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!”
From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century, 11/25/1920.
[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…]
A page from Lloyd C. Douglas’s article, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” in the November 25, 1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[This is a continuation of the essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. Douglas mentions that three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan had long ago started making fun of Darwin’s theory of evolution in his public addresses. Douglas continues:]
“So fully guaranteed to excite merriment in any crowd was this playfulness that the lecturer apparently could not resist the temptation of presenting it despite its irrelevancy to the subject under discussion. How weary he must have become reciting over and over, day after day, year by year, the same old monkey jokes! But the public would have them. How it must have rasped his sensibilities to repeat, again and again, the jaded pleasantry to the effect that if others wished to claim a chimpanzee for their grandfather, it was none of his affair – but as for him, etc., etc. And the cow – do you not remember? – the red cow that ate green grass and gave white milk from which they churned yellow butter? All of which disproved Darwinism.
“Now, Mr. Bryan is not a clown. At heart, he is serious, earnest, and self-respecting, as is sufficiently proved by the fact that he has consistently championed the things that make for better and nobler living. He really couldn’t go on telling and retelling these jokes about evolution indefinitely and retain his own self-esteem. So, he grew serious about the matter. But nobody can speak seriously on this profound subject without study. Only a skillfully trained biologist could trust himself to talk about evolution before an intellectual audience. Mr. Bryan, however, not having gone into this subject quite far enough to discover just how extensive was this field of science, and not being required to check his data because of the unexacting nature of the typical audience, talked of this theory with a degree of self-assurance utterly inexplicable on any other ground than that nobody had ever done him the kindness to take him aside and whisper a friendly admonition in his ear. He was to be forgiven, for it was a clear case that he knew not what he did.”
[I will continue Douglas’s essay in my next post…]
[The following is an excerpt from the third installment of Lloyd Douglas’s series about the fictitious minister, Rev. D. Preston Blue in the Christian Century during summer/fall 1920. The series was called, “Wanted – A Congregation!” The third installment, dated 8/26/1920, was titled, “The Sermon Sample.”]
“We have seen the minister’s process of enlisting his congregation’s interest in his new aspiration to develop an inspiring crowd. He has sworn them in to the task of doing their utmost to get their friends out to church on the particular date he has announced. But, as he recalls their pitifully ineffective efforts to perform such service in the past, he decides that they should be shown the way. He resolves to suggest a process to them.
“He goes to his printer with a card in mind – a card 6 x 3-1/4 – to be placed in their hands for distribution. Wait a minute! One knows exactly what you are going to say – that Blue is wasting his money – that the people will make no use of these cards at all. Just hold up a minute, please! Blue has some ideas that may be new.
“The reason that most of the ‘envelope stuff’ that the minister usually issues for advertising purposes is a mere waste of time, money, and effort may be accounted for on the ground that the printing is cheap – looks cheap – and the text dull and trite. One cannot afford to be economical in this business. Oh, what stupid cards many preachers circulate among their people – cards composed with no care whatsoever – mostly in the nature of a sad note beginning, ‘Dearly Beloved’ and closing with ‘Faithfully yours.’ No – that is a waste of good money. All the people who will read a card beginning ‘Dearly Beloved’ will get to church without any assistance.
“Blue is going to preach on ‘Shipwrecks.’ Isn’t it the most simple thing in the world for him to inquire of the printer whether he owns a ‘cut’ of a ship? Well – the printer doesn’t happen to have one; but he does own a big catalog of a type foundry; perhaps if Mr. Blue will look through that book, he may happen upon the very thing he has in mind.
“This book is a great revelation to the Rev. D. Preston Blue. He had never known there was such a thing. Here he has access to all manner of little cuts – ships, dynamos, dredges, fire apparatus, trees – of all kinds and sizes – flowers, birds, patriotic eagles, doves of peace, bluebirds ‘for happiness.’ Why – just to sit and study that book for an hour is good for enough material to stock a dozen sermons. Blue tells the printer to order him enough of the tiny cuts to make a border (36 pt.) all around the card, and two cuts of ships (inch) for marginal decoration. He leaves copy for the card, as follows:
SHIPWRECKS
A SERIES OF OCTOBER SUNDAY MORNING SERMONS
At the Broad Street Church
By Rev. D. Preston Blue
October third – ‘THE TITANIC’
October tenth – ‘THE EASTLAND’
October seventeenth – ‘THE IBERNIA’
A cordial invitation is extended to you by ______.
“There are one hundred active families in Broad Street church. That is – if one is not too punctilious about fine shadings of such words as ‘active.’ Blue has decided that he will make up enough of these cards to supply every family with five, except about twenty homes which may be trusted to make good use of so many as ten each. He proposes to mail one hundred cards himself to ‘prospectives’ and out-of-town friends who are on his mailing list – former members of the church removed to other places, occasional benefactors to the work of Broad Street church. All told, Blue needs 700 cards. He orders them printed in two colors – an orange border, with blue for the composition and marginal cuts. Cuts never cost very much, if ordered out of the regular stock.”
Douglas wasn’t making this up. Here is the card he used for a series of sermons he preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan, in January 1916:
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who wants to enlarge his audience but was taught nothing at seminary about reaching the surrounding community through the local newspaper.]
“Anybody who is not more than two-thirds blind needs not be informed that most people derive their information and form their opinions from the papers. It is to be doubted if responsibility for public opinion rests so heavily upon any other man as the editor. That being true, this important individual should receive some moral support. He is entitled to the intelligent cooperation of the preacher. When he strikes exactly the right note in an editorial, registering on the side of honor, justice, and morality, he has a right to expect that his good friend the minister will call him up or drop him a line of appreciation and encouragement; not a long-winded, piously-phrased homily which may produce precisely the opposite effect than the one intended, but a mere, ‘Bully work, Jim! You are doing fine business! The people who count are with you to the limit! More power to your elbow!’
“Not only does a little recognition like this have the effect of keeping the editor buoyed up to his task, but it serves as a deterrent in moments when he is strongly tempted to trim and hedge in some situation where the nasty little virtue of Prudence is admonishing him to ‘keep in right’ with Big Tom of the Steenth Ward.
“If the minister is not too far absent in the spirit, and habitually has his ear to the ground to detect impending seismic vibrations likely to disturb The Morning Star and cause the tripod thereof to wobble, he will happen in about this time and invite the editor out to lunch. Two dollars spent in this manner will sometimes bring larger returns than invested in a volume of Thirty Thousand Thoughts for the Theologian.”
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who received a request from the local newspaper for an abstract of his sermon from the previous Sunday.]
“Now, the introduction to that sermon had cost the preacher many hours of labor. He had toiled over it until it was flawless; not a tool-mark in sight; smooth, euphonistic, rhetorically sound in wind and limb. Not on any account could he escape the temptation to repeat this introduction in his abstract. Of course, the introduction was historical. It had dealt with the dramatic incident of Israel’s abandonment of the national ideal in the building of the golden calf. To clear the way for that theatrical event, Mr. Blue had backed up about a score of years, into the Valley of the Nile, so that he might get a long, running start at the calf story.
“Confronted, now, with the necessity of boiling the whole sermon down to a scant nine inches of eight-point, instead of jumping into the very ruck of things and hurling red-hot chunks of his appeal at the public in the first paragraph, the only method his inexperience could suggest was to begin with the calf.
“We are forever lamenting that the public knows so little about the Bible. The public knows more about the Bible than we suspect. It does not understand the causes of biblical events very well, nor does it have much sense of sequence, but the majority of the reading public can recite the more stirring stories of the Bible with considerable fidelity to detail. It knows, for instance, the story of the golden calf. It knows it so well that the mere mention of that incident acts in the nature of a narcotic.
“Well; Mr. Blue had squandered his five hundred words in riotous introduction. He had told the story of Israel’s defection, but there was nothing in it – except possibly in the last few lines, which nobody reached but the proofreader – even vaguely suggestive of a modern application. The editor had found nothing in it, so far as he had gone, to warrant an attractive caption. In fact, he had labeled it, frankly, ‘The Golden Calf – Dr. Blue Recites Well-Known Story – Idol Worship.’ Think you that anybody would read it, after such a recommendation? Verily, a silly question.
“Our friend’s pride nearly bleeds to death when he reflects upon the matter. He had been given a chance to preach to every man in Centerville on Monday morning, and this is the way he had done it – by rehearsing the moral lapses of another country and another age, as if he were afraid to approach America’s and Centerville’s lapses by less than thirty-three hundred years and seven thousand miles! To be sure, this wasn’t true of him! Anybody hearing him on Sunday would have admired his fearlessness – but he kept it very carefully concealed from the public in his report on Monday.”
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who was contacted by the local newspaper and asked for an abstract of ]
“Very much in earnest over this matter, Mr. Blue proceeds to do what he ought to have done back in 1905 when he lived in Robinsonville. He subscribes for several periodicals published in the interest of writers and pores over their contents with zealous industry. He is surprised and delighted to learn that he may have easy access to a voluminous literature on the subject of composition. He is heartened to find that the rules for newspaper writing are very simple. For example: he discovers that the newspaper reporter tells his story in the first paragraph – just the bare fact that John Smith robbed William Brown’s hen-coop and was assessed a fine of $50 and thirty days in the workhouse. If the reader is consumed with curiosity to learn all the thrilling details of this event – Smith’s former record, Brown’s attitude toward his bereavement, the fate of the fowls, together with such facts and fancies as the reporter may see fit to make public – is it not written in the story, further down the page? Mr. Blue discovers that this is a hard-and-fast rule in newspaper writing, that the reporter must throw down all his salient facts in the first three or four lines.
“Judging his feeble efforts in composing ‘sermon abstracts’ for the Monday papers on rare occasions by this inviolable rule indicated above, Blue smiles wryly over the remembrance of the stuff he had submitted. If it was never read by anybody – small wonder. He can easily understand now why he is so seldom asked for reports of his sermons. He recalls the day when he had preached a really remarkable sermon on the general subject of the danger of losing a national ideal. Very few had heard it. He had announced it in the Saturday column of ‘church notices’ under the title, ‘The Golden Calf.’ Blue never had known how to compose a sermon theme, though one scarcely needs be told that. ‘The Golden Calf’ is sufficient to explain Blue’s ignorance on this subject. But it was a good sermon; and if it had been given a fair chance, it might have drawn a better audience.
“It was so strong, indeed, that a discerning auditor had called upon the editor of The Morning Star, requesting him to print an excerpt. The editor had telephoned Blue, asking for about five hundred words. Blue had consented, somewhat gingerly, to furnish the required copy.”
[But all did not go well for Blue, as Douglas will reveal in my next post…]
Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.
[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” Douglas is talking about Rev. Blue, a minister who has decided to increase his audience. Blue knows he must make use of the local newspaper as a means of communication, but he doesn’t know how.]
“Had the theological school which claimed D. Preston Blue among her alumni offered a short course in Journalism for Preachers, she might have done herself and her output more credit than she ever received for the painstaking interest with which she had explained the Apocrypha in the original. Indeed, had she given this man so little as ten hours instruction in the art of composition intended for the public press, she might have served him better than with her entire wealth of erudition anent the Minor Prophets.
“When the minister, twenty years out, compares what he studied in the seminary with the actual problems he has faced daily in his profession, he wonders how his theological alma mater could have contrived to miss the mark with such systematic completeness. Almost nowhere had his instruction even remotely touched his job. He had been loaded to the gunwales with the history of doctrines, which the public didn’t care to hear about; crammed with rules for the manufacture of sermons which, if carefully observed, were guaranteed to stultify any spontaneity likely to shine through the gloom; stuffed with dogmatics, apologetics, hermeneutics, liturgics, homiletics, catechetics, exegetics, and a host of lesser ‘ics’ – now happily forgotten. But nobody had ever considered it necessary to inform him how to prepare attractive and readable ‘copy’ for a newspaper or magazine, probably for the very excellent reason that not a man on the faculty was possessed of such information. Nobody had ever so much as hinted that there were at least two ways – a right and a wrong – of phrasing sermon topics for public announcement. Never had anyone talked about the close and helpful contacts possible and desirable between preacher and editor.
“Of course, great changes – laus Deo! – have been registered in recent years in theological schools. These matters are now receiving in some quarters just a very little bit of attention. But that doesn’t help D. Preston Blue, who acquired his B.D. in the good old days when the seminary graduate was equipped only with such information as might fit him to aspire to one of the professorial chairs of the institution that had graduated him.”
The cover of the August 5, 1920, issue of The Christian Century.
I’ve told you before that Douglas debuted with The Christian Century by entering an essay contest. John Spargo’s article, “The Futility of Preaching,” was the subject, and a number of ministers responded to the editor’s call for rebuttals. Douglas was one of them. Through his essay, “Preaching and the Average Preacher,” Douglas demonstrated a style all his own, and the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison invited him to submit more of his writing to the Century. In fact, he urged Douglas to do it right away, while readers still remembered his name.
Douglas did better than that: he submitted a series of articles, and he framed them as a longer, more in-depth response to Spargo’s criticisms. He called the series, “Wanted — A Congregation!” In this series, he offered advice about how one might preach in such a way that people would flock to the church (as his own parishioners had been doing for the past five years at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan). Douglas had a dynamic personality and was especially powerful in the pulpit and at the typewriter, but in this series of articles he claimed that others could learn from his successes (and failures).
It may seem astounding that Douglas could have responded to Morrison’s invitation so quickly and voluminously, but this series was based on a book he had already written more than a year earlier. In January 1919, Douglas sent a manuscript of the book The Mendicant to the Doran Company. George Doran liked the style of Douglas’s writing but wanted the book to be more religious than it actually was. Douglas didn’t take Doran’s advice, and the manuscript sat in his file cabinet, waiting for the right opportunity to try again.
Douglas recognized Morrison’s invitation as that opportunity. Although The Mendicant was written as a series of dialogues, Douglas took the information that was in his manuscript and rewrote it as a series of essays. Over the next few weeks, I will share excerpts from those essays.
From the Michigan Daily (the student paper of the University of Michigan) sometime in October 1919.
This is Part 2 in a short series of posts about some anonymous limericks Lloyd Douglas wrote for the Michigan Daily, the student paper at the University of Michigan, in the fall of 1919. These were meant as advice to incoming freshmen. “The Newcomer” tells about himself and an “Old Timer” (an upperclassman) offers advice. This one was printed sometime in October 1919 and it was titled, “Concerning Etiquette”:
The Newcomer Says:
I love this free Democracy Where all of us are brothers; But where I eat on Duroc Street They also board some others.
My Uncle! You should see this crew – Their arms up on the table – Our food supplies they vocalize As loudly as they’re able.
And when the feat is quite complete And they have mopped the platter, They find a stick and gouge and pick Where anything’s the matter.
Now I was taught that men of thought Are persons of good breeding; Please tell me why this rule’s awry When college men are feeding.
The Old Timer Replies:
My cultured friend, you need not mend The maxim you have quoted; Most men of thought, as you were taught, Are for good manners noted.
But don’t you know someday you’ll go From out these halls of knowledge? All sorts you’ll meet – and with them eat (For all you’re trained in college).
We could not bear to send you there Unused to sights revolting; So, for your good, you take your food Where some are skilled at bolting.
And afterwhile you’ll sometimes smile To see their feats courageous; Be careful, though; we’d have you know The habit is contagious.
[I will continue sharing these limericks over the next two posts.]
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 