Lloyd C Douglas – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 7

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:

“If the minister will give some attention to this matter in his study and in conference with good musicians, he will discover, perhaps to his surprise, that a great deal of the strictly high class music of Christianity is not difficult of execution. He should find out what these anthems and solos are, if his choir is composed of persons who lack the talent and training to adventure with more complicated scores. It may be with the best intent in the world that he proposes to the choir that it attempt the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ which is, as he says, a very wonderful thing. But unless his chorus is made up of trained vocalists, he has placed his friends in a position from which it will be quite difficult to escape with credit to themselves and the cause they would like to serve. He should know exactly what grade of music his choir can successfully negotiate, and see to it that the musical library of his church is supplied with the best there is of that grade. He should have a complete list of the titles of these numbers in his study. When he plans a service, he should inform the choir director what special music is demanded by his sermon theme.

“How little coordination there is in most of our churches, of the sermon and the music! Sometimes the choir director doesn’t have the faintest idea what the sermon is about, and preacher doesn’t know (or care) what the choir is going to sing. He picks his hymns at random, without regard to their fitness or tunefulness. Occasionally he does this at the last minute. The choir has no notion what hymns are to be sung. No rehearsal of them has been had. And then this fellow will get up and babble about a wicked world that will not come out to church! Why should it? What is he doing to make the church more attractive? Complains about the size of his salary. In what other business could he earn more, if he went at it in the same way that he prepares for Sunday?”

Douglas has more advice for pastors on this subject, and he’ll share it my next post.

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 6

by Ronald R Johnson

“If the preacher is careless whether or not his church ever commands any attention and respect, let him put up with what he has had vouchsafed unto him. But if he hopes to make something of his church, he must deal with his music problem firmly. He must boldly announce that his church will have good music, or none! Far better to have no music at all than what passes for the same in far too many of our Protestant churches. And where does the responsibility rest, at last? With the choir? Not at all! With the music committee? Not a bit of it! It resides with the manager of the whole institution – the preacher. When the music is bad, the congregation is depleted; when that happens, who gets the blame? The choir? The music committee? Not for a minute.

“No; it is the preacher’s business, after all. He may pretend to wash his hands of it and lay the responsibility elsewhere; but verily he has his reward (which, likely as not, involves a move to some other locality where he stands a good chance of swapping the worst chorus-choir on the face of the earth for the awfullest quartet that ever jangled discords). Here shows up the importance of the preacher’s knowing something about music himself. He should be in a position to speak to his choir in a tone of authority. It is not enough that he should be vaguely conscious that the noise behind him on Sunday is raucous and infuriating; he should know exactly what the trouble is, and spare no pains to mend it.

“This demands of the preacher that he should have acquired some musical training. It is not very important that he should be a ‘practical musician.’ Indeed, it has happened that a preacher’s ability to sit down on the organ bench and demonstrate precisely how he would like to have a certain passage rendered has earned him an enemy guaranteed to hate him and his to the third and fourth generation. If the preacher is a good organist, he can well afford to keep this one candle of his under a bushel. And if he has a trained voice, he had better use it to talk with. The preacher-soloist who steps from the pulpit to the choir and back again had better take a day off and decide which of these two very excellent callings is his – and put all of his time on the vocation he decides to retain.

“But it will never be against him, in the opinion of the choir, if he reveals the fact that he knows good music from trash. How many preachers like to draw a chuckle from the choir by deprecating their complete ignorance of the devotional and inspirational music of the church – as if it were something to grin about! Just about as funny as if the doctor should remark that he had never taken any interest in clinical thermometers! And all this foolishness of asepsis in surgery! Of course, the preacher intends this pleasantly as a pretty little compliment to the choir for knowing so very much about something concerning which even he knows nothing; but it’s a poor joke, any way you take it.”

But Douglas’s comments weren’t all negative. In my next post, I’ll share his encouragement to ministers on this subject.

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 5

by Ronald R Johnson

The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has just finished saying that the public has better taste in music than most ministers are willing to admit, and that makes it harder for them to listen to poor music at church. He continues:

“Unfortunately, too many churches have been specializing in poor music. The reasons for it are legion. Two or three of them will bear mentioning. The trouble may be, for example, with the choir leader. Not to speak too abstractly, permit me to present Sister Iontha Place. Miss Place began directing the choir at the tender age of twenty-two, just after her return from the year she spent at the Tophole Conservatory. That was in the early summer of 1901. [Twenty years earlier, in other words.] Because she has been at it so long, and also because her brother is the heavy contributor, Miss Place must be retained. By virtue of her position, she may sing solos if she wishes so to do. And she wishes so to do – almost every Sunday. Miss Place flats abominably. There is only one satisfying tone taken in the whole of her performance – the final syllable of ‘Amen.’ There are ten persons in her choir – the sort that could be expected to become and remain party to such an enterprise. Every Sunday there is a sugary little anthem about ‘Behind the Beyond is Somewhere,’ or ‘His Old Mother’s Rocking Chair.’ And other stuff like that.

“Now, Rev. R. H. Pepper, a real preacher with a real message, has become aware that he can never make anything of his church so long as this state of things persists. He wants to know what he is to do. For, as has been said, Miss Place is the esteemed sister of Deacon G. Rowling Place, and in most excellent health. Your duty is plain, Pepper. It is not a pleasant job; but – somehow – you must contrive to displace the misplaced Miss Place (begging a thousand pardons!). Nobody envies you the task; for this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. But you can’t preach against that music. You must either change matters at that point, or be resigned, or resign!

“Have another? Well; meet our good friend, Mr. Onestop, the genial organist who has been playing for nothing (a just wage for services rendered) during the past thirteen years. Whenever the suggestion has come up to the board of trustees that Brother Onestop be given a big birthday dinner in celebration of his retirement as organist, somebody has remembered that Onestop really has been doing the best he could – which even the frenzied admit – and absolutely without recompense. This latter is to be kept carefully in mind. A new organist will add another annoying item to the budget; and the board’s pet motto is, ‘Budge not the budget!’

“These well-meaning people do not realize that they would be doing Percy Onestop a kindness by shielding him from any further rough criticism and contumely behind his back. And, as to the economics involved, Onestop’s gratuitous service at the organ is the most expensive item in their whole blessed and unbudgeable budget! If there are any tears to fall, let them be shed in behalf of our brother, the preacher, who has become the ungrateful legatee of such a bequest as Onestop. What shall he do? In the midnight watches, he asks himself, ‘What shall I do?’ He must get rid of Onestop. It would be positively wrong for him to poison the fellow; but he can easily request the rendition of certain musical numbers which are quite out of Onestop’s reach. If the man has any sense at all, he will see the point. If not, it can be explained to him by the aid of a map and lucid footnotes. But Onestop must go!”

In my next post, Douglas will say more about the role of the pastor in insuring that his church offers good music.

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 4

by Ronald R Johnson

“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.

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 3

by Ronald R Johnson

The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. Before getting into the subject of his essay, he’s talking about some of the things that can help keep the church pews empty on Sunday mornings. He has just finished talking about various ministers’ personality problems. He continues:

“But one’s full sympathy goes out to the minister who knows that he is not making a go of it – not failing for any of the reasons indicated above… but because he has never taking into account the importance of that supreme feature of Christian worship: the music of the church.

“He may be an able preacher, but he can’t preach past bad music. He may be a tactful and beloved pastor, but he can’t win and hold people to his Sunday services with that execrable choir! He may be no end of a statesman in his deft manipulation of his multitudinous auxiliary societies, boards, cabinets, bureaus, and whatnots; but the feeble organist will see to it that the SRO sign is never put out. Sometimes he is entirely unaware that this is so.

“Not infrequently one hears a preacher saying that he knows nothing about music at all – church music or any other kind – saying it nonchalantly, as he might admit ignorance of the tapestries peculiar to the Ming dynasty, apparently oblivious to the fact that his confession is equivalent to a carpenter’s casual remark that he never could saw a board straight or drive a nail without pounding his thumb. No more rarely one hears a preacher saying that he has ‘no ear for music’ – saying it with a smile that clearly means he is too much preoccupied with serious matters to give attention to anything so trivial. We are to understand that it is just a pleasant little joke that he has on himself. By no means is it a joke! It is exactly as if a painter should confess to color-blindness! For so large a place does music rightfully hold in Christian worship that whoever accepts responsibility for the religious education and devotional inspiration of a church can never hope to teach his congregation how to sense the Divine Presence unless he is not only in love with music but fairly conversant with its history, its functions, and the proper manner of its execution. ”

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 2

by Ronald R Johnson

“Only slightly less unalluring are the sermons that reek of the vapid tosh known as Pollyannaism. The ‘just be glad’ preacher gets to be as great a public nuisance as his colleague in the next block who knows the city deserves to be blown to perdition – and now a worm has chewed up his gourd-vine. Again, the preacher’s sermons may be so profound as to be incomprehensible to all but the self-confessed intellectuals of the neighborhood, or as light as the chaff which the wind driveth away.

“It is just possible that something may be wrong with his pastoral activities. He may have acquired a trick of wearing a chip on his shoulder, precariously poised, and frequently being brushed off by careless passers-by, to his perpetual discomfort and irritation; or he may have been built, temperamentally, by the rules which obtain in plain and solid geometry, with right angles and the apexes of triangles sticking out all over him, upon which rugged corners and sharp spikes people keep bumping themselves and moving off rubbing their hurts and muttering that he is what – most unfortunately – he is. Or, again, he may have so poor a head for anything like organization or executive leadership that his board of deacons is as glum, in session, as a coroner’s inquest, and his board of trustees haggles with him over the suggested appropriation of four dollars and fifteen cents wherewith to buy the janitor some new brooms and a coal-shovel, while his Sunday School hasn’t half enough teachers, and his women’s society is up to its ears in a brawl. These are some of the reasons [why the pews are empty]. Without doubt, these brethren have a bad time of it, each in his own way.”

But this was all by way of introduction. What Douglas wants to talk about is the music of the church, and its problems. In my next post, he’ll share some candid thoughts on that subject.

Reactions to Douglas in 1920

by Ronald R Johnson

Over the past several weeks I’ve been sharing Lloyd Douglas’s articles in The Christian Century during the summer and fall of 1920. He had made his debut in the July 1st issue, and the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, had urged him to send another submission while his name was fresh in the memory of the Century’s readers. Douglas did even better: he sent a five-part series called “Wanted – A Congregation!”

After the first two installments, Morrison printed the following response:

From the Letters to the Editor in the Christian Century, 8/26/1920.

In November, Douglas fired off an article criticizing the politician William Jennings Bryan for speaking against science in general and evolution in particular at the University of Michigan, where Douglas was the resident Congregationalist minister. That article prompted a couple of letters from readers:

From the Letters to the Editor at the Christian Century, 12/23/1920.

Because Morrison was eager to publish controversial material that would increase readership, he was happy to print Douglas’s articles and especially liked his spicy way of arguing his points. In the coming months, Douglas would continue to accommodate the editor’s desire for hard-hitting essays. I’ll tell you about more of them in my next posts.

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 6

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century, 11/25/1920.

[The following is the conclusion of Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“A few days ago this eminent lecturer spoke to a large audience of laymen in Chicago. The chance was his to make a notable contribution to that convention. What does it get from him? Why – the monkey jokes, of course! And the red cow! It is to be presumed that hundreds of laymen, going home from that convention under the impression that they had heard a great scientist speak his mind about evolution, will be on the alert now to detect the slightest deflection from orthodoxy on the part of their pastors. Let the good brother phrase his remarks in the language of modern scholarship, insisting upon a faith that may be held without damage to one’s intellectual self-respect, and he takes a chance of hearing unfavorably from the deacon who has just returned from the convention where ‘Darwinism’ – and all things scientific – had been weighed and found wanting.

“I write this partly to relieve my feelings, but mostly because there is no doubt in my own mind that we ministers, who have thought our way through these problems at no little cost of time and effort, should refuse any longer to tolerate such presentations of religion as that indicated above, if we may by any possibility put a stop to it! For Mr. Bryan to speak in any presence concerning the relation of religion and science is a piece of presumption! King David prayed, ‘Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins!’ David apparently considered this a serious offense – presumption. And David, being something of an expert on sinning, surely ought to be an authority.

“One is not forgetting that Mr. Bryan is a great and good man who means well and is loved devotedly by great masses of people. He has it in him to make a large contribution to religion. But however rich and active may be the wine of his faith and his enthusiasm, he really ought to stop trying to vend it in the old bottles. Oh – oh – but how fearfully old are the bottles!”

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 5

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is a continuation of Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“Every year, in most of our great universities, the student is asked to state his religious convictions at the time of his registration. He is requested to name the denomination to which he belongs, or the denomination he prefers, if not a member. After the cards had been handed to me, this year, which belonged to my denomination, it occurred to me that some interest might attach to a comparison of these registration cards with those of last year. I would see how many students who registered last year as of the faith of which I am an adherent were registered this year as ‘without religious convictions.’ The investigation showed no case of the kind. To the contrary, there were sixty-nine students who stated last year that they were without religious convictions who announced, this fall, that they were adherents of our faith. It is not true that the freshman inevitably comes to the university to surrender his faith. But it is true that many a chap is obliged to come into a university community to find his faith!

“Mr. Bryan does not know this. Nobody ever told him. He never inquired. He would not believe it if he were told. He doesn’t want to believe it. It would dampen his enthusiasm about the awful effects of modern science upon Christian faith. Then he would lose heart for the monkey jokes. And the monkey jokes must be told. And the red cow – the same old red cow – must she not still eat green grass and give white milk to yield yellow butter?”

[Douglas will conclude his essay in my next post…]

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 4

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on 11/25/1920.

[The following is a continuation from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“The total result of the Bryan address to his university audience was disgust on the part of religious people – both faculty and students – disgust over the speaker’s intellectual immorality, to say nothing of the crass impudence displayed by such an exhibition of ignorance before an audience of that character. But the really serious fact about the performance resided in the effect produced upon the students who never go to church, manifest no interest in religion, and who think of Christian faith with as little knowledge of its present-day claims as Mr. Bryan has of biology – which is next to nothing. This type of student understands that Mr. Bryan is a widely known and generally recognized religious leader in the country – frequent spokesman before ecclesiastical conclaves, and a general defender of the faith. The student is informed, from this respected quarter, that, to be a Christian, he must repudiate that which his own eyes have seen in the laboratory and believe certain ancient dogmas which he cannot hold without the sacrifice of his intellectual self-regard. It is extremely doubtful if Mr. Bryan will ever be invited to speak before this group again. But the damage is done!

“While we are on the subject – how much truth is there, after all, about the deplorable loss of religious faith which Mr. Bryan notices in academic circles? Let us see. Many people who do not know the facts are persuaded to believe that the typical freshman comes to the university firm in the faith of his fathers, fresh from Sunday School, convinced that the Bible is to be accepted as a textbook on geology, anthropology, astronomy, and all the rest of the natural sciences. After he has been here for a year or two, he loses his faith, becomes a cynic and a scoffer, flaunts his atheism or his infidelity, and repudiates religion as of no further use to him. What are the facts about this matter?”

[Douglas, having spent the past decade on major Midwestern college campuses, will give his answer in my next post.]