Tag: gratitude

by Ronald R Johnson

This is from a sermon entitled “The Grounds of Our Gratitude,” that Lloyd C. Douglas preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, November 23, 1919. (It can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

He gives four reasons for being grateful. The first (which I talked about in the previous post) was the fact that he and his people were alive during such an interesting era.

The second: “I am glad that I am permitted to live in this country. How would you like to be spending the only life you have to live in Russia these days? [The revolution in Russia had begun two years earlier and was still going on.] Or would you have preferred Armenia? [Their fate was uncertain in 1919.] How about Germany? [Having lost the war, they were expected to pay everyone else’s bills.] Can you think of any other country on the face of the earth that could offer you as much of advantage — security — liberty — and general satisfaction as this land in which we live?

“To be sure, we, too, are in a maze of serious problems; but they are not problems of how to deal with hardships so much as how to deal with excessive prosperity. It is not our poverty that has bothered us but our marvelous national riches.

“We are not now worried over the problem of trying to secure a larger liberty, but how to regulate those who would abuse the liberties that have been tendered them with such prodigality. Our industrial problem, for example, does not consist of a situation in which labor has more work than it really ought to be asked to do, but how to give the laboring man a contented mind, now that he has so much time on his hands to fret about the limitations of his job.

“Our problems are serious; but they are all problems arising out of progress, and not of repression or slavery. Any child in this country who wants an education can get it, and when he completes what the state has to offer him, absolutely free of cost, he has the equivalent of the education offered by the average college only twenty-five years ago.

“Any child who is lacking in mentality can find a safe refuge where his small capacities are trained to the utmost. A little while ago, the village idiot roamed the streets, either as an object of ridicule or crude and bungling sympathy of curious neighbors. In almost all the other nations of the world, such condition obtains at this hour. Here, the little child with the lame foot is invited by the state to come and be made whole, at the expense of the people.

“There is very little actual misfortune in America for which no remedy has been devised. There never was a more tenderhearted, more philanthropic nation known to human history. With all our obvious blunders, our mad rush, our almost insane desire to take shortcuts to prosperity (in the course of which we miss much, if not most, of the real satisfaction of life); with all our hard driving, and fierce competition, we are obliged to admit that our America, today, is, by all counts, the most livable country in the world.

“We can be thankful that it has been given to us to spend what little time is allotted to us on earth, right here in the United States.”

To be continued…