It is Week 2 of a three-week series on “Personality” by Lloyd C Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor. It is January 25, 1920. (This is from Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)
“Here is a man,” says Douglas, “anxious to make a place for himself in the estimation of society; eager to find that one task which he may perform better than any other task; hopeful of leaving an impress of his influence upon his generation — what is it, in his case, but a simple matter of salesmanship?
“And the article for sale? Himself. That is really all he has to market: himself. And before he goes out to create a demand for himself, he must first sell himself to himself. It will be extremely difficult for him to make anyone else believe that he is worthy of regard unless he himself thinks so. It will be next to impossible for him to express his personality in his contacts with other people until he has become conscious of the value and importance of his personality.
“Now, last Sunday (as you may recall) we spent most of our time investigating the reasons one may properly hold for believing in the worth of oneself. We began our thinking by predicating of ourselves divine sonship. I do not intend to review that argument at this time but only to add a few sentences to it. Whoever is conscious of the fact that he is, in a very real sense, a spiritual reproduction of the Infinite and directly accountable to the Infinite for the use he makes of his personality has that in his life which guarantees him power in the exact proportion to his faith in this fact. If he is but dimly, vaguely, fleetingly conscious of this fact (as, for example, in such moments as the present one, when the idea is forced upon his attention), then he receives a dim, vague, fleeting stimulus to realize this personal power which accrues through an occasional recognition of his supreme inheritance.
“If, however, every morning of his life, upon waking, it is a settled habit of his to fix his first conscious thought upon the hope that he may, through the day, walk worthily of the vocation whereunto he is called, by right of high birth, keenly sensible of his trusteeship of a personality for which he is to be held strictly to account; if, at night, his last conscious thought before he sleeps (the thought which he stows away in his subconsciousness to dominate its operations during the hours when active consciousness retires from the field in favor of the deeper, permanent self), if that thought is a mental recognition of the bond between his spirit and the Divine Giver and Keeper of his spirit, then this fact of his supreme importance as a child of God gradually becomes automatic in its effect and controls his life without his willing it so to do.
“In his case, the power of this spiritual contact is no longer a mere sporadic life, such as the heart may sense in a moment of high inspiration, when temporarily exposed to the dazzlingly bright possibilities of a God-led personality, but constitutes a steady pull, good for all weathers and in all climates, and guaranteed to keep him poised in the midst of all tests, discouragements, and temporary losses.
“It was an easy and logical step, in our argument, to pass from the fact of our divine sonship to the correlated fact of our human brotherhood. The universal brotherhood of all men, everywhere. Now, ‘universal’ is a very large word, but when we use it here, we must take it as it stands: all-inclusive. If all men are not my brothers, then God is not the Father of any of us. If God is your Father and mine, ehtn He is also the Father of everybody — our fellows and our foes, our countrymen and foreigners — everybody, white, red, yellow, brown and black, clean or dirty, cultured or crude, educated or benighted.
“Of course, we talk glibly about our belief in the brotherhood of man, but when we consider it in its practical outworkings, it is an idea entirely too big for any man to absorb or accept in a moment. It requires patient cultivation if one is to build it into one’s thinking so that the effect of it will be manifest in one’s personality. It implies that no matter how unattractive another person may be to me, he has, within him, that which sets him apart from all other men: a personality which I am bound to respect if I respect my own.
“This, I insist, is a hard saying. It means that when I see a dense crowd of men, untrained of mind and uncouth of manner, pouring out through the open gates of a great factory at noon, leaden of eye and dull of feature, I must recognize in them my spiritual brothers, each one of whom, though perhaps only very dimly conscious of the fact, possesses a personality like unto which there is not, in all the world, another. There isn’t a square inch of skin on his body that has a duplicate in the universe. He, too, was made for a distinctive purpose. If conditions make it difficult for him to realize that end, that fact has nothing to do with my appreciation of the dignity of his personality.
“Now, I am reiterating all this with as much insistence as I can because the development of personality hangs upon it, and because there is little use going into details until we have mastered this rudiment. I cannot properly express my own personality until I am ready to concede that every other man also possesses a personality which is as much entitled to respect as my own.
“Once that fact is firmly fixed in your mind, your contacts with all other people are so satisfactory to them, so flattering to them (if you will permit that phrase) that you instantly win their confidence and respect. Whoever he may be, he knows, by the manner in which I take his hand and meet his eyes with mine, he knows exactly what his status is, in my estimation. And there is no practiced trick of manner, no artificial energy of hand-clasp, no pumped-up enthusiasm of salutary smile, that will deceive him as to my thought of him.”
All of this was really just a recapitulation of what Douglas had said the previous week. In my next post, I’ll tell you where he took the subject from here.
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