As the 1919 Christmas season was about to begin, Lloyd C. Douglas announced an unusual sermon offering “The Way Out” of the intricate problems left over from the Great War (which we now call World War I). There was nothing Christmasy about this sermon. It was a review of the book, Walled Towns, by Ralph Adams Cram, a professor of architecture at MIT.
In a brochure announcing the upcoming sermon, Douglas wrote that Walled Towns “urges and predicts a return, in all things, to ‘the unit of human scale,’ believing ‘the Free City’ — ‘the Walled Town’ — to be the only solution of our problem which, [Cram] declares, involves the destruction of Imperialism, Materialism, and ‘the quantitative standard’ — the ‘three errors of modernism.’
“‘The life of society,’ writes Cram, ‘is conditioned by a rhythmical wave motion; curves rising and descending… the falling curve meeting at some point the rising curve of a future coming into being, the crossing points forming the nodes of history, and spacing themselves at five-century intervals either side of the birth of Christ, or the year 1, A.D.
“By the use of the drawing which appears below (special permission having been secured from Professor Cram to reproduce it here), the author calls attention to ‘the correspondence, in time, between certain periodic manifestations of spiritual force, identical in nature, though somewhat varied in fashion, and these nodal points: that is to say, the monastic idea as this showed itself in the first, sixth, eleventh and sixteenth centuries. This synchronism may be graphically explained thus, the thin line indicating the approximate curve of social development, the shaded line the monastic manifestation…
“‘It would appear from this,’ continues Professor Cram, ‘that now while the next nodal point is possibly seventy-five years in the future [1994], the next manifestation of monasticism should already be showing itself. The curve of modernism is now descending as precipitously as did that of the Roman Imperialism; but already, to those who are willing to see, there are indisputable evidences of the rising of the following curve.
“‘Whether this is to emulate in lift and continuance the curves of Medievalism and of modernism, or whether it is to be but a poor copy of the sag and the low, heavy lift of the Dark Ages, is the question that man is to determine for himself during the next two generations [the 1920s and 30s].'”
In the remaining paragraphs of his announcement, Douglas calls Cram’s views “prophetic” and says, “This new conception of a ‘way out,’ surely cannot fail to be of interest to the ‘tried and tired mind’ of the present generation. For many of us it will have such an allurement that we may be tempted seriously to give ourselves to the promotion of this expedient to rescue our social order from its own blunders.
“Owing to the limited seating capacity of the church and the probable interest on the part of many people in the matter indicated above, Mr. Douglas will deliver this address on ‘Walled Towns’ at both the 10:30 AM and 7:30 PM services…”
It was unlike Douglas to create so much hype around a controversial idea of this kind. He was a modernist, and Cram was not. Cram was advocating a return to monasticism. For Douglas to jump on this bandwagon, especially at the beginning of the Christmas season, is rather alarming. But we have to remember that this was just a year after the end of the Great War, and it seemed clear that the nations were still in turmoil (a fact that would eventually lead to another World War). Douglas was obviously concerned about the future.
In my next post, I’ll tell you about “Walled Towns,” a sermon that wasn’t very important in its own right, but that laid the foundation for one of his most memorable novels.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 