A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” The Christian Century, 4/14/1921.
[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to his fellow ministers about how they can find inspiration even in their busy lives. He writes:]
“In every congregation, there are a few elderly folk who are living on the income of spiritual capital amassed in days before we became too busy to take counsel of our hearts. I used to know a little old lady who was blind; that is, her physical organs of sight were not functioning. The eyes of her soul were very keen. I looked forward with keen delight to the next visit in her humble home. She always expressed gratitude that the minister called so frequently and stayed a while; but I never brought her anything to be compared with the treasures I carried away. Some of these fine old saints are prepared to do great things for us if we approach them properly. How often we rush in, pat them on the shoulder, tell them what a whale of a sermon we preached last Sunday, wish them well, and run away – tatting up another good deed done to ‘the sick and imprisoned’ – when, by sitting quietly at their feet and encouraging them to do the talking, we might have come away with a fresh sense of the glory of the human spirit and the desirableness of a life that is ‘hid with Christ in God.’
“If we only stopped long enough to think about it, the bereaved have rich treasures for us of an inspirational character. How little we make use of them, for our own good, in the moments when grief has fairly transfigured their lives! How we do imagine that we must, ourselves, do all the talking, apparently never dreaming that it is our business, at such times, to stand with bowed head and expectant heart, waiting for a message lifted up on the wings of pain.”
[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]
An excerpt from “The Bread Problem,” an editorial in the February 17, 1921, issue of The Christian Century, written anonymously by Lloyd C. Douglas.
[This is the conclusion of an editorial, “The Bread Problem,” which Douglas wrote without a by-line for The Christian Century’s February 17, 1921, issue. After briefly surveying the problem of hunger in the aftermath of the First World War, he narrated Christ’s first temptation in the wilderness, to make bread out of stones. He writes:]
“From that scene in the Jeshimon Wilderness, Anno Domini 30, let us return and take another glance at what we have before us in the early spring of 1921. Exactly how did our world get into its present miseries? We say that is an economic question. But is it? Well – say that the immediate cause of it was the war. Well – how did the world get itself head-over-ears in war? By walking in the ways of righteousness and brotherhood? By efforts at spiritual culture? By reliance upon his guidance who continually endeavors to attract our attention to the truth about human relationships? No; we got into war – the whole brood of nations – excusing nobody, laying the blame at every door impartially – through indifference to the cultivation of those principles which Jesus said would make for permanent peace!
“Even now – with so ghastly and complete a demonstration of the fact that war solves no problems whatsoever; that war not only wastes while it is waged but leaves a slimy trail behind it through uncounted years – there are plenty of us advocating more costly armies, more big gunboats, more deadly poison gas! In all the welter and wreckage – face to face with the problem of the world’s starvation – still – still – ‘armi virumque cano!’ [‘I sing of arms and men’: the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid.]
“Fully satisfied that organized greed and diabolical selfishness have not only foisted war upon the world, time after time, but have stood by to loot the pockets of its victims while they went forth hypnotized to death by appeals to their patriotism, still do we sit, complacently, declaring that the world’s chief difficulty is ‘a problem in economics.’ Economics? Nonsense! The world’s problem, today, is a spiritual problem! Humanity’s soul must be saved!
“What may we do about it? There is much that we can do. We can turn the searchlight in upon ourselves to see how far we, as individuals, are menaced by this temptation to believe that our own problems are questions in economics! Do I live by bread alone? What inspired to my choice of a life work – bread alone? For what reasons have I gathered friends about me – that they may use me, or I them? Have I cultivated them for bread alone? Is success, to my thinking, the sort of thing that has cornered some market; stacked up corn in warehouses against years of idleness; nailed down natural resources to make them inaccessible to other hands as fully entitled to them as myself?
“We do well who, through these Lenten days, assay the ore of our own characters and assist other people to test the quality of their motives to see if, perchance, we who have talked so volubly and knowingly of humanity’s great needs – the causes of its distress; the reasons of its hunger – may not be housing and arming the forces which make these problems more and more acute and perplexing.
“The Master found the complex problem of the world a simple spiritual problem at its root. Taking counsel of the God in his own heart, he found that man does not live by bread alone, but by the discernment and acceptance of his will who ‘standeth behind our lattice, keeping watch over his own.'”
[This last sentence was probably a quotation from memory (and therefore not quite accurately) of a line from James Russell Lowell’s 1845 poem, “The Present Crisis.” The poet complains of:
“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”
This same poem contains the all-important line, “New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth.” Douglas would quote that line repeatedly throughout the 1940s, very much aware that it was necessary to stop Hitler’s armies, despite everything he said in this 1921 editorial.]
An excerpt from “The Bread Problem,” an editorial in the February 17, 1921, issue of The Christian Century, written anonymously by Lloyd C. Douglas.
[The following is from an uncredited editorial that Lloyd Douglas wrote for The Christian Century under the heading, “The Bread Problem,” which appeared in the February 17, 1921, issue. He has just finished talking about world hunger following the aftermath of the First World War. He writes:]
“In this penitential period of 1921, we turn naturally to the story of our Lord’s temptation which provides a reason and a setting for this Lenten season. And we find, to our surprise, that the ancient narrative is vital, vascular, directly apropos of our present anxiety.
“The temptation followed the baptism immediately. Rising from the water, bearing in his soul heaven’s confirmation of his messiahship, Jesus went into the wilderness. Apparently he felt that he was not ready to face the crowd whom John had astonished with the announcement that the Messiah was among them, or any crowd, until he had struggled further through the problems vexing the world he had come to save.
“The first question thrust into the active consciousness of the young Galilean, after his voluntary exile into the wilderness, was essentially this: ‘What do men live by?’ At the moment, he was able to answer the question promptly, decisively. So far as he was concerned, the greatest thing in the world was bread! Because he happened to be hungry, the world’s problem seemed to be a clear case of economics! The cry of his people and the call of his own appetite united to tempt him to command the very stones at his feet to be transformed into bread!
“We need not debate whether this narrative is wholly, or in part, allegorical. Of course, we are fully conscious of our power to turn stones into bread – at least so long as the saltpeter beds of Chili continue to provide our wheat fields with the nourishment that makes them productive. [Douglas is referring to fertilizer.] If we are minded to let the Master have the power to do the same, by processes unknown to any but himself, there is no reason why he should be deterred from it by our lack of faith. If anyone sees it simply as an allegory, the lesson still stands inviolate. Those who cannot help viewing it this way rightly resent the charge that they fail to catch the point of the story.
“The point at issue was this: Is humanity’s problem a question in economics? Jesus thought it through and decided in the negative. Man does not live by bread alone. Man lives through his discovery and acceptance of the will of God.
“From that scene in the Jeshimon Wilderness, Anno Domini 30, let us return and take another glance at what we have before us in the early spring of 1921.”
[Douglas will continue his editorial in my next post…]
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:
“Now there are a few facts that every preacher really ought to know about choir anthems. First, the choir must never attempt anything that is too difficult to be rendered well. It is much better that the quartet should spend two hours trying to get together on ‘Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross’ – and then sing it with an eye single to one purpose – than to invest an equal amount of time on ‘The Radiant Morn’ – and tote it to the shambles. Every quartet wants to sing ‘The Radiant Morn.’ There are about a dozen church quartets on the Western Hemisphere that have any warrant for making the adventure. It is much more effective for the choir to learn ‘Hark, Hark, My Soul,’ so that it can sing it with good interpretation than to butcher Tchaikowsky’s ‘O Come, Let Us Worship,’ or Gounod’s ‘Sanctus.’
“In the next place, the choir should not attempt to present a new anthem every Sunday. That means nothing else than that the piece has been given only brief rehearsal. Possibly all that these loyal folk have achieved in that one rehearsal is a scrappy knowledge of the harmony. As to its interpretation, they have had not chance to attend to that. They just grind it out – happy if they all contrive to get through at the same time. It is much better if the choir should plan to present one new anthem each month, and repeat old ones frequently. The best choirs do it. If the piece is good, it will bear repetition. If it is not, it should never have been done in the first place. Quite to the contrary is the repeated sermon! Any sermon that the parson can repeat with a feeling of assurance that his congregation will not recall it never was worth preaching. Is that not a fact? When you preach an old sermon, do you pick one of the big ones that made everybody sit up? You do not? We are right, then, about this, as usual. It is not so of the anthem. The congregation likes an old anthem, if it is well done. Preachers who are poor readers of the Scripture Lesson should select obscure passages. The people have heard the familiar ones done well, and cannot forget about it.”
I will share Douglas’s concluding remarks in my next post.
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!”
They called it “wireless” in those days. Only a few enthusiasts throughout the country bought the kits, assembled them, then listened eagerly for messages from other enthusiasts. They could originate from anywhere. That was part of the fascination of it: trying to determine exactly where a message was being broadcast from, and how far it had traveled.
In Lloyd Douglas’s scrapbook, there are two newspaper clippings about an upcoming wireless experiment on New Years Eve, 1919. Neither one tells us the name of the newspaper, but one, entitled “Will Wireless Greetings on New Years Eve” (see above), is either from the University of Michigan or from an Ann Arbor paper; the other (see below) is apparently from the Detroit Free Press and is entitled, “U of M to Radio 1920 Greetings.”
According to the first of these: “On the evening of December 31, [1919,] just before the new year is ushered in, radio operators at the university radio station will send out greetings for the year to all parts of the country. Community Service, Inc., under whose direction the movement is being carried on in all sections of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is starting what will probably be an annual event in a great publicity campaign.”
Wireless radio was such a new thing that they had to perform stunts like this to make people aware of its potential. The article continues:
“Every radio station in the United States will send out New Years greetings during the evening, and all amateur operators are urged to ‘sit in’ and copy each message received.”
A paragraph later, the article says that the university “will use both the radio telephone and the radio telegraph.” That’s how new this technology was: what we now call “radio,” they called “the radio telephone” to distinguish it from “the radio telegraph,” which was, apparently, a wireless transmission in Morse code.
From the Detroit Free Press: “The telegraphic message will be sent out at 8:30 the evening of December 31, and the wireless telephone will follow 15 minutes later. The message, which is not to be made public before it is sent, was written by Rev. Lloyd Douglas, Congregational pastor of this city [Ann Arbor], and is 60 words in length.” [They were referring to the “telegraphic” message. His “radio telephone” message would be longer.]
The event would be under the direction of Lieutenant-Colonel John Lucas, head of the signal corps work at the university ROTC, and Professor J. C. Evans of the university faculty. There was an official aura around this technology, with the ROTC providing a kind of military authority to it. Things would be very different later, when radio would become a commercial enterprise.
As both articles said, “A rotary spark transmitter will be used by the university station, and for receiving the telegraph message, receiving tuning sets should be set at 600 meters wavelength. For receiving the radio telephone message, tuning coils should be set at 660 meter wavelength.” The organizers hoped that amateur operators all over the country would write down whatever messages they received, then mail them back to the university with detailed information about their location.
It was an exciting experiment, and it was just the kind of thing that Lloyd Douglas would be involved in, not just because of his interest in science but also because of his eagerness to pursue new ways of expanding his audience. I’ll tell you about his messages in my next post.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 