Archival Research – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

The Pearl Merchant

From the November 1919 issue of The Intercollegian.

In October 1919, Lloyd Douglas preached a sermon about Christ’s parable of the Pearl of Great Price. In the next month’s issue of The Intercollegian (the magazine put out by the YMCA in America), he published an essay that summarized the things he had said in that sermon. I told about that sermon in an earlier series of posts, and you can read them by clicking on the following links: Part One… Part Two… and Part Three.

Here is the article in the November 1919 issue of The Intercollegian:

“Only in recent times have civilized people worn jewelry for mere display. Their ornamental value formerly took second place to their symbolic significance. The amethyst has wrought many a moral miracle through its legendary power to protect its owner from evil thoughts. Who doubts that the man who had sacrificed many a pleasure to purchase an amethyst for this purpose failed to find help in its ownership?

“Once, a complete allegory of human aspiration, condensed into the telegraphic brevity of thirty-three words, was built around a pearl. Hear the story.

“The hero was a pearl trader. He was not a mere collector, playing at pearls for a pastime; he was a pearl-merchant, seriously making his business a life task. But he loved his vocation, and dealt only with the very finest pearls on the market. Years of shrewd and discriminating negotiations had brought him affluence. His capital stock now contained many pearls of exceptional value.

“Imagination suggests that the trader might have bought one of these cherished pearls in Athens. It was known to him as his ‘agnostic’ pearl. It stood for a neutral-tinted, convictionless attitude of mind — forever seeking evidence, cross-questioning witnesses, and examining testimony; but never arriving at a verdict. Whenever his heart proposed that he take a definite stand for something, he fondled his ‘agnostic’ pearl and remained non-committal. Indeed, he came to have much pride in his unfaiths, and was not offended when men called him a disbeliever. The word was not an epithet, but a distinction. Of all his goodly pearls, he loved this one best.

“But not much less ardently did he esteem the pearl he had found in Rome, the ancient seat of law. He called it ‘justice.’ It had kept him straight, many a time, when he might have cheated without it. Whatever happened, he would be just. Every man should have his due. But no man need expect more than his due. Sometimes the pearl-trader’s heart was moved to pity, for a moment, at sight of human wretchedness; sometimes he was sorely tempted to temper his justice with mercy, but the Roman pearl drew him up before he weakened. Mercy was enervating.

“Another pearl he had discovered in Alexandria — home of riches. When he thumbed the satin surface of his ‘prosperity’ pearl, he invariably experienced a thrill of pride in his wealth, and a longing for added riches. After all, honor and influence were not often far away from the man who held great possessions. Poverty, espoused even in the interest of fine and worthy ideals, was an intolerable curse. Who could afford to be poor?

“Many other pearls had this merchant, in the ownership of which he greatly rejoiced. But still he sought goodly pearls, not content with his possessions. Somewhere, he believed, there must be another jewel of rare value. It had become his sole passion to seek such pearls.

“One day — strangely enough, it was in the ancient city of his fathers — he was pointed to a pearl of such surpassing beauty and perfection that he knew he could never be happy until he had made it his own. He sought out the owner and, together, they discussed, long and earnestly, the peculiar significances attached to the super-pearl. It appeared that ownership of this pearl invested one with a simple, restful, childlike acceptance of the mysteries of life. The wearer would be unable to take pride in his unbeliefs, but would find himself saying, ‘I am persuaded. No; I do not pretend to explain; but I am persuaded!’ Moreover, the super-pearl was sure to guarantee a new state of mind to the four-square man who staked his all on the ‘quid pro quo.’ The wearer of this pearl would become so infatuated with Charity that his erstwhile emulation of pure justice would lose interest for him. And, again, this rare jewel had the power to distract a man’s thoughts from his own prosperity and focus his whole attention upon the happiness and welfare of others.

“The pearl-trader asked its price, somewhat nervously, it is to be believed; for he suspected that its value was beyond his reach. He was told that he might have it in exchange for his entire stock of pearls.

“Surely it must have demanded a long and serious mental struggle for the pearl-trader to arrive at a decision to exchange all of his precious jewels for this one pearl of great price. A friend, unacquainted with pearls, suggested that he ask the owner to cut the pearl in two (as diamonds are cut), but he only smiled sadly and replied, ‘Pearls cannot be cut, my friend. I must take it or leave it as it stands!’

“And so, he refused to trade. And so, he debated again the advisability of trading. And so, at length, he came with his precious pearls and gave them all for this one pearl of great price. For he was a merchant who sought goodly pearls, and he could not be satisfied until he had possessed the best! It is by this process, said the Master Teacher of us all, that the Kingdom of Heaven is achieved in the heart of the individual.”

A Truthful Commencement Address

by Ronald R Johnson

From the June 1919 issue of the YMCA’s monthly magazine, The Intercollegian.

This is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “A Truthful Commencement Address,” published in the June 1919 issue of The Intercollegian, put out by the YMCA. The full title is, “A Truthful Commencement Address (As It Might Be Delivered by the President of Any College).”

“My Dear Young Friends — or perhaps I had better say, Young Ladies and Gentlemen, for during your four years’ residence here I have been unable to become acquainted with you, having been required to be absent almost constantly, shaking down wealthy alumni and supplicating the state legislature for the wherewithal to pay salaries to your dearly beloved instructors.

“You have now arrived at an epochal hour in your lives — or what would be that, if so many of you were not contemplating post-graduate work which will keep you in the rah-rah for another three to five years. The few of you who do step forth today to grapple with life — or, more strictly speaking, who are all packed up to go home for the summer — might be felicitated upon the triumphal termination to your college career, were it not for the well-known fact that fully seven-ninths of you have been working only for credits, electing the pipes and snaps, and just skinning through with an oh-be-thankful average of C flat.

“I have it from your instructors that some of you are graduating by a very narrow squeak. They tell me that a considerable number of you never did fire on more than two cylinders; and that some of your batteries need renewing, even before you start on the journey of life, due to hard driving on your joy rides.

“Honestly, it makes me laugh when I see you sitting there, looking so solemn and wise, squinting up at me through your black tassels and wondering how far your rented gown misses connections with the back of your collar — for I saw your marks at the Registrar’s office; and, say, they were some grades!

“Doubtless you hope that I will say something about your painful ascent of the Mount of Wisdom — which only three or four of you took on high — for the benefit of your pa and ma who are admiring the top of your mortar-board from the balcony; but I am afraid to attempt it, for fear some of the faculty may grin and give the whole thing away. That being the case, let us approach the matter with friendly frankness — and tell the truth.

“You came here, four years ago, flushed with enthusiasm to become educated men and women. You had bright dreams of fitting yourselves for eminent service to society. The sophisticated upperclassmen had that all shamed out of you by the first Thanksgiving. The little handful of you who did contrive to retain your youthful visions were hectored and badgered and chaffed throughout your course by a bunch of roughnecks, many of whom will not be able to buy, borrow, or bank ten years from now unless they inherit something that can be doled out to them in the form of a pension. The majority of you settled down early to the belief that the faculty was your common enemy and that the big fight of your lives was to avoid seeming to take a personal interest in your studies, lest you should become an object of ridicule among your mates.

“You missed the lectures by eminent men, which we provided for you at considerable expense, and went to the movies instead, to see the man with the big hat and the leather pants rescue the heiress to all of Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to Seventy-Second Street from the clutches of Desperate Mike, in a log hut at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

“On the night of the orchestral concert which we brought on for your delectation to play the music of the masters, you had a dance — the music being furnished by two snare drums, a tin whistle, a pair of cymbals, a cowbell, a pistol, a couple of wooden blocks covered with sandpaper, the whole accompanied by a boy with a fatuous grin who beat the time by bouncing himself up and down on the piano bench. Again, when we enticed one of the foremost American artists to come here with his exhibition, you held another dance which was announced as ‘Strictly Modern’ — so modern, indeed, that some of the chaperones left before it was out.

“I have it on pretty good authority that some of you young gentlemen who are going out to lead in the great constructive movements of our day — pardon my smiling — used to get yourselves excused early from the seven-to-nine P.M. sociology seminar, where you were discussing the best processes of redeeming our degraded social order and setting to rights a badly befogged civilization, so that you might attend a vaudeville in which the chief bill featured a group of tired, underfed, underpaid girls who danced to the tune of ‘By the Moon, I Spoon,’ and coughed, between verses, to the tune of T. B., which was followed by a brief skit in which a trained monkey appeared and smoked a cigarette. This latter act must have been tame stuff, however, since one need not spend one’s good money to see such things.

“Well, here you all are; still young enough to make good, even if you have thrown away a chance you’ll never have again. Some of you possess a glimmer of genius which you can cash in, provided you don’t bank too heavily on what your family thinks you have found here on this campus. Don’t let any of our Commencement felicitations fool you too much about the real value of your college training, for mighty few of you have got anything worth all the fuss we are making over you.

“If you should care to come back about twenty years from today to attend the reunion of your class, it may interest you to see us pass out a generous chunk of the alphabet to some of your classmates who were hooted as ‘greasy grinds’ and ‘moles’ because they kept at their jobs while you went to see the trained monkeys, a sight you might have had any morning while shaving, except, possibly, for the adjective.

“And now, we bid you farewell; knowing that you would like to get loose and have a little walk with Flossie before the 3:15 train which carries you back to Jonesville, and Susie, who wears the Itta Bitta fraternity badge and has promised to share your fortunes when they are divisible by two.

“Don’t be depressed because it’s too late to mend the job you’ve foozled. Buck up, and play the game! A lot of people just like you, who trifled away their chances to learn something in college, have managed to put it over by imitating other people who had learned something. If you want to do a really constructive piece of service before you leave us, write a brief confession of the manner in which you bungled your job, seal it, and deposit it with us, to be handed to your own boy when he arrives here for college training. Maybe it will help to keep him steady; for, unless a new crop of youngsters comes along pretty soon with more interest in the real business of college life than you evinced, the whole thing will get to be a joke.

“Kindly step to the platform now and get your diplomas. We have printed your names on them in English so you might have no trouble identifying your own. As for the rest of it, we have prepared it in Latin. Few of you will ever know just what it says; but — no matter.

“We are sorry to see you leave. We would not be sorry if we thought the next outfit that comes along would be any more diligent. In that case, we should speed you on your way with an almost unseemly hilarity. But we know that you have set an example for your juniors which will make them as nearly like you as peas in a pod.

“Go out in the world, then; and, after five years of hard knocks, do create some new sentiment about college life! For we want to keep old alma mater going — and we can’t, very well, unless there is a change of attitude on the part of our constituency toward the real business of higher education!”

Paste These Words in Your Hat

by Ronald R Johnson

From Douglas’s essay, “Wedding Clothes,” published in the May 1919 issue of The Intercollegian.

This is from “Wedding Clothes,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the May 1919 issue of The Intercollegian, the YMCA’s monthly magazine.

“The prince was about to be married. His father, the king, planned a banquet in honor of the nuptials. Only the blue-blooded and full-pedigreed were invited. They sent regrets. The king was enraged. He told his servants to go out and bring in anybody and everybody. The servants brought them.

“Some came because they were curious to see the king’s palace; some to eat; some to drink; some to be able to boast later that they had been there; some to follow the crowd. None of them felicitated the prince or inquired for the bride or cared a whoopteree for the wedding.

“Robes were provided at the door to cover the guests’ rags and patches, on the theory that if you can’t have interior respectability, you’d better try to rub some of it on the outside. One unkempt fellow said, ‘I’ll not wear their togs. They can take me just as I am, or throw me out!’ So they threw him out. It may have been a trivial reason for expulsion, but out he went.

“The man who told this fable added, ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’

“A long time ago, men were born into the Kingdom of Larger Opportunity. Then, so many of the pedigreed fell down on their jobs that the K. of L. O. was thrown open to the general public. They began coming from all quarters to attend the feast of wisdom provided by our institutions of higher learning.

“Some came because it was their parents’ wish; some because they had finished high school, and what else was there to do; some to participate in the sports and the games; some to enjoy the fun and frolic of student life; some to follow the crowd. They are still coming. Many are called, but few are chosen. The majority are pitched out of the K. of L. O. as soon as they enter — sometimes for trivial reasons.

“One man is rejected from the K. of L. O. because he doesn’t know how to speak his own language. Some people know five languages; he doesn’t know any. The vernacular has always served his purpose. Says he, “‘I done it’ is just as good as ‘I did it,’ haint it, so long as I really went and done it?” Then, the day comes when the Big Man, who has it all to say whether our young hero gets his chance in the K. of L. O., hears him talk, passes him up as either too stupid to have noticed the difference between his uncouth speech and the language of cultured men, or too lazy to have mended his slovenly talk, or too indifferent to care. Anyway, out he goes. Oh, not to perish utterly; just to become a second-rater, holding the light and grinding the knives and washing the dishes and collecting the data for some other fellow who hasn’t half his morals but twice his manners.

“Another is thrown out because he doesn’t know how to eat; thinks a knife will do, so long as he is careful not to cut his face. Another is thrown out because he is so beastly ungracious. Another is thrown out because, when he shakes hands, he offers a flabby, flaccid pudding to the Big Man who, having shaken it and put it aside, says, ‘He will not do. It’s his hand. There’s no bling in him!’ And, all the time, the bling may be in him — only one wouldn’t suspect it by shaking the dead fish attached to his wrist.

“The pity of it all is that every year men graduate and go out to win their way in the world, and mess things up for society, who lack any moral purpose, who would willingly double-cross their own grandmothers for a dollar, while other men, who have studied themselves round-shouldered and half-blind preparing to do their share of the world’s work — honest, industrious, sincere — are pitched out of the K. of L. O. for lack of some insignificant decoration, like the wedding garment.

“Many are called, but few are chosen.

“Paste these words in your hat.

“For the man who gave them to us always knew what what he was talking about.”

Ten Commandments for the ‘College’ Church (Revisited)

by Ronald R Johnson

Reproduction of “Ten Commandments for the ‘College’ Church,” an essay that Douglas published in The Intercollegian in their April 1919 issue.

I featured this article in an earlier post some years ago, but it’s appropriate to post it again now, as part of a series on Douglas’s essays in The Intercollegian from January 1919 through June 1920. Here is my earlier post:

Reprinted below is a humorous article by Lloyd C. Douglas published in the magazine, The Intercollegian, April 1919. During ten of his years as a minister, Douglas was on a university campus, first as the religious director of the YMCA at the University of Illinois (1911-1915), then as Senior Minister of the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan (1915-1921).

Of particular note is the Tenth Commandment. Douglas had obviously run out of numbers, so he crammed several commandments into the last one. I especially like how he warns against asking big-name faculty members to teach Sunday School if their “spiritual thermostat” is below the freezing point.

The commandments are listed with Roman numerals:

I AM the Spirit of Christianity. Thou shalt have no other business but to promote me.

Thou shalt not squander thy time by offering dissertations upon Genesis as a text book on anthropology, biology, geology, astronomy, or any other ology or onomy appertaining to the heavens above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth; thou shalt not bother thyself overmuch with philosophical explanations of strange matters concerning which thou knowest nothing; for I, the Spirit of Christianity, am now exercised more about other things; notably, the character of thy summons in behalf of lofty ideals and worthy living.

II.

Thou shalt not specialize upon indictments of Organized Christianity because of its ancient mistakes, for they are amply able to speak for themselves without thy help, and thy task is to remedy such blunders rather than commemorate them.

III.

Remember the Faculty and keep its respect. Students come and go, and their opinions are easily modified; but the Faculty Man stays, and likewise do his convictions. Let him once give thee a black eye, and thou shalt be thus adorned for some time. In him thou shalt invest much of thy time and thought, that his good opinion of thy motives and methods may be won, lest he consider thee out of harmony with Truth and intolerant of truth-seekers, whereupon he hooteth at thee in his lecture-hall, after the which thou mayest as well lock thy door and throw away the key thereof.

IV.

Honor the student traditions of thy university, however silly they may seem to thee, that thy days may be longer in the academic community wherein thou hast chosen to live thy life and perform thy work.

Thou shalt not scold.

VI.

Thou shalt not commit sectarianism.

VII.

Thou shalt not bawl out the fraternities.

VIII.

Thou shalt not cause thy most loyal students to flunk their courses by spending too much time scouring thy pots and pans, engineering thy pop-corn festivals, lest they evermore think of thee as one doth regard the tailor who built him the ill-fitting pants.

IX.

Thou shalt not covet university credits for thy courses in religion.

Thou shalt not covet the instructor’s right to consider it unprofessional to be interesting; thou shalt not toady to the professor who knifeth thee in the back after thou hast caused him to be made toastmaster of a student banquet within thy gates, nor ask them to teach thy classes in Bible study who, though they have large names and many letters affixed thereunto, register less than 32 degrees on their spiritual thermostat; thou shalt not covet the student’s slang, airs, dress, indifference, cold-bloodedness, or any other thing that undignifies thee and nullifies thy usefulness and causeth him to thrust his tongue in his cheek when he passeth thee by.

[The editor added this note at the end: These “commandments” may be of interest also – and profit – to Association Secretaries and other Christian workers in academic communities. – Edit.]

Calling All Professors

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Ph.D. — Director of Philanthropists,” in the February issue of The Intercollegian.

The following is an essay entitled, “Ph.D. — Director of Philanthropy,” which Lloyd Douglas published in the February 1919 issue of The Intercollegian, the monthly magazine of the YMCA. At the beginning of this essay, Douglas talks about two black men on a ship, one of which is seasick. His bunkmate tells him “we’s a passin’ a ship!” According to Douglas, the seasick man says, “Ah doan want tuh see no ship…. Call me when we’s a passin’ a tree!”

The Great War (which we now call WWI) had just concluded two months earlier, and Douglas draws the lesson:

“This yarn fits our mood. Certain sights, sounds, and demands have palled on us. Only a change of scenery will beguile our interest. The lore of bayonets, red and sticky, and of dead men’s legs sticking up out of the mud of the trenches — it is enough! Lead us away.

“It happens, now, that ‘we’s a passin’ a tree.’ Tourists will kindly hunt a porthole and look out.

“I’m both sorry and glad that I am not a faculty man, these days — sorry because I should like to have his chance to become immortal in the lives of the young fellows who are so eager to be led into a larger life; glad because I shouldn’t want to risk foozling such an opportunity.

“College students are facing their tasks just now with deep seriousness. The old selfishness has become unpopular. They used to say, ‘I should worry!’ Now they are saying, ‘I should worry!’ They are anxious to be challenged to do something to prove their right to live in these high days.

“A tremendous amount of spiritual energy, no longer static but kinetic, has been and is being generated in the heart of the young collegian. All persons who have to do with him will be held accountable by human society for the manner in which they help to recharge the batteries of life with this new dynamic, to carry the race over the long, lean years of such material prosperity as invariably follows great crises.

“The faculty man who believes in Christianity as ‘the theory of applied altruism’ and dares to say that he believes it in his classroom; challenging men to operate their lives centifugally; calling recent events to witness the folly of attempting to live centripetally; may justly feel that the five minutes he spends in making that speech are worth a whole semester’s lectures on his particular subject.

“Inversely, the member of the college teaching force who pooh-poohs the zealous aspirations of young men and women to invest themselves in some heroic philanthropic service is useful only as a brilliant and theatrical example of an ‘undesirable citizen.’

“Every thoughtful man is now called upon to acknowledge the value of ‘the imponderables’ — the facts of life which cannot be assayed by the ton or estimated with a slide rule.

“A certain type of academic, accustomed to doing his thinking only in the pluperfect [well in the past, in other words], will still pursue the ‘laboratory method’ of dealing with everything — regardless. Whether he makes research of a poem, an acid, a dogma, or an oratorio, he straps on his rubber apron, adjusts his green eye shade, lights the gas burner under the little copper pot, and pours whatever-it-is into a test tube.

“There is developing a new type of college instructor, however, whose imagination and faith are going to work wonders in helping the present crop of serious-minded students to deepen their own convictions that the greatest energies of this age are not to be spoken of in terms of KWs or BTUs [kilowatts or British Thermal Units].

“To my mind, there is no prophetic office more potential, in our day, than that occupied by the conscientious and fearless faculty man.

“His mere aside, tossed into a lecture, touching upon the importance of conserving the spiritual energies generated by this age of heroism and sacrifice, is worth more than all the sermons of the college preachers.

“One needs hardly add that his sneer at ‘the present wave of sentimentality’ can easily chill the ardor of many a student whose interest had been turned toward the things of life that really count.

“He shall be long remembered as a loyal friend of humanity, whose Ph.D. in these days means, ‘Director of Philanthropists’ — the potential philanthropists now in training in our colleges.”

Passenger or Crew Member?

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Taking the Grade,” published in The Intercollegian’s January 1919 issue.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to post the essays Lloyd Douglas published in The Intercollegian (the monthly magazine of the YMCA) from January 1919 through June 1920. Today’s article is entitled, “Taking the Grade,” and it was published in the January 1919 issue. (Let me just say in advance: some of Douglas’s essays haven’t aged well. This one was written right after the end of WWI.)

“A thoughtful friend of mine, who is something of a maxim-wright, informs me that ‘eventful eras produce prophets.’ If this is true — and it does jingle like an honest-to-goodness proverb — we must have been passing through an uncommonly stirring period, judging by the densit of the present population on the Isle of Patmos.

“These prophets seem to constitute a new species of the genus seer, in that they are agreed on at least one premise, to wit: we are entering upon an age of unprecedented possibilities for the advancement of civilization.

“Now the unanimity of this forecast surely cannot be charged to collusion among the prophets, for the business of prophesying is strictly a one-man job. The prophets do not ‘collude.’ Never yet have they held an annual conference to elect officers and have their picture taken. Prophets are about as chummy as comets.

“Therefore, when all of them declare, with certitude, each independently of the others, that we are now en route to better things — and that, too, in face of the traditional uncheerfulness of their trade — the combined effect of their predictions is very heartening.

“We will consider this as a settled fact, then–an incontrovertable, non-sinkable, self-bailable, time-lock, sunk-hinge Fact. The world is about to ‘take the grade’ to the upper levels. After a long and uneventful journey across the prairie, civilization makes ready to climb to a clearer and cleaner atmosphere. But the prophets have not said that the world is going to toboggan up to that altitude. Coasting is only good for movement in the opposite direction.

“Whoever is interested in this proposed ascent of civilization will join the crew. Erstwhile coal-passers will ply their shovels at the furnace doors. Persons previously on the passenger list will go forward to the tender and help the stokers. Certain husky people will get out behind and push. A few daring ones may go ahead and pull — though this is dangerous business, involving the risk of being run over; it is sincerely to be hoped that nobody will try to pull who hasn’t had a lot of previous experience in pushing.

“Of course, there are to be many passengers. Special cars will be made up for various parties, such as the dirty nations, the greedy nations, the ignorant nations, the self-infatuated nations, and the sick nations.

“Certain other passengers with special reservations are such incapacitated types as the great-grandson of old Timothy Waggles, who sat on the wharf swinging his feet and shouting, ‘Fool!’ at Robert Fulton when the latter was trying to make his steamboat go; and the son of Caleb Scroggins, who hee-hawed at Langley’s attempt at an aeroplane; and Willum the Last, himself, who turned all the resources of his empire into gunpowder and then pulled the trigger.

“All these will have to be hauled up the grade; plus one more passenger. Him I heard say, not long ago, ‘What’s all this talk about ‘missions’ and ‘increased missionary effort’ and ‘a larger missionary program’? Personally, I have never seen any good in missions, and I don’t see any good in them now! I consider all this chatter to be mere piffle!’

“So, we have to haul him too, along with Waggles and Scroggins and Willum. He will probably expect an assignment to the most luxurious coach on the train. We can’t ask him to ride forward in one of the rattan tourist cars, along with the ordinary supermen and the Hunkies and the Turks and the rest of that gang who went out to spread ‘kultur’ among their benighted brethren. No; we’ll have the porter make up the drawing-room compartment for this man, and ask the steward of the diner to send him all his meals.

“I think I can see him chatting with the senile Waggles and the infirm Scroggins and the other old fellow, on the way up, saying, ‘Mighty fine bit of country through which we are passing, gentlemen! Growing more and more beautiful with every mile. Notice how pure the air smells up here! And, just to think, we’re coasting up! Remarkable, isn’t it?’

“Now, if we could find some way of coaxing this man to stroll through the train and see what all we have on board, I believe he would want to join the crew; for he is not a bad sort. He is just getting a bit elderly in his habits of thought. All his life he has been ransacking the depths of his inexperience for wise words of caution for all who ‘waste their money and strength on missions.’ His mind has been lighted up, slightly, by the general illumination that has been observed by most people not utterly blind; but his voice still quavers the old tune. His mind and his mouth seem to have become disconnected in some manner.

“Anybody with a plan to suggest for persuading this man to put on his hat and walk through the train will confer a great favor on the crew who need his assistance. If we could get him into that car where the passengers are down on all fours around a wooden thing with six legs, ten horns, two tails, and a stinger, beseeching it to give them health and harvests, I know he would say, ‘What this bunch of drooling idiots want is a God with some sense; and a corps of doctors, and some tractors, and a threshing-machine, and a million dollars’ worth of soap! Why, I didn’t know we had anything like this aboard! What kind of a train is this? Let me get out and look!’

“And if he did get out, and saw what a tremendous amount of energy it was going to require to haul this miscellaneous outfit up the grade, I know that fellow well enough to believe that he would take off his coat and help. For he’s not a fool, even if he is old and fat.”

An Editorial Note

by Ronald R Johnson

The front page of the YMCA’s monthly newsletter, *The Intercollegian*, in the fall of 1919.

For those of you who who have been reading this site sequentially, I wanted to give you an overview of what I’ll be posting over the course of the next few weeks. I’ve spent the past several months sharing the sermons that Lloyd Douglas preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor (at the University of Michigan) during the 1919-1920 school year. A young student named Freda Diekhoff, whose father was a professor at the university, kept the transcripts of those sermons and donated them years later to the Lloyd Douglas archives at the university’s Bentley Historical Library. I have shared all of them but one. For some reason, Ms. Diekhoff’s collection skips from Washington’s Birthday to Palm Sunday. I will share the Palm Sunday sermon closer to that date.

In the meantime, I thought it might be appropriate to cover the articles that Douglas published in the YMCA’s monthly newsletter during this same period. That publication, The Intercollegian, featured an editorial by Douglas every month from January 1919 through June 1920. Over the next few weeks, I will post those essays, returning to Frieda Diekhoff’s collection in time for Palm Sunday.

Washington’s Prayer

by Ronald R Johnson

A page from “The Father of Our Country,” a sermon preached by Lloyd C. Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on February 22, 1920. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

It is the weekend of President’s Day, 1920, and Lloyd C Douglas is preaching a sermon on the subject, “The Father of Our Country,” at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor. The date is February 22, 1920. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

In this sermon, Douglas talked about the unique characteristics that he admired about President George Washington: his poise, his simplicity, his attitude of service to others. And now, at the conclusion of his address, Douglas says,

“Among the many written prayers with which his [Washington’s] personal memoirs abound is this petition, composed during his presidency of the United States, and evidently at a time of considerable strain.” Douglas closes with this prayer by Washington:

Most Gracious Lord: from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift, take care, I pray Thee, of my affairs, and more and more direct me to Thy truth.

Suffer me not to be enticed from Thee by the blandishments of this world.

Work in me Thy good will; discharge my mind from all things that are displeasing to Thee, of ill will and discontent, wrath and bitterness, pride and vain conceit, of myself, and render me charitable, pure and patient.

Make me willing and fit to die when Thou shalt call me hence.

Bless the whole race of mankind, and let the world be filled with the knowledge of Thyself and Thy Son, the Christ.

Bless Thou my friends, and grant me grace to forgive my enemies as heartily as I desire forgiveness of Thee for my transgressions.

Defend me from all evil, and do more for me than I can think or ask, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Washington’s Simplicity

by Ronald R Johnson

[This is from a sermon entitled, “The Father of Our Country,” preached by Lloyd C. Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on February 22, 1920. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)]

“Now, if a man proposes to be a servant of his time, it means that his chief errand in life is to give rather than to get. There is something peculiarly apt about Paul’s admonition to them that have something to give.

“Says the Tarsan: ‘Let him that gives, do it with simplicity.’

“No big show of it; no large spread of it; no self-conscious parade of it; for many a seemly virtue has been made extremely obvious for having been too broadly advertised by its possessor.

“Not too serious about it, either, as if to say, ‘Here, I have skimped and saved and done without — for you, you no-account; I have slaved till my fingers bled, in order to hand you this inestimably valuable whatever-it-is; and now that it is yours, don’t let me ever catch you forgetting what an awful time I had getting it for you.’

“Why, you and I know people who, when they give anything, raise such a hullabaloo about it and make such a profound and painful fuss over their magnanimity that they who benefit by the generosity would as leave do without the good thing as to witness the scene in the shambles before the altar of sacrifice has been reached.

“George Washington had much to give, and he gave it with simplicity. He apparently never thought of himself as a great man who must of necessity weigh his every word so that when history laid hold of him it should find him guiltless of a split infinitive or caught with some idea slightly less than cosmic in its application. I don’t believe he was thinking much about the future or attempting to prescribe for universal maladies of the social order. He was doing his honest best to serve his own people, of his own generation, and minister to the needs of the hour.

“One mark of his simplicity was his modesty, a not altogether unbecoming grace in a man elected by his countrymen to execute their wishes. When, for example, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the United States armies, he declared himself utterly unfit for the position and begged to be permitted to serve his country, at war, in some subordinate capacity. And when finally he accepted this trust, he took the office without salary, stoutly maintaining that only the feeling that he might be shirking his duty if he declined reconciled him to the idea of serving in this conspicuous position.

“Moreover, it is stated of him that Washington was always a determined skeptic as to his fitness to fill the positions to which he was successively elected, plainly shrinking from promotions involving larger responsibilities. When Washington gave of himself, he gave with simplicity.

“Examination of his state papers reveals them as of immediate concern with the problems of the exact day and hour of their composition. Therefore they are of great interest to succeeding generations. Had he been writing under the delusion that he was a prophet or a seer, it would not have been so. Neither would his utterances have amounted to much in his own time, or to anything later.

“He was just a simple-hearted American citizen — of deep patriotism and genuine concern for his neighbors, trying to do and say that which might best meet the needs of his country at the hour. And, having acted in that attitude, his words have become invested with much wisdom for his posterity…. No prophet; no sage; no seer; no political mystic, conscious of the powers of divination; but only a simple-hearted, great-souled, fine-fibered Christian gentleman — the welfare and contentment of his countrymen his most urgent thought.”

[I will share the last part of Douglas’s sermon in my next post.]

Douglas’s Thoughts on George Washington

by Ronald R Johnson

“The sign and token of this day is a device featuring a hatchet and the ragged stump of a young cherry tree. Many people know that George Washington once cut down a cherry tree and truthfully confessed his sin, who probably remember little else about this man except, possibly, that he was the first president of the United States.

“Now, instead of merely taking it for granted, as a peculiar and interesting fact that so great a man as Washington must be made concrete for us by the sign of a hatchet with which, as a lad, he was said to have hewn down a cherry tree, it is worth our while to attempt to fathom the reason for this. Surely there must be a reason.

“It may be hastily concluded that this hatchet symbol means that Washington’s outstanding attribute was his unswerving adherence to the absolute truth. In the interest of that same kind of truth, it must be admitted that this story about Washington probably hasn’t a leg to stand on. It pains me to reflect that this yarn about the hatchet and the cherry tree was said to have been invented by a man of my own profession — one Reverence Mason Weems.

“This good man wrote a biography of Washington in 1800 which caught the popular fancy and had a circulation quite out of proportion to its actual merits. When, six years later, he came to the point of preparing a second edition of it — flushed with pride over his success — he introduced many anecdotes of Washington’s youth which that worthy, then silent in his tomb at Mt. Vernon, was unable to deny. Among these delightful reminiscences of the great man which the Reverend Mr. Weems evolved from his exceedingly versatile imagination, occurred the story of the cherry tree. And she is a very unprofitable schoolteacher who fails to point the salutary moral for her disciples that Washington was so infatuated with the truth that it began to show up in him when he was a little boy; therefore, go and do likewise.

“A slightly deeper inquiry into the peculiar processes of the public mind, however, in catching at this fanciful story of the hatchet and the cherry tree reveals a fact that must not be overlooked in our estimate of Washington. That he was a truth-lover and a lie-hater is undoubtedly correct. But the real reason that the hatchet-story has become symbolic of this man is probably due to his simplicity of heart.

“There are a few equestrian statues of Washington, but they are not notable statues, and not many people know exactly where they are, who carved them, or the occasions of their establishment. When you try to visualize Washington, you do not think of him on a horse, though that is the way he spent most of his time out of doors. Neither do you conjure a picture of him brandishing a sword and shouting to a tattered and disorganized army to get into the game and try to put some pep into it before it is too late.

“You would have John Paul Jones that way, and Phil Sheridan, and the redoubtable [Teddy] Roosevelt (all of whom were truly great men, if I have any notion of the meaning of that adjective), but Washington seems always to be placid, poised, unexcited.

“Most people like that picture of him in the open boat, crossing the Delaware — by no means posed as a big dictator, frowning upon the slaves of his galley, impatient to be done with them and on his way — but rather as a member, in good and regular standing, of a party of patriots, all equally concerned with a common cause — he not moving any faster than they, all of them in the same boat, he conscious of the value and importance of their oar-strokes to the successful course of this little transport.

“One of the marks of Washington’s greatness was his democratic simplicity. Of old, our Master said to his disciples, apropos of human greatness: ‘You are aware that among the gentiles, their leaders exercise lordship and their greatest men lord it over them; it must not be so among you. Whoever would be greatest must be servant of all.’

“Now, we do not stray far afield when we make this the first test of a genuinely great man. Of course, it is to be admitted that there are many notable historic characters of whom but little could be predicated, were one to judge them by this Galilean standard of greatness. But such conspicuous characters were mostly of the type that shot up, like a red rocket, to flare, dazzlingly, for an hour, in some crucial exigency when, but for their audacity and courage, a great cause might have been lost. And we are quite willing that these meteors should have as much praise as the fixed stars — even if their highest service was rendered at the moment of their extinction.

“But as one turns the pages which certify to the long careers of eminent leaders, one discovers that the great names — the really and truly great, who were so great that little children must be taught to speak pieces about them and the banks close on their birthdays, seven scores of years after their deaths — such great were invariably of the servant type in their attitude toward the state as an institution, and their countrymen as fellow pilgrims.”

[Douglas went on to talk about this attitude of service. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.]