or nobler action. Such advices are customarily offered on the first day of the week, at a time when we ourselves are busy with our well-meant, though sometimes ineffective, endeavors to build up a stronger consciousness of human-divine contacts in the souls of our parishioners. We are simply agents and jobbers of spirituality, ourselves menaced with spiritual insolvency due to lack of inspirational income plus a steady drain of expense at that point; starved in the very process of retailing to the ultimate consumer the finest provisions we can lay hands upon – sometimes blissfully unconscious of the pernicious anemia that has sapped our spiritual vigor.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Lloyd Douglas on “Saving the Minister’s Soul”

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” The Christian Century, 4/14/1921.

[The following is from an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on April 14, 1921, under the title, “Saving the Minister’s Soul.” He writes:]

“So steady a character as the Tarsan [St. Paul] once candidly admitted that, having preached to others, it was by no means certain he himself might not become a castaway. These were brave words coming from the self-confessed pioneer of an exalted moral code engaged in its first struggles to gain a following. It would have been easy for Paul to say to his congregation, ‘I have discovered two forces at work in you – virtue and vice; so inextricably mixed that, even when you would do good, evil is present!’ It was quite another matter when he declared, ‘I find two laws within me – a law of my mind and a law of my members, and these two laws at war; o wretched man that I am!’

“The present-day preacher who would thus phrase repentance in the first person singular might give his congregation an uneasy moment for fear he was about to make some startling disclosure of moral turpitude. It is considered much more becoming in him to speak of sinfulness in the third person; or, at most, in the second person. It is assumed that he himself bears a charmed reputation and inviolate character, safe as Caesar’s wife from the ordinary frailties of the race.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

The Bread Problem, Part 3

by Ronald R Johnson

An excerpt from “The Bread Problem,” an editorial in the February 17, 1921, issue of The Christian Century, written anonymously by Lloyd C. Douglas.

[This is the conclusion of an editorial, “The Bread Problem,” which Douglas wrote without a by-line for The Christian Century’s February 17, 1921, issue. After briefly surveying the problem of hunger in the aftermath of the First World War, he narrated Christ’s first temptation in the wilderness, to make bread out of stones. He writes:]

“From that scene in the Jeshimon Wilderness, Anno Domini 30, let us return and take another glance at what we have before us in the early spring of 1921. Exactly how did our world get into its present miseries? We say that is an economic question. But is it? Well – say that the immediate cause of it was the war. Well – how did the world get itself head-over-ears in war? By walking in the ways of righteousness and brotherhood? By efforts at spiritual culture? By reliance upon his guidance who continually endeavors to attract our attention to the truth about human relationships? No; we got into war – the whole brood of nations – excusing nobody, laying the blame at every door impartially – through indifference to the cultivation of those principles which Jesus said would make for permanent peace!

“Even now – with so ghastly and complete a demonstration of the fact that war solves no problems whatsoever; that war not only wastes while it is waged but leaves a slimy trail behind it through uncounted years – there are plenty of us advocating more costly armies, more big gunboats, more deadly poison gas! In all the welter and wreckage – face to face with the problem of the world’s starvation – still – still – ‘armi virumque cano!’ [‘I sing of arms and men’: the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid.]

“Fully satisfied that organized greed and diabolical selfishness have not only foisted war upon the world, time after time, but have stood by to loot the pockets of its victims while they went forth hypnotized to death by appeals to their patriotism, still do we sit, complacently, declaring that the world’s chief difficulty is ‘a problem in economics.’ Economics? Nonsense! The world’s problem, today, is a spiritual problem! Humanity’s soul must be saved!

“What may we do about it? There is much that we can do. We can turn the searchlight in upon ourselves to see how far we, as individuals, are menaced by this temptation to believe that our own problems are questions in economics! Do I live by bread alone? What inspired to my choice of a life work – bread alone? For what reasons have I gathered friends about me – that they may use me, or I them? Have I cultivated them for bread alone? Is success, to my thinking, the sort of thing that has cornered some market; stacked up corn in warehouses against years of idleness; nailed down natural resources to make them inaccessible to other hands as fully entitled to them as myself?

“We do well who, through these Lenten days, assay the ore of our own characters and assist other people to test the quality of their motives to see if, perchance, we who have talked so volubly and knowingly of humanity’s great needs – the causes of its distress; the reasons of its hunger – may not be housing and arming the forces which make these problems more and more acute and perplexing.

“The Master found the complex problem of the world a simple spiritual problem at its root. Taking counsel of the God in his own heart, he found that man does not live by bread alone, but by the discernment and acceptance of his will who ‘standeth behind our lattice, keeping watch over his own.'”

[This last sentence was probably a quotation from memory (and therefore not quite accurately) of a line from James Russell Lowell’s 1845 poem, “The Present Crisis.” The poet complains of:

“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”

This same poem contains the all-important line, “New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth.” Douglas would quote that line repeatedly throughout the 1940s, very much aware that it was necessary to stop Hitler’s armies, despite everything he said in this 1921 editorial.]

The Bread Problem, Part 2

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from an uncredited editorial that Lloyd Douglas wrote for The Christian Century under the heading, “The Bread Problem,” which appeared in the February 17, 1921, issue. He has just finished talking about world hunger following the aftermath of the First World War. He writes:]

“In this penitential period of 1921, we turn naturally to the story of our Lord’s temptation which provides a reason and a setting for this Lenten season. And we find, to our surprise, that the ancient narrative is vital, vascular, directly apropos of our present anxiety.

“The temptation followed the baptism immediately. Rising from the water, bearing in his soul heaven’s confirmation of his messiahship, Jesus went into the wilderness. Apparently he felt that he was not ready to face the crowd whom John had astonished with the announcement that the Messiah was among them, or any crowd, until he had struggled further through the problems vexing the world he had come to save.

“The first question thrust into the active consciousness of the young Galilean, after his voluntary exile into the wilderness, was essentially this: ‘What do men live by?’ At the moment, he was able to answer the question promptly, decisively. So far as he was concerned, the greatest thing in the world was bread! Because he happened to be hungry, the world’s problem seemed to be a clear case of economics! The cry of his people and the call of his own appetite united to tempt him to command the very stones at his feet to be transformed into bread!

“We need not debate whether this narrative is wholly, or in part, allegorical. Of course, we are fully conscious of our power to turn stones into bread – at least so long as the saltpeter beds of Chili continue to provide our wheat fields with the nourishment that makes them productive. [Douglas is referring to fertilizer.] If we are minded to let the Master have the power to do the same, by processes unknown to any but himself, there is no reason why he should be deterred from it by our lack of faith. If anyone sees it simply as an allegory, the lesson still stands inviolate. Those who cannot help viewing it this way rightly resent the charge that they fail to catch the point of the story.

“The point at issue was this: Is humanity’s problem a question in economics? Jesus thought it through and decided in the negative. Man does not live by bread alone. Man lives through his discovery and acceptance of the will of God.

“From that scene in the Jeshimon Wilderness, Anno Domini 30, let us return and take another glance at what we have before us in the early spring of 1921.”

[Douglas will continue his editorial in my next post…]

The Bread Problem, Part 1

by Ronald R Johnson

In recent months I’ve been sharing with you the essays Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century from the summer of 1920 to the early months of 1921. In the February 17, 1921, issue, there is an uncredited editorial that was clearly written by Douglas. It not only has his style and vocabulary, but he later emphasized its thesis in a number of his books, both fiction and non-fiction.

He begins by talking about world conditions in the aftermath of the Great War (which they, poor souls, did not yet realize was merely the First World War of the twentieth century). He writes:

“If we are to believe the cries that proceed now from all quarters, the problem of this world is hunger – actual, physical, death-bent hunger! There are some complications to the problem – but at root it is a simple demand for bread. We stand aghast at the figures which announce the state of wretchedness in China where ten thousand daily die of starvation. We read with horror of living conditions in Russia where even those long inured to such poverty as we Americans could not possibly understand, much less endure, cry out that they can go no further. We are appalled at cablegrams from the war-devastated countries of Europe where fully thirty million little children are barely kept alive through the generosity of strangers in foreign lands. And always a large block of India is in a state of slow starvation: the only reason we do not observe her plight at this moment is because these European dead, closer to us by common ties and miles and racial stock, emit a phosphorescent glow that obscures India’s suffering. How to find bread to eat – this is the problem.

“Little good can come of spending our time in an attempted analysis of this condition to determine its exact causes. Some of them are patent. It is beyond thought that the greater nations of the world could spend four years firing off high explosives, all of which contained the potentiality of food, and could take out of the normal walks of life millions of men habitually productive of such supplies, without inviting the disaster now so pitifully paraded before the eyes of all the world. This cause is obvious enough.

“Neither need any mystery be made of the fact that organized greed has capitalized this emergency of war for all that the traffic would bear. Not one government on earth has had the facilities to deal with this menace, so strongly entrenched was it, and so skillfully operated. Our own nation, very much better situated to handle the problem than any of the others, has registered the most spectacular failure of them all. So rampant and inclusive has greed become, and so triumphant, that those who have been going through the motions of checking it feel ridiculous and ineffective when they lay hands upon any single individual and say, ‘You are guilty.’

“There have been other causes, but these two will suffice to explain the world’s present predicament. The world is hungry! The problem of the moment is bread! This is an economic consideration. Everybody is thinking, talking, writing economics! We must produce more food; plough more deeply; sow more grain; develop a larger arable acreage through fertilization, irrigation, and other reclamation activities; increase the merchant marine, build more gondola-cars; and entice young men into the open country. Food! Bread! That is our need!”

[Douglas will continue his editorial in my next post…]

What About Lent? Part 7

by Ronald R Johnson

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “What About Lent?” in The Christian Century, 2/3/1921.

The following is the conclusion of 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 has been just been saying that he holds church services every afternoon during Holy Week, and that he handles them topically. He writes:

“For example: Let the general theme of the addresses [all week] be phrased: ‘Suffered Under Pontius Pilate.’ On Monday, the theme might be, ‘The Indictment.’ Pilate asks, ‘Art thou a King?’ That is the indictment. It fits like a glove to the business one was doing on the day before, when the Palm Sunday pageantry was displayed.

“On Tuesday (all of these topics have to do with Pilate’s attitude toward Jesus – Pilate the cold-blooded, self-contained, dispassionate businessman) the topic might be, ‘A Problem of Jurisdiction.’ This deals with the story of Pilate’s sending his prisoner to Herod. He hoped to prove that the adjudication of the case was none of his business. A curious little twist is given to the story when it is noted that ‘Pilate and Herod, who had been previously at enmity, became friends that day.’ Pilate the gentleman strikes hands with Herod, roue and sot. Pilate despised Herod – but today they find common cause.

“On Wednesday a good theme is, ‘A Compromise Settlement.’ Pilate advises the crowd to ‘scourge him and let him go.’ If Jesus was guilty, he should be punished; if innocent, he should be acquitted. Pilate is willing to trim. It all gets back to the old query, ‘What will you do with Jesus?’

“On Thursday the topic might be phrased, ‘A Judgment Affirmed.’ This has to do with Pilate’s remark to the priests, ‘What I have written, I have written.’ After it is too late, Pilate bucks up and reveals a vestige of moral courage. After it is too late, Nicodemus ben Gorion and Joseph of Arimathaea appear as pallbearers. It is a great text – ‘What I have written.’

“Good Friday seems to take care of itself. There should be a program of penitential music, an address on the significance of the sacrifice on Golgotha, a stirring appeal to the courage and devotion of every man who has claimed fealty to Christ. Care must be exercised not to let this service become a mere lugubrious funeral of the Lord. Seeing he is not dead, that manner of memorial is out of drawing. A great theme for that day is, ‘Ye need not weep for me!'”

What About Lent? Part 6

by Ronald R Johnson

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 has been offering ways that Protestant ministers can make the most of Lent. He writes:

“All of the sermons and mid-week addresses of this period should be clustered around this central idea of self-search, self-examination, spiritual appraisal. Great advantage is gained by printing and distributing a calendar of all these services, showing that they are all of a piece, and all pertaining to Lent. One can build a program that has cumulative value, reaching its high point in the celebration of Holy Week.

“We miss much who do not hold daily services during Holy Week. Unless local conditions absolutely prohibit the plan, it is best to have these meetings late afternoons. There should be excellent music, meditative and devotional of mood. The address should be brief. The congregation should be asked to do little or nothing but sit and think and pray. We have been making mistakes who have considered it necessary to every service that our people should sing hymns and read responsively. Occasionally – during Holy Week, for example – it is better to give them nothing to do but listen and meditate. In the writer’s program for the coming Holy Week, the congregation has nothing to say or do at all. A penitential ritual (homemade, for we are not ritualists) is to be rendered by two choirs, one in the choir box consisting of a mixed chorus of sixteen voices, the other in the rear of the balcony composed of a male quartet acting as an obligato accompaniment to a soprano soloist. In answer to the question that has just come to the reader’s mind – ‘Does this not involve large expense?’ – it may be said that, in our own case, these people are contributing their daily services through Holy Week without financial recompense.

“As to the addresses of Holy Week, it is better for the minister to make them himself rather than call in local colleagues who are unable to establish such continuity of thought as may be achieved by one speaker. The most frequent treatment during this Week is a consideration of the events in Jesus’ life, day by day through the crucial period. This proves quite perplexing. On Wednesday, there is practically nothing to be said; on Thursday and Friday one is positively embarrassed by the abundance of materials. It is better to plan a series of addresses, topically.”

[Douglas will conclude this essay in my next post…]