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 Lloyd C Douglas Page 