jesus – Page 3 – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Just Imagine!

From the title page of “The Pearl-Trader.” In Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

Sometimes the little things end up being important later, even if we don’t notice them at the time.

In Lloyd Douglas’s case, it was a mere phrase he happened to utter in one of his sermons ten years before the publication of his bestselling novel, Magnificent Obsession. The title of his sermon was “The Pearl-Trader,” and he delivered it at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on October 26, 1919. (It can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

The phrase I’m talking about was: “If we may be permitted to lend our imagination wings…”

His biblical text was Matthew 13:45-46, which says, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant seeking goodly pearls; who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”

There doesn’t seem to be much meat in that short passage, but Douglas used his imagination to make more out of it. From a strictly exegetical point of view, one may argue that he should stick to the text; but from a biographical point of view, the fact that he indulged his imagination on this occasion is significant. And, unlike the average pastor, Douglas’s imagination always produced interesting results.

He says of the pearl trader: “If we may be permitted to lend our imagination wings, we may venture a guess that he… picked up one of his treasured pearls in Athens, the traditional seat of learning. Perhaps he called it his ‘Agnostic’ pearl. It had a special value for him. It stood for a neutral-tinted, convictionless attitude of mind, forever in quest of truth and never satisfied with its booty; forever asking for evidence, cross-examining witnesses and demanding testimony – and never reaching a verdict.

“Sometimes his heart proposed that he take a definite stand for something; espouse a cause and see it through; join hands with a movement and put it over; announce discipleship to some Master and follow him; but always he remembered the Agnostic pearl and remained non-committal. ‘Skeptic,’ his friends called him, and the word was not an epithet but a badge of merit, to his mind. He liked to be called ‘free-thinker.’ I suppose that of all the pearls he had, the merchant loved this one best.”

A lot of people in the church that day could probably empathize with this position – especially freshmen. Douglas continued:

“But not much less ardently did he rejoice in the possession of the flawless pearl he had bought in Rome, the headquarters of jurisprudence. Whatever qualms of conscience the Agnostic pearl aroused in him, this Roman stone, which he called the Justice pearl, stirred him to a self-righteous pride. For Justice was an undeniably fine attribute for any man to possess.

“Sometimes his heart suggested that he waive aside the claims of inexorable justice and invest something in behalf of human woe and wretchedness – even if that misery had but little to justify it. Sometimes he would have been glad to do something, out of the charity of his heart, for a weaker fellow; but always he remembered the Justice pearl. Every man should have exactly his due from him, and no more. Mercy was enervating. Mercy was always wearing its heart on its sleeve and getting itself taken in by imposters. No; Justice would do for him.”

Personnel from the administrative side of the University of Michigan were there that morning, and perhaps they felt the same way. Douglas continued:

“And then there was that most showy pearl of the lot, the one he had found in Alexandria, the home of riches and commercial prosperity. As he rubbed his sensitive thumb delicately over its satin surface, he glowed with satisfaction over its ownership. Just carrying it had brought him wealth. After all, honor and influence were not far away from the man who had amassed much property. It was ever so. Poverty, even voluntarily embraced in the interest of a great cause was nevertheless a serious handicap. Not for any consideration would he part from this jewel which he knew as his Prosperity pearl.”

Members of the Ann Arbor business community were members of the church, including prominent business leaders. Perhaps they could relate to this attitude. Douglas continued:

“But with all his goodly pearls he was not content, but still sought others. He appears to have had a haunting suspicion that somewhere there was a valuable pearl to which he had not yet gained access. I daresay he felt it would be a great pity to have gone through life, bent upon the exclusive business of finding the most valuable pearls, and then discover, perhaps when it was quite too late to achieve it, that the most wonderful pearl in the whole world was not his – could never be his – that he had not even seen it, much less owned it.

“It is this gnawing unrest that brings many of us toward the day of silvering hair and faltering footsteps, fearful that, after all, try as we might to live purposefully, we had somehow missed the very best things – maybe passed them, unnoticed, along the way; maybe tossed them aside, as of no account, in our ignorance of their value. Indeed, the man of fifty sometimes reflects that he remembers the day when he passed a great opportunity to possess something of inestimable worth; and if he might set his life back as easily as we set back our clocks last night [for the fall time-change], he would surely want to go back to that crucial hour and live it again.

“I do not know just how much this pearl-merchant worried lest he was rejoicing in the possession of some second-rate jewels when he was seeking the very best; but I do know that when the Master introduces him to us, he is still seeking pearls, goodly pearls. Still touring about from country to country, by ship and caravan, seeking better pearls than these he owned. It doesn’t look as if he was entirely contented.

“You will find them all along the way, many of them people you have envied for their conspicuous positions, their learning, their culture, their wealth – you will find them, like the pearl-merchant, still in quest of something better than they possess. Restless souls, whose very quest proclaims their dissatisfaction with their accretions.”

We know, of course, that the Pearl Merchant is going to find that one pearl that will outshine the others. But Douglas indulges his imagination in other ways, and what he does next is very interesting. I’ll tell about it in my next post.

Is Christianity Opposed to the Theory of Evolution?

by Ronald R Johnson

On October 19, 1919, Lloyd C. Douglas was speaking at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on the subject of “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” and for a brief moment in that sermon he touched on the question, “Is Christianity Opposed to the Theory of Evolution?”

(This sermon is filed under Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

Lloyd Douglas was never one to shy away from controversial topics if he felt they needed to be addressed. He wouldn’t argue with people, but he would state his opinion boldly.

In this sermon, Douglas says, “Christian philosophy – if we may deal with its elemental propositions – makes no effort to account for the exact process by which mankind came into existence. The old Hebrew religion, out of which Christianity emerged under the leadership of the young Jewish Nazarene, did account for the creation of man on the ground of a miracle. There was a collection of these creation legends which were pieced together and assumed a fairly definitive narrative, with only minor discrepancies. Jesus knew this Hebrew creation story, for it was taught Him as a child. It was presented to Him as a fundamental doctrine which, to disbelieve, made one an infidel.

“If Jesus believed it at all, He did not consider it an important matter. If He had considered it important, He would have said so. The only fact about man’s creation worth noting was the fact that he had been created, undeniably for a high purpose. Nothing else about his creation mattered.

“Whether God is to bring the human race up, through ages of discipline, by a process of patient evolution or is to create him as he is now, by divine fiat, is a non-essential.

“The ancients who tried to explain the process were doubtless seeking an easy way for God to do it – the way they might have attempted to do it, had they been God.

“The indisputable fact is that nobody knows, or has ever known, the process by which God dignified one genus of the animal order to the point of endowing it with spiritual gifts and graces. It is a practically sure venture that the early Hebrews did not know, who believed the earth to be the center of the universe, around which the sun revolved.”

Although Douglas was a Christian minister, he did not think it was necessary to defend the Old Testament or even to believe in its teachings. He didn’t even think it was necessary to believe everything in the New Testament. He considered the Bible a library of books in which the writers did their best to make sense out of life and grappled especially with the idea of God and their relationship to God. For Douglas, to follow Jesus meant to do the things Jesus taught. In that sense, he was a minimalist: nothing else in the Bible mattered as much as the things Jesus said.

To be a Christ-follower, in Douglas’s opinion, did not require a person to believe that God made the sun stand still at Joshua’s command, nor did it require him to believe that the earth and its inhabitants were created just as described in the first two chapters of Genesis. He thought Christians should not tell scientists how to do their job, for there was nothing in the teachings of Jesus that disagreed with the theory of evolution. Douglas recognized no fundamental difference between the teachings of Jesus and the theory of evolution, despite the fact that there were plenty of Christian ministers saying otherwise.

Words Aren’t Equal to the Task

by Ronald R Johnson

A Lake Michigan sunrise, September 16, 2023.

“…it is a pretty clear case that God is somewhat out of the reach of our little vocabularies.”

These are the words of Lloyd C. Douglas, from a sermon entitled, “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” which he preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on Sunday, October 19, 1919. (The sermon is filed under Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

Of course, we don’t have any other way of talking about God other than by using words; but Douglas was pointing out the error of confusing our verbal descriptions with The Thing Itself.

For example: “…the phrase ‘a personal God’ has been an unhappy combination of words in the mouths of people who couldn’t conceive of a person without instantly ascribing to that person such qualities as pertain to human personality. Thus the opinion found its origin that God is a tremendously great and powerful man-type.

“The authors of our most noted church confessions indulged themselves in the use of alarmingly big words which purported to magnify, but in reality only restricted and minimized, the Being they intended to laud. The more they defined Him, the more they sheared Him of power. Every time a new crop of dogmatists tried their hands at informing the world all about God, He lost ground in the opinion of people who didn’t want to trust to any superman, however super, to direct the affairs of the universe.”

But it was not so of Jesus, Douglas says. “There is a noticeable absence of ponderous phraseology in the Author of Christianity’s statements about God. To the mind of the Galilean, God was not to be encompassed by learned dissertations, but was only to be accepted as a fact, just as little children accept a fact which they do not comprehend. Of just one quality of God was Jesus sure. God was the Father of all men. He had not created the human race to serve a whim. And, as the Father of the race, He surely had not engendered it to hate it or neglect it, but to love and preserve it. This was a simple deduction, simply phrased. The dogmatists who have tried to improve upon it have failed.

“‘God is a Spirit,’ said Jesus. ‘They that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit’….

“Mankind is… a spiritual being, instinctively trying to relate his life to an intelligence beyond and without the province of temporal things. Christian philosophy simply falls back upon the childlike belief that God is the Father of us all…”

This view would lead Douglas throughout his life to minimize the importance of religious creeds. As he saw it, the task wasn’t to try to understand or explain God; it was to make contact with God. And for that reason, he also thought that Christians shouldn’t meddle in scientific explanations of the natural world and how it came to be. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.

The Conservation of Moral Leadership

by Ronald R Johnson

The date is October 19, 1919. Lloyd C. Douglas is preaching at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, addressing the question, “what elements are really essential to the building of a faith, at once fearless in its appeal to the intellect and satisfying in its answer to the instinctive demands of the emotions”? He’s speaking to a congregation partly made up of university people (students, grad students, professors, and administrators), but also made up of people from the town, including some of the principal businessmen. They have chosen him as their pastor because they agree with what he’s trying to do: preach a gospel that appeals to the mind just as much to the emotions.

The rhetorical question he’s asking today is: What are the basic elements of such a gospel?

(The title of his sermon is “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” and it can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

“In the first place,” he says, “the Christian religion grounds its life on the conviction that the universe is neither an accident nor the product of a blind necessity…. It rather considers all reality as the continuous activity of one who knows exactly what He is doing, and why.” (The first element is God as Father of us all, in other words.)

Second: ” …this establishes among us a common brotherhood. It declares that the strong and the weak, the civilized and the barbarian, the cultured and the ignorant, are bound together by ties which cannot be broken, and which it is decidedly perilous to ignore.” (So the second element is the brotherhood of man.)

“In the third place: Christian philosophy is considerably more than a system of ethics or metaphysics. It is an historical system of faith, of worship, and of practice which traces its origin to the life and teachings of a man whose character it regards as the highest embodiment of ideal living”: Jesus.

And finally: “The Christian philosophy, which begins with God’s Fatherhood, involving man’s brotherhood, and the Mastership of Jesus, who viewed this life as a training-school for future achievements of a higher order, finds it quite impossible to permit death to assume any other place than that of porter at the gates of another world.” (So the fourth element is belief in life after death.)

If you’re at all familiar with Lloyd C. Douglas the novelist, you may be surprised at how unoriginal this answer is. Douglas had a lot of interesting things to say throughout his career as a minister and especially in his writings, but it doesn’t take more than a glance at this sermon to see that, in the fall of 1919, he had not yet developed his ideas. It would take him most of the 1920s to accomplish that; at this point he was still saying many of the same things that other modernists of the period were saying. Christian religion for him was, in essence, a faith in God as Father, the Brotherhood of Man, the centrality of Jesus, and belief in life after death.

This is the core of Douglas’s sermon, but I have to be honest: on this occasion his remarks are not well organized. He talks about a variety of topics, but he doesn’t clearly tie them all together. In fact, I can’t see how the title, “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” relates to the any of the things he says in the body of the sermon. On at least one other occasion (1/4/1920) he admitted that he was required to submit the titles of his sermons so far in advance (in order to be announced in the newspapers and printed in the bulletin) that his thoughts sometimes went in a different direction from the one he had in mind when he chose the title. Since his sermon the previous week was about the leadership responsibilities of young people in the years to come, he probably had this sermon in mind as a follow-up to that one, explaining how their leadership could be “conserved” by pursuing the kind of religion he was going to describe. Whatever his intentions were, he didn’t end up making them clear.

Despite all this, there are a few “quotable quotes” scattered throughout the sermon, and some of them are worth talking about. I’ll do that over the next few posts.

The Religion of a Collegian, Part 1

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of “The Religion of a Collegian,” Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Copyright University of Michigan.

Over the next few posts, I will be sharing a sermon preached by Lloyd C. Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on October 12, 1919, entitled, “The Religion of a Collegian.”

It is the beginning of the 1919-1920 school year at the University of Michigan. After talking briefly about higher education and its goals, Douglas sets out to answer the question, “What manner of religion, then, may expect to find favor and acceptance with the average normal type of collegian mind?” His short answer is: a religion in which “the real elements of Christianity, as taught and exemplified by the matchless Teacher of Nazareth in Galilee shall be revivified and energized in modern life.” In other words, a religion based on the teachings of Jesus and applied to daily life in the twentieth century.

To summarize: He starts out, however, with the claim that religion in general is an important part of the cultural bequest that students should grapple with by the time they graduate. Next, he talks about how natural it is for young people to rebel. But today, with so many things to rebel against, where should thoughtful young rebels focus their efforts? If the church is to improve, he says, the laity rather than the clergy must take leadership – and he explains why. In the face of this great need, both on the part of the church and of the larger world, college students are called to respond, if they will accept the challenge.

Over the next few posts, I’ll go back over these points in more detail.

First, then: Why should college students pay attention to religion?

Because “the religious instinct is the oldest recorded interest and hope of mankind – coeval, so far as we can discover, with humanity’s earliest strivings…”

Because “this religious instinct is inseparably linked with human history, as far back as that history runs, and furnishing the chief clue to the achievements of those prehistoric folk whose aspirations may only be guessed at.”

Because “this religious instinct was directly responsible for most of the great migrations which have developed and civilized the world; and for most of the wars which, from time to time, have reset the stage and revised the plot and recast the players of the age-old terrestrial drama.”

Because “any education which fails to comprehend the importance of religion to the mental, spiritual, and physical evolution of the race is sadly deficient…”

He says “there are at least two mental types who fail to appreciate this fact…. Strangely enough, these types are utterly antagonistic to each other, at deadly enmity, holding each other in abhorrence; yet, by circuitous routes contriving to arrive at a common destination where their surprise at meeting is doubtless mutual.

“One is the blatant scoffer, who hoots at all religion as the shameful legacy bequeathed by a long line of superstitious forebears. And the other is the mole-eyed bigot whose sacred books and sacred creed and sacred symbols are the only authoritative manifestation of God to the human race.”

Douglas says that, of the two, it is probably the religious bigot who has “achieved the larger results in making shipwreck of their neighbors’ feeble faith.” People tend to be turned away from the faith most consistently by those who, “with rack and wheel and fagot-fire,” with “denunciation and the selfishness of bigotry, have maintained that their peculiar sects enjoyed a monopoly of religious truth, and that all who differed were without remedy or recourse in a sinful world.”

It is against such displays of narrow-mindedness that college students typically turn away in disgust, Douglas says. But more than that, it is perfectly natural for young people to rebel. It’s part of being young. It’s actually a good thing. It’s what keeps the human race moving forward. And it is that very rebelliousness that the church stands in desperate need of, he says. I’ll explain why in my next post.

Ann Arbor, Fall Semester, 1919

by Ronald R Johnson

First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor circa 1917. In LCD’s 1917 Scrapbook, Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

Over the next several weeks, I will be using Frieda Diekhoff’s collection of Lloyd Douglas’s sermons to reconstruct his preaching during the 1919-1920 school year at the University of Michigan. If you want to imagine the scene, the first ingredient you’ll need to include is excitement. By all accounts, Douglas’s sermons attracted enthusiastic audiences – so much so, that latecomers were often turned away for lack of seating.

Lionel Crocker was a graduate student at the time. He remembered years later that Douglas “was the leading preacher in Ann Arbor when I was studying and teaching at the University of Michigan…. I, like hundreds of others, had to be in my pew at ten o’clock for a 10:30 service” (“Preaching Through the Novel,” Classmate, March 9, 1947, p. 3).

The congregation was composed of professors and administrators from the university, as well as businesspeople from Ann Arbor. Douglas appealed to both “town” and “gown.” But the balcony was reserved for students, and it was always filled to capacity. As I mentioned in previous posts, Douglas was in charge of the YMCA at the University of Illinois before coming to Ann Arbor, so he was popular with students. But he never talked down to them. His sermons were geared to the level of educated audiences – of all ages.

It’s the beginning of a new school year, and a new season of football at the University of Michigan. The Great War (which we, with a larger historical perspective, call the First World War) is in the recent past. It’s in the back of our minds, but quickly receding. Two years earlier, everyone was walking around in a grim mood, but not now. Life is good again. Although it’s too early for people to say so, the Roaring Twenties are about to begin.

The music at this church is excellent. Earl V. Moore is the organist and choir director. He will soon become the head of the Music Department at the university, but for now he is the university organist and Douglas’s prize catch. Although people come primarily to hear Douglas preach, they also come for the music.

Here is a description by Calvin O. Davis, Professor of Education, in A History of the Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, 1847-1947, published by the church circa 1947, pp. 60-61:

“Dr. Douglas was one of the most scintillating and brilliant ministers ever to occupy our pulpit. To many individuals he was a platform orator. Facile in speech, powerful in imagery, dramatic in delivery, and quick to utilize a pithy saying or a humorous anecdote in order to emphasize a point in his sermon, he made a tremendous appeal to young and old alike, particularly to many university students. Within a short time the auditorium of the church was filled to overflowing every Sunday morning – scores, if not hundreds, of persons often being turned away from the doors by ushers because there was not an available seat left in the building.

“Dr. Douglas was accustomed to use notes in the delivery of his sermons but rarely, if ever, did he read directly from his manuscript. His aesthetic nature was peculiarly sensitive and expressive, especially in his recital of poetry, his description of art pieces, and his appreciation of music. At times his audience would spontaneously laugh aloud at some unexpected descriptive phrase or witty saying.”

But Professor Davis didn’t gloss over the negatives: “To some he seemed not deeply spiritual – more of a lecturer and entertainer than a preacher and religious inspirer. Some withdrew from the church on that account; others stayed but criticized. Certainly the religious influence he exerted through the publication of his many books since leaving Ann Arbor is proof of the spiritual leadership he possessed. It is true his theological views were broad and liberal and he gave only slight emphasis to creeds, but to the thousands who came in contact with him either on Sunday mornings or at other times he was a genuine inspiration.”

But what did he say in those sermons? That’s the question I’ll be answering in detail over the next several weeks.

Release

by Ronald R Johnson

Although he never flaunted it, Lloyd Douglas knew his New Testament Greek. And that was probably why he chose the working title, Release, for his next novel,in the summer of 1932.

Luke 6:37 is usually translated into English as, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven,” but a literal translation would be “Release, and you will be released.” The Greek verb is apoluō, which means “to release.” It also means “to forgive,” because that is one example of how you can “release” someone. The point Douglas wanted to emphasize in this new novel was that, in releasing others, we ourselves are released.

Here is how he explained his thesis to Ira Rich Kent, the Managing Editor at Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company on 7/26/1932 (from Box 1, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan):

“This book is not in any sense a sequel to Magnificent Obsession…. The thesis of M.O. was, briefly: How to get what you want, and be what you would like to be, through a practice of a Galilean principle of secret philanthropy.

“The thesis of the present work is: how to get free of the encumbrances which block the way to the expansion of personality.

“The most common of these encumbrances is hatred – prejudice, toxic frustrations, cancerous might-have-beens, bottled-up injustices.”

Notice that his examples go beyond just hatred to include disappointment and frustration that has been “bottled-up.” The title Release has even more meaning in this regard. He continues:

“The solution – to be cryptically disclosed through a process not at all homiletic, but by a device capable of sustaining reader interest – is based on the only comment the Lord offered on ‘the Lord’s Prayer’: If ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will forgive yours.

“Trespasses, in this book, are considered as ‘invasions of rights.’ My ‘Major Personality’ has a right to energies which He has invested in me. I cannot hope to succeed in a large way unless I concede and honor His right to the control of such power.

“My freedom to enjoy; to savor life; to get out of it all that is in it for me by putting into it all that I possess, depends upon my willingness to put myself into complete harmony with His design for me.

“I cannot hope to do this unless I free myself of the encumbrances that weight me down.

“At this point, there arises a quite definite proposal of NEGOTIATION. If I sincerely forgive all who have made life difficult for me, I have offered the credentials necessary for this FREEDOM.

“All this sounds didactic and brittle, as I attempt to explain it; but it will not appear so in the book.”

That part about “negotiation” will almost certainly appear foreign to Christians. We place our trust in Jesus, not in any sort of “negotiations” or “credentials” we may bring. The thing to remember here is that Douglas isn’t talking about salvation, and he’s not using orthodox vocabulary. He’s talking about unleashing one’s potential in one’s daily pursuits, and he’s using the vocabulary of the ordinary person out in the world. His congregations were filled with people who professed to be Christians but who had never done the things Jesus talked about. He’s trying to get them beyond talking about it and actually doing it. And he’s starting at Square One.

In the book (Chapter 15), he has the character Julia explain it this way (and she seems to be referring to Matthew 18 here):

This little piece [of scripture]… doesn’t whine at all. It doesn’t ask you to whimper for mercy.

It’s just a business proposition same as if you owed a thousand dollars to Mr. Smith, and ten other people owed you a hundred dollars apiece, and Mr. Smith said, ‘Pay me that thousand dollars,’ and you said, ‘I can’t – with all these people owing me.’

And Mr. Smith said, ‘I don’t need the money so much, but I like you and want to be friends with you, and as long as you are owing me you’ll be keeping away from me for fear I’ll ask you for it and make you ashamed. And it won’t do any good for me to tell you just to keep the money and forget it, because that would make you ashamed, too, and you would always feel in debt. So – I’ll make you a proposition. If you will cancel all the debts of these people who owe you, and are afraid to face you, so that they can afford to cancel the debts of the people who owe them, I’ll call it square with you. Then we can all be good neighbors again, and nobody will be afraid of anyone else, or shy, or ashamed.’

This all sounds so much more sensible to me, dear, than the way they talk about it at the meetings. It’s just as if God wanted us to do business with Him about these things that have kept us strangers.

Houghton Mifflin published the book in November 1932 under the title, Forgive Us Our Trespasses. Douglas had thought it would be a clever satire of modern art, but it ended up being much more. And, in writing it, he found his mission in life. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 2: The Christian Century

by Ronald R Johnson

In a previous post I said that Lloyd Douglas must have felt he was going back to square one when he submitted his manuscript of Magnificent Obsession to Willett, Clark & Colby, a two-year-old company that was run by the same people who published The Christian Century. But it is safe to say that Douglas’s novel wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if it had been brought out by a name-brand publisher.

The Christian Century, having a vested interest in the success of Magnificent Obsession, advertised the book prominently and kept doing so – relentlessly – for the next few years. And since, as Douglas later said, they were taking the funds from one pocket of their trousers and putting it into the other, they could afford to do this. Douglas would later complain that Willett did very little publishing outside The Christian Century, but (as I’ll show in the next post) it was immensely beneficial to the book to receive such lavish attention from the Century.

Here is a full-page ad from the October 23, 1929, issue:

They didn’t include ads in every issue after that, but when they did, there were usually two of them: one from the publisher and another from “The Christian Century Book Service” (a book club tailored to the needs of clergy and lay leaders). Here’s the Book Service ad from November 13, 1929:

Ministers and laypeople who subscribed to The Christian Century were reminded again and again about Douglas’s novel over the many months that followed. And they kept it current, creating new ads whenever a prominent minister wrote something favorable about the book.

In the June 11, 1930, issue, under the headline, “LIFTED UP THEIR HEADS,” the publisher wrote, “In the rapid coming and going of many books, these books have lifted up their heads and will not be put down. The reading public discerns their value – and buys them.” Five books are listed, including Magnificent Obsession.

At this point, they were exaggerating. Willett, Clark & Colby was a very small fish in a big pond, and they had only been in business for a few years. Their claim to have published five books of importance was just hype. Even Magnificent Obsession wasn’t selling that well yet. Its first printing, in November 1929, was of 3,000 copies. Those sold quickly, so Willett ran a second printing of 3,000 that same month. But despite their claim in June 1930 that the book had “lifted up its head,” there were, at that point, only 6,000 copies in existence. It wasn’t until August that they ran a third printing of 3,000. After that, however, things took off. Their ads became increasingly newsy, announcing each new printing with mounting excitement:

Third printing, August, 1930
Fourth printing, October, 1930
Fifth printing, January, 1931
Sixth printing, March, 1931

Testimonials by respected ministers were printed. Reviews from increasingly important newspapers were excerpted. And now it was no longer just hype. In the April 29, 1931, issue of the Century, the publisher ran a full-page ad with the headline, “SUCCESSFUL!” Immediately under this, they printed the following quotation.

“A book which was published in November, 1929, has for some time been appearing on the best seller lists of mid-western stores, and this month its percentage brought it up among the leading twenty-five books of fiction. This is MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, by Lloyd C. Douglas….”

from Publishers’ Weekly, April 18, 1931

“Publishers’ Weekly,” the ad explained, “is the recognized book trade journal. Its ‘best seller’ records are compiled from reports issued by bookstores all over the country.”

The ad continues:

“Hundreds of subscribers to THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY have already read this amazing story by the pastor of St. James United Church, Montreal, Canada. Ministers in all parts of this country have taken MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION into the pulpit and have broadcast its message to their congregations. It has become a best seller in many cities, and the demand for copies, after eighteen months, is increasing! (The average life of most books of fiction is but a few weeks.)”

This was all true. In terms of sales, most books do what they’re going to do within weeks of publication; or at any rate, publishers expect immediate results and do not give long-term support to most books. Magnificent Obsession surprised people in the industry by climbing up to the bestseller lists slowly, over the course of a year and a half. That was due, in large part, to the fact that the publisher kept hammering away at subscribers of The Christian Century, reminding them about the book. The ad concludes:

“The publishers believe that every subscriber to The Christian Century, layman as well as minister, would profit by the reading of MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION. Order a copy from your bookstore today…”

And, of course, as the novel climbed farther and farther up the NY bestseller lists, the ads in the Century kept announcing that fact, along with news of subsequent printings:

“Seventh printing, May, 1931
Eighth printing, July, 1931,
…and the current demand for copies is greater than ever before!” says one ad.

What’s ironic is that those “hundreds of subscribers” mentioned in the April 29, 1931, ad were the key to the book’s success. It all started with the advertising, but the “publishing miracle” was largely due to the response of Christian Century readers.

[To be continued…]

Farewell, Loose Angels… Hello, Montreal!

by Ronald R Johnson

As I mentioned in earlier posts, in November 1928 (to be effective January 1929) Lloyd Douglas resigned as Senior Minister of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles because there was a small but determined group of members who were opposed to him, and he refused to let the congregation fight over him. Unfortunately, that meant that he was out of work at a time when he badly needed funds. His daughters were studying in France, and he had to get money to them, either to stay there or to come home.

It took a few months, but in March 1929 he was invited to preach at St. James United Church of Montreal, and they ended up extending a call to him. It was a big change from sunny California to what his daughter Virginia later called “the Land of the Frozen North” (Dawson and Wilson, The Shape of Sunday, 220). But it was also a godsend. Despite the few members of his Los Angeles congregation who didn’t like his message, Douglas was at the height of his powers as a preacher, and the sermons he delivered in Montreal are some of his best. At any rate, he was glad to say farewell to “Loose Angels” (his words, not mine).

St. James United Church of Montreal. From the congregation’s website: https://www.stjamesmontreal.ca/about-us/our-history.

St. James was (and is) a big church. On April 1st, 1929, Douglas wrote, “Yesterday was a red-letter day at the church. Fully two thousand were there in the morning and at night hundreds stood around the walls after the place was packed. Large chorus choir of excellent voices led by superb soloists accompanied by organ, piano and orchestra. It was quite lifting” (Shape of Sunday, 222). And very much in synch with Douglas’s way of doing church.

“A most intelligent audience,” he continued. “I couldn’t flatter myself they came to hear me.” After the rejection he had experienced in Los Angeles, it was hard for him, at first, to believe that people wanted to hear him preach. But they did, and after a while he allowed himself to accept that fact.

Even his Sunday night services attracted crowds. As he told his Akron friends, the James Van Vechtens, on April 12, “my Sunday night mob here, as compared intellectually with some I’ve seen, are a lot of Platos, Aristotles and Einsteins…. They all looked pretty intelligent to me from where I stood. Of course, I can’t see very well. And I’m a stranger here. Anyway, it’s a lot of fun and I’m glad we came” (Shape of Sunday, 223).

In the meantime, since Harper & Brothers had rejected his novel Salvage, Douglas tried to find another publisher. George Doran of Doubleday, Doran had expressed an interest in Douglas’s writings as early as the nineteen-teens. (See my earlier post on Douglas’s manuscript entitled, The Mendicant.) Douglas sent Doran the manuscript of Salvage, but he declined it for the same reason he had declined The Mendicant: because it wasn’t religious enough.

Douglas tried one more time. With this next company he was a shoe-in and he knew it: Eugene Exman at Harper had suggested a newly-established Chicago firm called Willett, Clark, and Colby, owned by the same people who published the Christian Century. And Douglas was one of the Century’s favorite writers. “The Christian Century and Willett, Clark & Co. are all the same thing as to brick and mortar, men and money,” Douglas explained a few years later.

Although it was fairly certain that they’d publish the manuscript, Douglas was taking a huge step backwards. His first book had been published by the Christian Century Press in 1920, but afterwards he upgraded to more prestigious firms: Scribner, then Harper. Giving his book to Christian Century people was like going back to square one.

But he did so, and Willett, Clark, and Colby accepted the manuscript, bringing it to press in the fall of 1929. When he sent it to them, he had changed the name of the book one last time. He called it Magnificent Obsession.

Irreconcilable Differences

by Ronald R Johnson

On November 4, 1928, at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, Lloyd Douglas read to his congregation the following message:

“I have a brief announcement to make which will come in the nature of a surprise to a great many people, friends and members of this church, who may have been scarcely aware that, throughout my two years here, there has been developing a left wing [it would have been more accurate to say ‘right wing’], increasingly out of sympathy with my administration.

“From the first I have been aware of this opposition; but, hoping it might be placated, I continued, happy in such service as I was enabled to render the church, believing the stress might soon be relieved.

“Upon my return from abroad, I learn that the minority has become quite aggressive and outspoken. Were there any principles involved, I might be persuaded to contend for them. There are no principles at issue. What storm there is, centers about myself. The natural solution is that I eliminate myself, and the confusion will be abated.

“I have never been party to a church quarrel. It does not seem to me that the church is the place for them. Anybody who, seeing a church row in the offing, can think of a good way to head it off, should be called blessed, I think, by both factions, if he suggests his remedy. I now crave that blessing. Rather regretfully, grateful to the very considerable majority who have been loyal and cooperative, and without any bitterness toward those who have not seen eye to eye with me, I offer my resignation to take effect on the last day of January.

“We now have three months left to us to demonstrate what sort of people we are. The persons in the church who wish for other leadership will presently have it. As for my friends, I trust they will realize how important it is that the church should carry on with a minimum of friction. I want my friends to be identifiable by the well-bred calmness with which they accept my decision, and the resoluteness of their refusal to discuss it.

“What we have had here is just one of those little predicaments which are apt to arise when there has been a maladjustment. Nobody in particular to blame; most of it arising out of temperamental incompatibility.

“Let us spend these next three months working together like Christians, and give the Los Angeles public a pleasant and perhaps unusual illustration of what the Lord was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount.”

He made it sound so easy. But his daughter Virginia wonders what was really going through his mind. She writes:

I can only imagine what he did. He must have dropped his head to his hands and let sweep over him the exact details of his predicament. A man must have moments of despair when alone he faces a future that seems totally black. Then fear must rush in and overwhelm him for a few moments no matter how he struggles to retain his grasp upon the strong hand of his faith…. Daddy must have had to look squarely at his future, without benefit of retouching. He had given up his job and was stranded in the West when all his connections were in the East; he was fifty-one years old, past the height of his career, many would say; his daughters were in Europe, requiring money to keep them there or bring them home; [and] the novel…

Dawson and Wilson, The Shape of Sunday, pp. 218-219.

Yes, the novel! The one he had been working on so hard for the past several months: Salvage (which would later be retitled, Magnificent Obsession). All his hopes now were pinned on that novel. But things weren’t turning out as well as he had hoped…