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.
“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.]
“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.]
“Whenever any of his historical characters in a play happened to get caught in a tight squeeze, or a peculiar predicament demanding instant resourcefulness, William Shakespeare always hurried to the rescue with a fine phrase that exactly suited the emergency.
“A typical occasion arose when that interesting ex-hero, Julius Caesar, lay weltering in his own gore at the foot of Pompey’s statue, having gone the way of things autocratic. It seemed incumbent upon somebody to make a few remarks. Antony volunteered to perform this solemn service. And as he cast about for some reliable rhetorical whitewash wherewith to anoint the nineteen (or was it twenty-six?) carmine-stained dirk-rents in the toga of him whose first personal pronoun singular had become too huge any longer to be contained in his corporeal body, Shakespeare rushes to Antony’s relief with this wholesale indictment of humanity: ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’
“As much as to say, ‘Of course, an unfriendly world — meaning you — will reflect only upon this man’s mistakes; it will not, however, be decent enough to remember the good things about him, many of which I could tell you if I had the time and you were fit to hear them.’
“In passing, it might be added that Mark Antony was not the sole beneficiary of this fetching phrase — as many a hard-pressed funeral orator of a less remote period would willingly testify. Whenever you happen in upon the obsequies of a public character and hear the preacher quote this text of Shakespeare’s, you may put it down that they are getting ready to bury all that is mortal of a great rake. It is never used except as a sweet-smelling spice to embalm somebody of whom the less said, the better.
“For ordinary working purposes, it is untrue. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, ‘the evil that men do’ is speedily forgotten, provided they had contrived to achieve enough of good to warrant their being remembered at all. And for every Nero, Caligula, Attila, or Judas Iscariot, of whose lives nothing is preserved but the decidedly unpleasant, and whose names are symbolic of all that is reprehensible, there abide, securely fixed in the chronicles of every nation, hundreds of heroes whom history reveres to the extent of adulation — entirely willing to forget their lapses and indiscretions.
“History is just the subconscious mind of the human race and can be depended upon to tuck deeply away from sight whatsoever of her memories she would willingly part with. Doubtless one of the most beneficent provisions of our All Wise Creator is His endowment of us with this strange capacity for battering down the unpleasant, the humiliating, the belittling, and the besmirching experiences of our past, until the memory of them rarely obtrudes upon our active consciousness. One of the most cruel forms of insanity is that of the disordered mind which is no longer able to keep its bitter doses down.
“And, by the same token, he is most richly invested of all men who, ‘forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth to those things which are before,’ can press toward the mark, unimpeded by the torturing memories of his weaker hours. In like manner is that nation to be considered most fortunate which can, with good conscience, transpose Antony’s requiem over Caesar into a major key and shout that the good that men do lives after them while their evil is mostly buried in their graves.
“We Americans, said to be rather generous by nature, have been singularly blessed with this ability to celebrate the very best that is to be remembered of the lives of our heroes. We are prompt to idealize them and make the most of their merits. No sooner does a strong man die than we put his fineness out, at compound interest, and, in a space, are able to strum the lute and chant epic songs about our great, in which the canonical and apocryphal are so delightfully and inextricably entangled that our minstrelsy might well excite the envy of Homer and bring confusion upon the head of the imaginative Vergil.
“One of the fascinating cases in point is that of the truly great man whose birthday we celebrate on this twenty-second day of February — he who has become known as the Father of our Country.”
Have you ever been part of a group icebreaker exercise where you were asked, “What superpower do you wish you had?” There’s something like that in this text I’m quoting from Lloyd Douglas, except he isn’t asking what powers you wish you had; he’s asking how high you would rate the powers you have been given.
“If the cause is large enough,” says Douglas, “and a man is aware of its importance, he can be depended upon to esteem that cause first. His life, his convenience, his appetite, these are negligible considerations.
“So, with Jesus, the solution of his problem all traced back to his estimate of the importance of his power. If it was Heaven-lent, it was not to be used in any such manner as was involved in this temptation.
“If a student fails of preparing himself for his life-work because, while he was in college, sport was more important than study, because he had gone through his period of training saying, ‘A man must live. A man must have a bit of fun. A man can’t work himself to death,’ this only means that his temporary pleasure was of more concern to him than his permanent power. He is an opportunist.
“If the merchant or manufacturer fails to keep his product up to grade because of unscrupulous competition, saying, ‘A man must live,’ he merely means that temporary success is more important than a permanent sense of inviolable integrity.
“This is the problem Jesus handles in his statement, ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break through and steal, for where your treasures are, there will your heart be also.’
“If bread is the supreme fact of your life, why then, it is to be supposed that you should go after bread — but it will be with the distinct understanding that there are many other things, probably better, which will be forever denied you. If ‘getting on prosperously, by any hook or crook’ is the best thing in life and affords you chief satisfaction, why, it were foolish to have any other aspiration.
“But if the great things of life are larger than pleasure, more significant than prosperity, better than bread, then one must sacrifice to have them, just as one must sacrifice the great things to have less. One rarely appreciates a virtue until one has purchased the right to its possession at a heavy price.
“I suppose most of our mistakes are made because we do not invoice our personal power at a figure sufficiently high to represent its value. We cheat, only because we do not understand the moral satisfaction of being honest. We lie, because we have not recognized the moral pleasure of being truthful. We are selfish, only because we have not experienced the joy of sacrifice.
“The tempter says, ‘Jesus, you are hungry. You have the power to provide bread. Why not do so?’
“And Jesus replies, ‘Why not, indeed? I am hungry and I have the power to provide bread. But if I… debase my power for this purpose, what will that do to my power? Will not that act reduce my power — just by placing a low figure on it?’
“So may I today test out the value of my brain, to me — my eyes, my ears, my hands, my heart. What are they all worth? Just what I think they are worth. If I use them for the attainment of little, selfish ends, then they are worth just as much as littleness and selfishness are worth. If they are quite too important to be put to unworthy uses, they are important enough to be put to worthy uses. Which is only another way of saying that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
“If he thinks himself a rascal, he is — all of that. If he thinks his life is worthless and his mind is poor and his power is cheap, he is correct in his assumptions.
“And if he thinks himself a child of God, entrusted with power too precious to be squandered — he is a child of God, and his power is precious. It does not belong on Mammon’s counter, but upon the altar of his God.”
This raises the question: What powers have you been given?
“Jesus was entering upon his life work, jubilant of heart. He did not journey into the Jeshimon Wilderness over a Via Dolorosa. He was led up. All the bright hopes of the future led him up. He had a career before him. He had found his Father, God. His Father was very real to him — not circumscribed by books and laws and holy buildings, but accessible to all His children, regardless of race or country. Someday soon [Jesus] would return and tell the story of his discovery of this spiritual Father.
“There comes a time in every story when all the circumstances, episodes, and incidents of the narrative seem to have converged upon one focal point which is to stand as a sort of decision day. A casual event of a few chapters earlier, passed as merely possessing a touch of color now bobs up wearing a very determined air. And so, when all of these circumstances, accumulated along the way, strike that point of focus where there are some great choices to be made, between love and duty perhaps, or between resignation and struggle, this day and hour and place and condition are encircled with a blue pencil and named ‘The Crisis.’ After that there are definite results which follow as the night the day.
“After the Macbeths have murdered their royal guests, we expect just one eventuality; for murder will out. After King Lear has repudiated his faithful daughter and trusted himself to the tender mercies of flattery and duplicity, we know exactly what will be the end of it. After the senators have finally rounded up enough influences to assure the destruction of Caesar and have planned the crime and gone home to make ready the fateful hour, we ourselves might easily compose the rest of the story. After the moneychangers have been scourged out of the temple, we understand that the cross is already in the making. When the crisis has been reached, the catastrophe is inevitable….
“Jesus is tempted to misuse his divine power by producing bread. It was not a question of starvation for him. He was hungry because he had gone out voluntarily where there was no food to be had. When he finds himself dangerously hungry, in peril of his life through starvation, he may easily retrace his steps out of the wilderness and find food.
“The problem was, What use should he make of his newfound power? For he was conscious now of his ability to perform extraordinary deeds.
“‘Here is all this wonderful energy,’ he was saying. ‘Let me test it out. I am hungry. I need bread. Why should I not use my power to provide food?’
“And as the sense of his power, on the one hand, and his hunger, on the other, associated themselves in his mind, he felt that much could be said in favor of doing this thing. To be sure, he could find bread by going back where bread was to be had. But it was good for him to be out here in this wilderness, planning his campaign. He ought not to be inconvenienced by hunger. It seemed like a temptation of necessity….
“How often do we get ourselves into trouble through such faulty logic as deals with a so-called problem of necessity. A man gives his customers short weight and adulterated goods because an ungodly competition makes it necessary. Overworks and underpays his employees because industrial rivalry makes it necessary. Lies to forward his business interests because if he does not lie, he can’t compete with his rivals — the lie therefore being necessary.
“Sometimes he says, ‘A man must live,’ not meaning that he is likely to die but that a man must live up to a certain standard of convenience, wealth, and luxury….
“Jesus’ reply to his temptation may properly be regarded a motto for all who face what they choose to call the temptation of necessity. ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ There are other considerations of higher value than bread. Just the satisfaction of knowing that one has maintained one’s principles, at the cost of bodily hunger and inconvenience, is worth more than the satisfaction of serving one’s appetite.”
[I’ll tell you his concluding thoughts in my next post.]
“One does not rightly understand the setting of this scene,” he says, “unless one is acquainted with another figure in the sacred drama: one John the Baptist. Owing to the fact that this rugged character is cut down in young manhood, paying with his life the costly price of speaking his mind candidly in the court of Herod Antipas, we see so little of him that he is likely to escape observation. Nobody can hope to become fully conversant with the mission of Jesus, however, unless he acquaints himself with this young hermit who plays a part so significant in the life of the Galilean.
“From his youth, John believed that the religion of his fathers faced a crisis and demanded a reform. He never thought of himself as a revolutionist or reformer. He was the forerunner of a reformer. His priestly father, Zacherias, had consecrated him in childhood to the Nazarite order, one of the most severely austere monastic sects ever established; and, in pursuance of that vow, the young Judean had left home at a tender age, to live the life of a recluse.
“Twenty miles east of Jerusalem, flanking the Dead Sea, there was and is an arid waste, in area about half the size of Washtenaw County [the county in which Douglas and his listeners are gathered], where such scraggy vegetation as survived the rigors of the climate only added to the unattractiveness of the sun-drenched, windswept waste of jagged rocks. There, John the Baptist spent most of his life, wandering up and down the parched ravines, shouting, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord’ — which any modern businessman would say was poor advertising, inasmuch as nobody ever went into the Jeshimon Wilderness except an occasional caravan en route from Engedi to Joppa.
“Be that as it may, the time came when thousands made the pilgrimage into the wilderness to hear the hermit preach, and vast numbers, infected by his contagious enthusiasm for a revival of the real spiritual interests of the Hebrew monotheism, believed his words and were baptized with water — a brand-new ceremony by which John welcomed his disciples into the rejuvenated kingdom of the heart. At length, as his influence increased and the crowds grew larger, he was persuaded to move northward, out of the dreary, bleak Jeshimon Wilderness into the more pleasant and accessible meadows along the Jordan River, where he continued his preaching and baptizing until one day a stranger appeared, a young man of quiet dignity and great personal charm, and when John saw him, he exclaimed:
“‘This is He!’
“Jesus was baptized that day in the presence of a mystified throng of thousands. They surveyed him with rapt interest; for John had said, ‘This is He of whom I spoke, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. Behold your prophet, priest, and king!’
“One expects Jesus to make an inaugural address. The time was ripe for it, and the audience was at hand. One expects him to go at once to the Holy City, the glint of whose towers and turrets shone resplendent in the afternoon sun.
“He does neither of these things. Without a word, he emerges from the river and strides rapidly southward toward the Jeshimon Wilderness. He wished to be alone. The great moment had arrived for the inception of his ministry. But he wanted to get away by himself to examine his credentials and take stock of his spiritual resources before beginning his work.
“Thus was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days, a period of self-search which we celebrate in the Lenten season, just now at hand.”
[All of this was merely an introduction to Douglas’s sermon. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.]
“Early in the experience of every person who hopes to live a purposeful life,” says Lloyd Douglas, “there comes a consciousness of an ideal. For almost nobody is too absurdly self-sufficient [not] to understand [with Longfellow] that the ‘Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime.’ Whether or not ‘We leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time,’ is, indeed, quite another matter, depending on a variety of circumstances.”
Douglas holds up Christ as the supreme example to follow. In previous weeks he has been talking about how to develop (or, in his words, “discover” and “express”) one’s personality. Today he turns his focus on the Person whom he considers the Ultimate Personality.
“Jesus of Nazareth was but thirty-three years of age when he closed his eventful career, perhaps only thirty-one, and eighteen years of that short life are wrapped in mysterious silence. Of Jesus’ infancy and early childhood there is abundant record, replete with incident and rich in colorful detail.
“Clear-cut as a cameo [a raised sculpture cut out of a gem, in bold relief], the circumstances of his birth stand out in such high relief that all the world feels acquainted with the Babe of Bethlehem. It is as if we might take him in our arms. Every legend of the Nativity is precious. We see Joseph, the Nazarene carpenter, standing sentinel over the Child of promise, and Mary’s transfigured face as, in ecstasy of love, she clasps her little Son to her breast. We watch the shepherds leave their flocks and the sages journey from afar to pay homage at the manger-shrine. We attend the presentation in the temple and are thrilled at the escape from the murderous jealousy of the governor.
“We see him at the age of twelve, in company with his parents, attending the annual Passover feast in Jerusalem where, having contrived to gain admission to the Hall [of Hewn Stones], the lad converses with the doctors of the law on high themes, surprising and bewildering them all with his queries.
“Thus far, it is as if this sublime epic were rendered by a choir in full view, every syllable of the anthem clearly audible. But at this point there is a decided ritard. The choir recedes into its cloister and shuts the door. We hear, now, only the melody of the song as it trails off into a dreamy diminuendo, wordless and indistinct, until presently it is quite beyond the reach of our tensed ears.
“And it is as if a screened picture, presented with brisk action and bright vividness, had begun to lose its sharpness of detail, gradually drawn out of focus, until only one dim figure seems to be moving about: the figure of a growing youth who, as he increased in stature, increased also in favor with God and man. And the picture is too blurred any longer to be seen clearly, and for eighteen years we completely lose sight of him.
“Imagination comes to our aid…”
[Yes; imagination always came to Lloyd Douglas’s aid…]
“…and in fancy we see this stalwart youth embracing every opportunity to acquaint himself with the life of his fellow men. Caravans passed through the little town of Nazareth, and he talked with the travelers about the great world beyond the hills. He learned the duty and dignity of common labor in the little carpenter shop of Joseph. He attended the rabbinical school and became versed in the holy lore of his nation. He endeared himself to the villagers as a great-hearted, magnanimous youth, slow to believe evil, quick to forgive, pure as the snow, sensitive as a flower, in all things fair and above reproach.
“While he waited — waited for the day to come when he might enter upon the unique ministry, the responsibility of which had deepened within his heart as the years passed by. It is now as if the door of the sacristy had opened again. The choir comes forth, in renewal of the epic song. Jesus, the Galilean teacher, is about to enter upon his great commission.”
This is Douglas’s way of introducing the story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.
“There is also that tendency in middle life to slide. After the senses have become jaded, after the bloom has been rubbed off the ideals and anticipation holds out fewer dazzling fingers, then comes the menace of what an old-time bard called ‘the destruction that wasteth at noonday.’
“There was Saul. I would not weary you with a long story. Just a few broad charcoal strokes will suffice; a mere silhouette of him.
“His nation wanted a king. Saul was a brawny youth, handsome as any Terrean ever was. Head and shoulders over any other young man of his generation. And when the old judge, who had it all to say who should be appointed king, spied this super-youth, he called his long quest ended, invited him to an interview, told him to go home and wind up his affairs, and prepare to wear his nation’s crown.
“And Saul was completely overpowered by the high distinction that had come upon him, right out of the blue. He was afraid he wasn’t quite up to the part. Indeed, he hid himself among the freight of the caravan, half-inclined to ‘beat it,’ as we say, and evade the terrific responsibility. But persuaded at length that it was his duty to obey the call to kingship, he acceded to the throne, robed himself in the vestiture of royalty, and looked — and for a time acted — every inch a king.
“The years passed. Saul concentrated more and more upon the interests of his court as against the larger interests of his kingdom. More and more he took on the role of an autocrat, aristocrat — less and less the attitude of service to his nation. Little by little he came to regard with jealous hatred every strong personality in his court. Even the shepherd lad, brought in to play for him upon the harp, excited Saul’s envy until he was filled with murderous rage. Until, bye and bye, it was said of him, in curious words which are spoken in a tone of bleak finality, his spirit left him. And then the chronicler observes, ‘But Saul wist not that his soul had departed from him.’
“It was gone, but Saul didn’t know it. He didn’t miss it. He still had his crown; his scepter; his ermine — or whatever was the equivalent of ermine in Saul’s regal establishment; but his soul was gone.
“Where? How? When? Nobody could say.
“He had just aped the tawdry pomp of his heathen contemporaries a little too long. He had just allowed his own interests to outweigh his vested responsibilities a little too far. He had allowed his soul to come out of him gradually, until there was nothing left of it — even if he wist not that it had departed from him.
“If you have never read this majestic poem which recites the details of Saul’s tragedy and the Nemesis that overtook him, do not much longer deny yourself that experience. I do not mean to narrate any more of it. Just to stamp this one sentence down hard upon your consciousness: ‘And Saul wist not that his soul had departed from him.’
“How many a man who, as a youth, was visited by splendid dreams of a future made bright by loyal friendships, worthy achievements, and the reasonable rewards of fair deeds, has drifted and drifted on toward the twilight of age — morose, dissatisfied; both hands full of gold, perhaps; barns filled with corn, perhaps; ready to eat, drink, and be merry — and when his soul is required, he finds that he hasn’t a soul. It has departed, though he may not have observed its flight.
“And since we have been standing for a moment before an old-world portrait, let us tarry in this closing moment before another. The great emancipator of this same nation has been up on a hillcrest to commune with God concerning his responsiblity as a leader. The whole nation has been waiting in the valley for his return. And when he came down and rejoined them, it was said of him that his face was illumined. And the historian adds, ‘And Moses wist not that his face shone.’
“He was reflecting the glory that was his by virtue of his spiritual contact with his Father, but he didn’t know that his face shone. If he had known it and had thought about it and had prided himself on this distinction, perhaps the strange light would have departed from his eyes. But he was unaware of it, simply because he was too much wrapped up in the love he bore his people, and his sense of high obligation to serve them.
“I think we shall find it true that most men and women who are able to exercise great power over their fellows wist not that their faces are illumined. And just because they do not know it — being too much engrossed with the duties thrust upon them to love, to serve, to lift, to heal, to redeem — their faces shine.”
“I turn now to the final phase of our subject with much reluctance. Until now we have been talking of the most pleasant possibilities of the theme. Now we must briefly take stock of those conditions by which personality becomes impaired, if not altogether lost.
“What are these conditions?
“Perhaps we had better concentrate upon the most common cause of this tragedy: the withering blight of unwholesome influences during the plastic period of adolescence.
“I am glad that I do not know exactly how many keen-eyed, splendid youths have come to this place of high privilege where we live [the University of Michigan]… resolved to make the very most of their lives, who have failed either to realize their own bright dreams or to justify the investment made in them — all because they early fell easy victims to influences which they had neither the will, wit, nor wisdom to combat. And these influences were human influences, generated by persons whose outlook upon life was wholly opportunistic, selfish, sordid, petty, reprehensible.
“In this dull, gray atmosphere of doubt, distrust, and excessive sophistication which hovers over so many quarters where students congregate, our ambitious youth struggles for a little time to hold on to a group of ideals which seem less and less worth holding, every day, until he himself turns scoffer — and then he is done. He goes out, at length, to make his way, but it is a lonesome way, and his friendships must ever be sought among his own kind — the kind that feels as he feels about life. They are in the world for what they can get, like birds of prey. They will as promptly and effectively invade his rights as any, and he knows it. He mentally puts up his guard to defend himself against a whole race for which he bears no love — a race that will do him hurt unless he practices eternal vigilance.
“I have seen them come to college through these many years past, full of eager enthusiasm, ingenuous, lovable, arms outstretched to the world, ready to greet it with open palms. I have seen many of them go, furtive, suspicious, eyes heavy-lidded with the growing weight of distrust, incipient lines of cynicism penciling the corners of the mouth — so plainly that he who runs may read their message.” [This is a reference to Habakkuk 2:2.]
“Coming in with open palms; going out with clenched fists, to meet and overcome the world. And meanwhile the personality has escaped. Nobody can say exactly where it has gone or precisely when it took its leave — but it is gone.
“The man himself may hardly be aware of his loss, but his personality is gone. Whether he may find it possible, in later life, to retrieve it is a question I should not like to try to answer, because I do not know. All I know about it is that there isn’t room enough inside any human skin for a cultivated cynicism and a forceful personality — and cynicism is a thoroughly disintegrating mental obsession. Once it takes full possession and begins to color one’s thoughts about life, I fear the results are almost invariably dismal in the extreme.”
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 