Death – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

The Demotion of Death, Part 3

An excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Demotion of Death,” Christian Century, 1/27/1921.

The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921 issue of The Christian Century. He is talking to an audience largely of ministers, reminiscing about how harrowing funerals used to be. He writes:

“Little by little that which is mortal has abated its erstwhile interest for him who has lost his dearest friend; and gradually the whole event is being invested with the spiritual and immortal.

“The home of bereavement is, more and more, emulating that high spiritual courage which Christianity teaches. No other person is so aware of this as the minister, to whom this fact is increasingly made manifest. Whatever may be the peculiar advantages of our profession, none is so fraught with great value as the opportunity we have to see how other people conduct themselves in time of trouble! Of course, the layman knows something about this. He stands by his best friend in an hour of trouble and sees, that day, a glimpse of the radiant glory of the human soul in one of its high moments – and the remembrance of it will outlast all the other observations of his life! This may happen to the layman once, twice – a few times, perhaps – in a lifetime. In our business, such revelations are so frequent that they come to be classed as ‘all in the day’s work.’ I do not mean that we ever get used to it, or that the frequency of such experiences dulls our consciousness of the absolute grandeur of the human soul when empowered by this high spiritual courage; but we see it so often that we understand it is not a rare gift bequeathed to an occasional rare spirit, but rather that it is a sort of built-in capacity of the normal soul!

“And – sometimes – when I see that men and women are able to go under fire; and accept the losses of the very dearest possessions of their lives; and how they face, with a sense of victory and mastery, bereavements that fairly tear up the intricately knotted affections of years – smiling through it all – I stand in a kind of reverential awe before this virtue that lifts men out of the category of terrestrials and shows them to be sons of God!”

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

The Demotion of Death, Part 2

by Ronald R Johnson

The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921, issue of The Christian Century. He is talking to an audience largely of ministers, and has just finished saying how Christ’s crucifixion changed people’s attitudes toward death. He writes:

“From that day, there has been growing up in the soul of men a new and peculiar kind of spiritual courage that has demoted Death from his erstwhile position as enemy of mankind, to the office of warder at the gates of a city which only they regard with dread who have become so infatuated with the material things of life that they know that when they leave these things, they leave their all!

“There is no human happiness at all comparable to that of ‘walking fearlessly.’ One may truthfully speak of this raw spiritual courage as the finest grace of the evolving soul because it permits men to travel unafraid even of the valley of the shadow. What significant gains in this field have been registered even in the past three or four decades! I am not an old man, but I have seen marked changes in the attitude of my own generation toward the mysterious agency that men call death. I can easily recall the most intrusive and painful emphasis that used to be placed upon all the somber trappings, significant of mortality, when a house had been bereaved; the hysteria; the uncontrolled grief; the tightly-closed shutters; the whispers of the neighbors as they tiptoed about through the gloom; the long-drawn-out cruelty of funeral rites, and the too often harrowing effect of their words who had been called in to offer official comfort, and to whom a funeral, where no mortal fainted under the soul-racking discussion of loneliness on the one hand and worms on the other, was very poorly executed, indeed. And do you not remember the shock as you used to hear the heavy spadefuls of clods spattered upon the pine box lid as a grisly accompaniment to the ancient words of the committal service – that almost incredibly dismal and despairing rite which even the heathen in their blindness would probably repudiate as an awful thing to do!”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post.]

The Demotion of Death, Part 1

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Demotion of Death,” Christian Century, 1/27/1921.

The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “The Demotion of Death,” which appeared in the January 27, 1921 issue of The Christian Century. He writes:

“The world was old, weary, and jaded before there was vouchsafed to the race, through the words and deeds of Jesus, that which would dispel the gloom of life at the point where the shadows had ever rested most darkly. The Hebrew prophets spoke of death – when, rarely, they spoke of it – as a mystery too vast to be encompassed by human thought or phrased in human speech. The spiritual leaders of other peoples rose to their very highest points of faith when expressing the vague hope that the soul might persist. But all men walked uncertainly as their slanting shadows lengthened toward the east. Solemnly did they respect their obligation to preserve the bodies of their fathers, hoping that their children would deal no less considerately with theirs – but, beyond the sepulchre, there waited nothing more than was comprehended by an undefined wish.

“Thus, life lacked the buoyancy, the zest, the zeal, the urge, that came upon it by way of his spiritual contribution who has become known to the civilized world as Master and Lord. Not until he came was victory proclaimed at that part of life which surely is the most important of all parts of it! Not until he came did the soul become the motive power of life; lasting through all changes; superior to all changes; containing an indestructible spark that was as supreme over the body as the body was supreme over its clothes!

“Consistent with his own belief, this man of the vision splendid went to his own death with a serenity that made them marvel who had been so disinterested in his tragedy that they gambled for his robe. Not a tremor was in his voice as he declared to his sorrowing disciples, ‘Let not your heart be troubled. In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ Not a trace of agitation in his tone as he remarks to the fearful crowd, that lined his way to the hill Golgotha, ‘You need not weep for me! If you weep, let it be for yourselves and your generation.’ Ah – to what heights did the evolving soul of humanity arise that afternoon when he hung, dying, to whom death was but a guide to a land uninvaded by sorrow!”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post.]