From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.
The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has been saying that it is the pastor’s responsibility to make sure the church’s music is good. He continues:
“It can easily be proved that discouraged preachers have consistently underrated the public taste. They have harangued their congregations about the increasing godlessness of this generation as a reason why their churches are failing to attract, when the real reason may reside in the increasing unattractiveness of their services, due to the more exacting nature of the public taste. In no field has this development of taste proceeded with more rapidity of late than in this matter that is before the house just now. The public has recently achieved new agencies for the cultivation and satisfaction of its heart-hunger for good music. The phonograph which has become almost as common and indispensable to the American home as the wash-boiler, reproduces the music of the masters, executed by the best known of contemporaneous artists. True, the jazz record brays its abominable yawp more often than ‘Gloria a Te’ raises its majestic praise, but the family that is likely to take any interest in church at all owns a few first-class records and plays them with delight of a Sunday afternoon. More people know good music when they hear it than we suspect. It should be repeated – the preacher is always tempted to underrate the public taste! Because they don’t talk back, he thinks his puny little essay on Sunday morning was a wonder. Because nobody stayed after church to ask him where he got his figures when he said that one-third of the inmates of Sing Sing are college graduates, he thinks they believe it. Because they don’t call him up Monday morning to tell him that the music yesterday was the most awful thing they had ever heard on land or sea, he imagines the music will do. Ah, no; the public isn’t such a dull ass as some would have us believe.”
Douglas is just getting started. In my next post, he’ll tell us why he thinks church music is so bad.
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 