Title page of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Third Phase—The Sermon Sample,” in the August 26, 1920, issue of The Christian Century.
[The following is from the third installment in Lloyd Douglas’s series, “Wanted—A Congregation!” in the summer and fall of 1920. This installment, dated 8/26/1920, is titled, “Third Phase—The Sermon Sample.” The series is about the Reverend D. Preston Blue, who is on a campaign to enlarge his audience.]
“Late one afternoon when the Blues were sitting out on their front porch talking things over, a woman sauntered up the steps peeling an apple. She smiled pleasantly but said nothing; not even ‘how-de-do’ – just smiled and peeled. Neither did the Blues disturb the silence, so fascinated were they by the performance of the woman who was skinning the rind off that apple with a curiously shaped knife that turned work into play. After a moment, Mrs. Blue exclaimed: ‘Oh – do tell me where I can get a knife like that!’ ‘You may have this one,’ replied the woman, quietly – ‘for thirty-five cents.’ She took the money, left the knife, and, enroute to the gate, picked up two bags which she had parked behind a rosebush – a large bag and a small one. Said Mr. Blue as the gate clicked behind her, ‘The small bag is full of knives, and the large bag is full of apples – and the woman is full of wisdom.’
“Now it happens that this man, who is no other than our good friend, Rev. D. Preston Blue of the consuming ambition to preach to a large congregation, has been giving himself recently to a serious study of psychology – especially in its relation to the processes by which a demand may be created in the public mind for a thing of high value. For several minutes he was thoughtful after the agent had left, and then he said, half to himself, ‘That woman has a good head. She didn’t come up with a whole bagful of knives to make a long speech about their meritorious attributes. She didn’t muddle us with a lot of knives and arguments; she simply exhibited one knife – in operation.’
“‘Yes,’ responded Mrs. Blue, who guessed what was in her husband’s mind, ‘and she didn’t tell us what a good, kind man he was who owned the factory, or what kind of wood the handle is made of, or that she herself is selling them to support eleven starving children.’
“‘Exactly!’ approved D. Preston, nodding his head vigorously. ‘She knew the value of her merchandise and just let it sell itself by a demonstration.'”
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who wants to enlarge his audience but was taught nothing at seminary about reaching the surrounding community through the local newspaper.]
“Anybody who is not more than two-thirds blind needs not be informed that most people derive their information and form their opinions from the papers. It is to be doubted if responsibility for public opinion rests so heavily upon any other man as the editor. That being true, this important individual should receive some moral support. He is entitled to the intelligent cooperation of the preacher. When he strikes exactly the right note in an editorial, registering on the side of honor, justice, and morality, he has a right to expect that his good friend the minister will call him up or drop him a line of appreciation and encouragement; not a long-winded, piously-phrased homily which may produce precisely the opposite effect than the one intended, but a mere, ‘Bully work, Jim! You are doing fine business! The people who count are with you to the limit! More power to your elbow!’
“Not only does a little recognition like this have the effect of keeping the editor buoyed up to his task, but it serves as a deterrent in moments when he is strongly tempted to trim and hedge in some situation where the nasty little virtue of Prudence is admonishing him to ‘keep in right’ with Big Tom of the Steenth Ward.
“If the minister is not too far absent in the spirit, and habitually has his ear to the ground to detect impending seismic vibrations likely to disturb The Morning Star and cause the tripod thereof to wobble, he will happen in about this time and invite the editor out to lunch. Two dollars spent in this manner will sometimes bring larger returns than invested in a volume of Thirty Thousand Thoughts for the Theologian.”
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who received a request from the local newspaper for an abstract of his sermon from the previous Sunday.]
“Now, the introduction to that sermon had cost the preacher many hours of labor. He had toiled over it until it was flawless; not a tool-mark in sight; smooth, euphonistic, rhetorically sound in wind and limb. Not on any account could he escape the temptation to repeat this introduction in his abstract. Of course, the introduction was historical. It had dealt with the dramatic incident of Israel’s abandonment of the national ideal in the building of the golden calf. To clear the way for that theatrical event, Mr. Blue had backed up about a score of years, into the Valley of the Nile, so that he might get a long, running start at the calf story.
“Confronted, now, with the necessity of boiling the whole sermon down to a scant nine inches of eight-point, instead of jumping into the very ruck of things and hurling red-hot chunks of his appeal at the public in the first paragraph, the only method his inexperience could suggest was to begin with the calf.
“We are forever lamenting that the public knows so little about the Bible. The public knows more about the Bible than we suspect. It does not understand the causes of biblical events very well, nor does it have much sense of sequence, but the majority of the reading public can recite the more stirring stories of the Bible with considerable fidelity to detail. It knows, for instance, the story of the golden calf. It knows it so well that the mere mention of that incident acts in the nature of a narcotic.
“Well; Mr. Blue had squandered his five hundred words in riotous introduction. He had told the story of Israel’s defection, but there was nothing in it – except possibly in the last few lines, which nobody reached but the proofreader – even vaguely suggestive of a modern application. The editor had found nothing in it, so far as he had gone, to warrant an attractive caption. In fact, he had labeled it, frankly, ‘The Golden Calf – Dr. Blue Recites Well-Known Story – Idol Worship.’ Think you that anybody would read it, after such a recommendation? Verily, a silly question.
“Our friend’s pride nearly bleeds to death when he reflects upon the matter. He had been given a chance to preach to every man in Centerville on Monday morning, and this is the way he had done it – by rehearsing the moral lapses of another country and another age, as if he were afraid to approach America’s and Centerville’s lapses by less than thirty-three hundred years and seven thousand miles! To be sure, this wasn’t true of him! Anybody hearing him on Sunday would have admired his fearlessness – but he kept it very carefully concealed from the public in his report on Monday.”
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who was contacted by the local newspaper and asked for an abstract of ]
“Very much in earnest over this matter, Mr. Blue proceeds to do what he ought to have done back in 1905 when he lived in Robinsonville. He subscribes for several periodicals published in the interest of writers and pores over their contents with zealous industry. He is surprised and delighted to learn that he may have easy access to a voluminous literature on the subject of composition. He is heartened to find that the rules for newspaper writing are very simple. For example: he discovers that the newspaper reporter tells his story in the first paragraph – just the bare fact that John Smith robbed William Brown’s hen-coop and was assessed a fine of $50 and thirty days in the workhouse. If the reader is consumed with curiosity to learn all the thrilling details of this event – Smith’s former record, Brown’s attitude toward his bereavement, the fate of the fowls, together with such facts and fancies as the reporter may see fit to make public – is it not written in the story, further down the page? Mr. Blue discovers that this is a hard-and-fast rule in newspaper writing, that the reporter must throw down all his salient facts in the first three or four lines.
“Judging his feeble efforts in composing ‘sermon abstracts’ for the Monday papers on rare occasions by this inviolable rule indicated above, Blue smiles wryly over the remembrance of the stuff he had submitted. If it was never read by anybody – small wonder. He can easily understand now why he is so seldom asked for reports of his sermons. He recalls the day when he had preached a really remarkable sermon on the general subject of the danger of losing a national ideal. Very few had heard it. He had announced it in the Saturday column of ‘church notices’ under the title, ‘The Golden Calf.’ Blue never had known how to compose a sermon theme, though one scarcely needs be told that. ‘The Golden Calf’ is sufficient to explain Blue’s ignorance on this subject. But it was a good sermon; and if it had been given a fair chance, it might have drawn a better audience.
“It was so strong, indeed, that a discerning auditor had called upon the editor of The Morning Star, requesting him to print an excerpt. The editor had telephoned Blue, asking for about five hundred words. Blue had consented, somewhat gingerly, to furnish the required copy.”
[But all did not go well for Blue, as Douglas will reveal in my next post…]
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” Douglas is talking about Rev. Blue, a minister who has decided to increase his audience. Blue knows he must make use of the local newspaper as a means of communication, but he doesn’t know how.]
“Had the theological school which claimed D. Preston Blue among her alumni offered a short course in Journalism for Preachers, she might have done herself and her output more credit than she ever received for the painstaking interest with which she had explained the Apocrypha in the original. Indeed, had she given this man so little as ten hours instruction in the art of composition intended for the public press, she might have served him better than with her entire wealth of erudition anent the Minor Prophets.
“When the minister, twenty years out, compares what he studied in the seminary with the actual problems he has faced daily in his profession, he wonders how his theological alma mater could have contrived to miss the mark with such systematic completeness. Almost nowhere had his instruction even remotely touched his job. He had been loaded to the gunwales with the history of doctrines, which the public didn’t care to hear about; crammed with rules for the manufacture of sermons which, if carefully observed, were guaranteed to stultify any spontaneity likely to shine through the gloom; stuffed with dogmatics, apologetics, hermeneutics, liturgics, homiletics, catechetics, exegetics, and a host of lesser ‘ics’ – now happily forgotten. But nobody had ever considered it necessary to inform him how to prepare attractive and readable ‘copy’ for a newspaper or magazine, probably for the very excellent reason that not a man on the faculty was possessed of such information. Nobody had ever so much as hinted that there were at least two ways – a right and a wrong – of phrasing sermon topics for public announcement. Never had anyone talked about the close and helpful contacts possible and desirable between preacher and editor.
“Of course, great changes – laus Deo! – have been registered in recent years in theological schools. These matters are now receiving in some quarters just a very little bit of attention. But that doesn’t help D. Preston Blue, who acquired his B.D. in the good old days when the seminary graduate was equipped only with such information as might fit him to aspire to one of the professorial chairs of the institution that had graduated him.”
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted — A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase — Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. Douglas is talking about a minister who has decided to stay with his current church and seek a wider audience there, rather than going elsewhere.]
“It is worth a great deal to our hero to have found out so much as that. Just to have stopped his continuous chatter about ‘the peculiar conditions which obtain in this town’; just to have ceased poring over the column of ‘Calls and Resignations’ in his weekly church paper, in quest of some utopia where the SRO sign would be hung on the church door Sunday mornings at 10:20; just to have left off petting his fatuous dream of Elsewhere — constitutes Mr. Blue’s first long step toward happiness in his ministry.
“This man has given himself to prayer and fasting over his problem. He knows now that there is just one thing in this world that he wants – a crowd! He is conscious of a message burning in his heart – a message so highly potential that if only he could face a large congregation with it, there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind about its value. He recalls the few times he has occupied a pew in a crowded church; the strangely magnetic quality of the audience; its tense attitude of expectancy; how the congregational singing of the hymns seemed to carry a rich overtone almost supernatural in its uplifting power; how vividly the Book poured out its inexhaustible treasures when read to that responsive crowd – a crowd that had been welded into one solid chunk so that it saw, heard, thought, and felt as with the eyes, ears, mind, and heart of one man!
“And the sermon! Inspired! Nothing less than that! Why, almost anybody could preach under such circumstances! The minister seemed fairly lifted up and borne along by the intense interest of his congregation whose size lent new significance to the belief that the gospel is, in very truth, the hope of the world! With such support, Blue knows that he, too, could preach. With the promise of such a congregation, Sunday after Sunday, he could hurl himself into his task of sermon preparation with all the zeal and abandon of a prophet.”
The cover of the August 5, 1920, issue of The Christian Century.
I’ve told you before that Douglas debuted with The Christian Century by entering an essay contest. John Spargo’s article, “The Futility of Preaching,” was the subject, and a number of ministers responded to the editor’s call for rebuttals. Douglas was one of them. Through his essay, “Preaching and the Average Preacher,” Douglas demonstrated a style all his own, and the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison invited him to submit more of his writing to the Century. In fact, he urged Douglas to do it right away, while readers still remembered his name.
Douglas did better than that: he submitted a series of articles, and he framed them as a longer, more in-depth response to Spargo’s criticisms. He called the series, “Wanted — A Congregation!” In this series, he offered advice about how one might preach in such a way that people would flock to the church (as his own parishioners had been doing for the past five years at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan). Douglas had a dynamic personality and was especially powerful in the pulpit and at the typewriter, but in this series of articles he claimed that others could learn from his successes (and failures).
It may seem astounding that Douglas could have responded to Morrison’s invitation so quickly and voluminously, but this series was based on a book he had already written more than a year earlier. In January 1919, Douglas sent a manuscript of the book The Mendicant to the Doran Company. George Doran liked the style of Douglas’s writing but wanted the book to be more religious than it actually was. Douglas didn’t take Doran’s advice, and the manuscript sat in his file cabinet, waiting for the right opportunity to try again.
Douglas recognized Morrison’s invitation as that opportunity. Although The Mendicant was written as a series of dialogues, Douglas took the information that was in his manuscript and rewrote it as a series of essays. Over the next few weeks, I will share excerpts from those essays.
Christ is part of a caravan of pilgrims making their way into Jerusalem for Passover Week. They are singing the songs of deliverance. Douglas says:]
“There was just a slim chance that Israel, feverishly anxious to find adequate leadership, would listen to [Christ’s] message. If ever they were in a mood to hear an interpretation of God’s will, one would think that time was now.
“If he could only lead them to see that their Messianic hope must reside, at last, in a new social order, in a new spiritual commonwealth.
“It was worth trying.
“It would probably be unsuccessful, but it was worth trying. He resolved to submit himself to the outward tests of the Messiah, as picturesquely foretold by the prophets.
“His disciples were ordered to go find a colt, the foal of an ass. They spread their garments on the beast, in the presence of the curious throng of wayfarers. The word was passed along that the Young Prophet of Nazareth who was reputed to have healed the sick, whose words were quoted on every hand as words of authority, was about to ride into Jerusalem as the Messiah.
“Messengers rushed to Jerusalem and spread the tidings.
“Jesus rode slowly at the head of a vast concourse of people. Jerusalem poured through the city gates and hurried out to meet him.
“It is said that the road which he took still exists, winding around the shoulder of Olivet amid groves of figs and palms until, suddenly, across a wide ravine, Jerusalem rises like a city painted on the clouds.
“The crowd rifled the trees of their foliage and strewed the branches along the road for the advancing king. The cries of ‘Hosanna!’ filled the air. The multitude grew hysterical with joy. Never was there a scene of such enthusiasm; never a crowd so infatuated with a sublime idea.
“To those tumultuous throngs, it seemed that the knell of Rome had sounded. The long and often disappointed dream of Jewish nationality was coming true! The golden age had dawned — for, at last, a Jewish king was riding to his capital in triumph.
“Amid this tumult of delight which swept away all sober sense, no one was any longer capable of seeing things in clear and lucid outline; all swam through a dazzling mist; all caught the glamor of imagination.
“And least of all did the multitude perceive the growing sadness on the face of Jesus.
“At the distance of about a mile and a half from Bethany, the road abruptly bends to the right, a narrow plateau of rock is reached, and with a startling suddenness the whole city is revealed. Nowhere perhaps in all the world is there to be attained a view of a metropolis so complete in itself or so dramatic in the suddenness of its revelation.
“It was here that the procession halted.
“There stood the temple, filling every corner of the area with its multiplied and splendid colonnades, with its superb and lofty edifices, which crowded to the very edge of the abyss and rose from it like a glittering apparition.
“The whole city was planned upon a scale of almost equal grandeur. On every hand, mansions of marble rose out of gardens of exquisite verdure. Terrace upon terrace, the city climbed. In the northwest it was crowned by the porticoes of Herod’s palace; a vast aqueduct spanned the valley; and from the Temple to the upper city stretched a stately bridge; while the walls themselves, built of massive masonry and apparently impregnable, suggested a city ‘half as old as Time.’
“It was thus that these ecstatic pilgrims thought of the sacred city. Jerusalem — beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth — would endure forever, when Rome had vanished.
“If Jehovah had humbled her by permitting Roman occupation, it was only for a day — and the hour had now struck. The King was coming to his own. How delightful it was to shout ‘Our King’!
“But these were vain hopes and fond illusions, not shared by him whom they acclaimed. Where all was hope and pride and triumph, he alone was not elated. He alone saw the city with the prophet’s brooding eye; and as the procession halted on this rock plateau from which the whole vast panorama lay unfolded, an utter sadness fell upon his heart.
“And he wept.
“Jerusalem had rejected the things that might have made for her peace. It was too late to avert the disaster.
“To the consternation of his followers, Jesus wept what must have seemed to them tears of weakness in the very hour when courage was most needed to affirm of himself what they affirmed of him, that he was a king.
“Now, I think that anybody could tell the rest of this story even if he had never heard it. Need it be said that the crowd left off chanting and fell into little groups to discuss the situation in bewilderment? Need it be said that they threw away their palm branches and retired from him?
“He rode on into Jerusalem and saw it through. But it was a day of great disappointment — both for him and Jerusalem.
“They were not ready for an ideal king who believed in the social commonwealth of souls. They wanted a king who could give them political freedom — and, at length, political power.”
The following is from “A Suggested Valedictory for Class Day at AnyCollege,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the June 1920 issue of The Intercollegian (the monthly magazine of the YMCA). Douglas had already done something similar a year earlier under the title, “A Truthful Commencement Address,” given by the college president. This time he’s pretending to be a member of the graduating class:
“Honorable Board of Directors, Members of the Faculty, Distinguished Guests, Alumni, Fond Parents, Fellow Students, Dear Classmates, Ladies and Gentlemen, and — have I forgotten anybody, I wonder?
“We are about through. One more long, trying session in these flowing robes — appropriately so-called because of their perspiration-exciting capacities — and we shall float out of them upon the sea of life.
“It is a well-known fact among us that only a few skippers of our gladsome fleet are aware of their next port of call. Most of us are concerned with the business immediately at hand — that of standing on the bridge, waving our handkerchiefs to the crowd on the wharf.
“Personally, I have an uneasy misgiving about my cargo. For some years, the stevedores have been dumping it into my hold, and I have stood by, checking the items: two B’s of this, three A’s of that, and ten C’s of something else, with an occasional D or two of something else — but making no effort to store the stuff in a manner that may permit of its being unloaded. Indeed, as I have looked into the hold now and again, of late, I have been quite worried over the problem. I find that I have been considering certain consignments as mere dunnage which really are of great value. There are huge bales of priceless wares chucked down in the bilge, probably water-soaked and half rotten by this time, that I could market for a fine price if only I had known earlier how important it was to preserve them.
“Moreover, I have my cabin piled high with boxes and cartons of merchandise which, a little while ago, seemed tremendously valuable, but now appear to be useless.
“I recall with a shudder how I laughed on the day that the big bale labeled ‘Political Economy’ broke loose from the grappling hooks and fell through to the very keel of me and smashed; and I said, ‘Oh, well; it amounts to little anyway! Let it lie!’ That same day, I was toting up to my stateroom packages of stuff which were so precious I wouldn’t let anyone else touch them — all about the movie stars, the latest crinkle in jazz, the last sartorial yip from the haberdashery.
“I would give much today if I might escape this Turkish bath for a few hours to dig about in my hold and lay hands upon some of the discarded and water-logged possessions of mine and fish them out.
“But that seems impossible. The engines are chug-chugging, and the band is um-pah-ing, and our admiring friends are bidding us ‘Bon voyage!’ We must be true to form and see the event through, according to the best traditions. Forgive us for wearing serious faces. We cannot help being reflective. Every mother’s son of us knows that he is embarking with a badly-distributed ballast.
“As for myself, I am aware that there isn’t a scrap of machinery in me capable of hoisting a single bale of my cargo up out of the hold. I hooted at the Literary Society and called the Oratorical Association funny names. I never learned how to speak in public and am considerably at a disadvantage when it comes to expressing myself clearly in private. I do not know how to write, convincingly or any other way. It is difficult for me to compose a readable letter of fifteen lines. In other words, I am full of knowledge up to my quarter deck, and I have no equipment for disgorging it.
“O ye who follow us — a word with you! Be careful how you store your cargo. Don’t emulate our folly who have debated, hours, on the respective merits of Gish and Pickford; who wrote long editorials admonishing the local play-houses against showing such an excessive amount of advertisements on the screen to the loss of our time who had come rather to see Deadeye Pete and Mexico Jake save the life of the Queen of Bronco Bill’s Dive; who had no time for concerts, lectures, art exhibits, or the paleontological museum — half ashamed, indeed, to be caught with an interest in such things — I say, don’t try to perpetuate our foolishness!
“Store your cargo so that you can get at it again. Be sure that you rig some windlasses and donkey-engines on your decks, to be used at various ports! And Heaven help you if you toss down into the bilge-water merchandise of great value. I know some of you. Already well on toward committing the same blunder that today causes us unrest. Nobody could persuade you to appear in a collar one-quarter inch too high — and you pooh-pooh the idea of trying to find out what ails Russia!
“Farewell! We are off! In many respects, we have been off all along. Farewell! Just toss that rear hawser in, will you? That’s a good fellow! Thanks!”
I’ve been doing a series on the essays Lloyd Douglas published in The Intercollegian (the monthly magazine of the YMCA) from January 1919 through June 1920. If you’ve been reading these articles, you may have noticed that Douglas was quite upset with some of the things going on in the nation’s universities following the First World War. When Douglas was against a thing, his sarcasm often took over, and he could become quite pessimistic.
In today’s essay, from the March 1920 issue, Douglas tells about a student who wrote to him and challenged him to change his attitude. Douglas’s response was called “Streaks of Sunshine.” He accepted the challenge and tried to find things to rejoice about. (It’s amusing that one of the things he found was evidence that jazz was on the way out. Douglas, who loved classical music, had a life-long aversion to jazz, and he seized upon this news. Fortunately for the rest of us, that prophecy was not fulfilled.) Here is that essay:
“The other day an undergraduate in a midwestern college who had read in this magazine a few pessimistic remarks of mine relative to some depressing observations of present-day student life wrote and told me so.
“He was highly indignant, and his pen fairly spluttered his disapproval of me and my sour reflections.
“I was glad that he didn’t agree with me. If I were sure there were fifty men just like him in every college, ready to quarrel with me on that point, I should throw up my hat and yell, Hoo-ray!
“Or forty — or thirty — or twenty! I would hoo-ray if there were only ten! Ten optimists could have saved Sodom. And Sodom was a bad outfit. (See the Bible for particulars.)
“I told this young fellow that I would take a few doses of calomel and try to think of some good reasons for being cheerful. Pursuant to this promise, I hereby beg leave to report.
“You can’t get a seat at the Cort Theatre in New York to see John Drinkwater’s ‘Lincoln’ unless you apply a month in advance, with a special pull and a stuffed club.
“The obese producers of our theatrical entertainment (much of whose fatty tissue has accumulated above the collar) are slightly bewildered. They always thought they knew exactly what the American people wished to see. They have produced salacious drivel and sensational flapdoodle for the stage, under the impression that a play couldn’t succeed unless it was slightly off-color. Now they are discovering, with something of a shock, that the Americans have brains. Thousands are clamoring for a chance to see a drama woven about the history of a great American leader. It is a streak of sunshine on our way! Cheer up!
“Reports, properly authenticated, certify that jazz is on the wane; that people are getting tired of the abominable racket of it, the drooling idiocy of it, the execrably bad taste of it — and that a revival of decent music impends. It may be some time before all the back counties hear that the Great Jazz is dead; but whoever contemplates taking up trap-drumming as a life-work had better consult the oracles before he invests too heavily in a supply of cowbells, tin pans, and sandpaper, wherewith to gladden the hearts of his countrymen. For his countrymen are weary, to the point of tears, over such nasty noises. This is a streak of sunshine! And again I say: Rejoice!
“One hundred and forty of the branches of the Christian Church in America have become party to a plan which proposes to demonstrate that they are all able to work together for the common good, forgetful of the old divisive controversies.
“Plenty of people who have spent their lives chattering about the reprehensible ructions among the denominations will now have nothing to talk about. Some of them will again have to be taught to speak, just as many a typhoid patient is obliged to learn how to walk. This will be a great pity. Otherwise, it is all very happy. It is a streak of sunshine! Dawn of a new day!
“A tidal wave of evangelism sweeps the country, invading many quarters previously stolid and indifferent. The colleges are feeling the impact of this new idea. You know what a ‘hormone’ is, don’t you? Well, this new idea is in the nature of a hormone. (Business of looking it [up] in the dictionary. I doubt if you find it. It’s a new word. So is this a new idea. You can’t pour a new idea into an old word, lest the word break, and the idea be spilled.) More students are asking questions about enlistment for life service than ever before in the history of American colleges. More sunshine!
“Here’s to the student who gets sore when some old fossil says we’re going to the bow-wows. Let him line up the other nine in his school who feel as he does about it — and see what happens! Another streak of sunshine! I expect to see daybreak before long!”
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 