Fanny Fern - "Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends"

John Burroughs - "The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers"

Alice B. Emerson - "Ruth Fielding at the War Front"

Henri Bergson - "Dreams"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

What Is and What Might Be

E >> Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be




There is another aspect of the idea of a supernatural revelation on
which it is necessary to touch. As intercourse between Nature and the
Supernatural world takes place, not in the natural order of things
but at the good pleasure of the Supernatural God, revelation must
needs be conceived of as a highly-specialised process. A revelation
which was addressed to the whole human race, and to which the whole
human race was able to respond, could scarcely be regarded as of
supernatural origin. The distinction between the supernaturalness of
the appeal and the naturalness of the response would gradually tend
to efface itself: for "what is universal is natural," and the voice
which every man was able to recognise would come at last to be
regarded as a voice from within oneself. If the supernatural
character of an alleged revelation is to be established, its
uniqueness must be duly emphasised. A particular people must be
chosen for the purpose of the divine experiment. A particular
law-giver must be commissioned to declare to the chosen people the
will of the Supernatural God. And from time to time a particular
prophet must be sent to rebuke the chosen people for its
backslidings, to show it where it has gone astray, and to exhort
it to turn again to its God.

For if it is far from Man to discern good, it is still farther from
him to desire it. How, then, shall he be induced to walk in the path
which the Law has prescribed for him? To this question there can be
but one answer: By the promise of external reward, and the threat of
external punishment. To set before Man an ideal of life--an ideal
which would be to him an unfailing fountain of magnetic force and
guiding light--is not in the power of legalism. For if an ideal is
to appeal to one, it must be the consummation of one's own natural
tendencies; but the current of Man's natural tendencies is ever
setting towards perdition, and the vanishing point of his heart's
desires is death. Were an ideal revealed to the Law-giver and by him
presented to his fellow-men, and were the heart of Man to respond
to the appeal that it made to him, the basic assumption of
legalism--that of the corruption of Man's nature--would be
undermined; for Man would have proved that it belonged to his nature
to turn towards the light,--in other words, that he had a natural
capacity for good. The plain truth is that legalism is precluded, by
its own first principles from appealing to any motive higher than
that instinctive desire for pleasure which has as its counterpart a
quasi-physical fear of pain. It is impossible for the lawgiver to
appeal to Man's better nature, to say to him: "Cannot you see for
yourself that this course of action is better than that,--that love
is better than hatred, mercy than cruelty, loyalty than treachery,
continence than self-indulgence?" What he can and must say to him is
this, and this only; "If you obey the Law you will be rewarded. If
you disobey it you will be punished." And this he must say to him
again and again.

It is true that among the many commandments which the Law sets before
its votaries, there are some--the moral commandments, properly so
called--which do in point of fact, and in defiance of the
philosophical assumption of legalism, appeal to the better nature
of Man. But these are at best an insignificant minority; and their
relative importance will necessarily diminish with the development
into its natural consequences of the root idea of legalism. For
legalism, just so far as it is strong, sincere, and self-confident,
will try to cover the whole of human life. The religion that is
content to do less than this, the religion that acquiesces in the
distinction between what is religious and what is secular, is, as we
shall presently see, a religion in decay. Religion may perhaps be
defined as Man's instinctive effort to bring a central aim into his
life and so provide himself with an authoritative standard of values.
In its highest and purest form, Religion controls Man's life, both as
a whole and in all its essential details, through the central aim or
spiritual ideal which it sets before him and the consequent standard
of values with which it equips him. But legalism is debarred by its
distrust of human nature from trying to control the details of life
through any central aim or ideal; and its assumption that all the
commandments of the Law are of divine origin, and therefore equally
binding upon Man, is obviously incompatible with the conception of
a standard of moral worth. Its attempt to cover the whole of life
must therefore resolve itself into an attempt to control the details
of conduct _in all their detail_; to deal with them, one by one,
bringing each in turn under the operation of an appropriate
commandment, and if necessary deducing from the commandment a special
rule to meet the special case. In other words, besides being told
what he is not to do (in the more strictly moral sphere of conduct),
and what he is to do (in the more strictly ceremonial sphere), Man
must be told, in the fullest detail, how he is to do whatever may
have to be done in the daily round of his life. Such at least is the
aim of legalism. The nets of the Law are woven fine, and flung far
and wide. If there are any acts in a man's life which escape through
their clinging meshes, the force of Nature is to be blamed for this
partial failure, not the zeal of the Doctors of the Law.

It is towards this inverted ideal that the doctrine of salvation
through obedience will lead its votaries, when its master
principle--that of distrust of human nature--has been followed out
into all its natural consequences,--followed out, as it was by
Pharisaism, with a fearless logic and a fixed tenacity of purpose.
An immense and ever-growing host of formulated rules, not one in a
hundred of which makes any appeal to the heart of Man or has any
meaning for his higher reason, will crush his life down, slowly and
inexorably, beneath their deadly burden. "At every step, at the work
of his calling, at prayer, at meals, at home and abroad, from early
morning till late in the evening, from youth to old age, the dead,
the deadening formula"[3] will await him. The path of obedience
for the sake of obedience speedily degenerates into the path of
mechanical obedience; and the end of that path is the triumph of
machinery over life.

For it is to the letter of the Law, rather than to the spirit, that
the strict legalist is bound to conform. The letter of the Law is
divine; and obedience to it is within the power of every man who will
take the trouble to learn its commandments. What the spirit of the
Law may be, is beyond the power of fallen Man to determine; and were
an attempt made to interpret it, the result would be a state of
widespread moral chaos, for there would be as many interpretations of
it as there were minds that had the courage and the initiative to
undertake so audacious a task. As it is with the Law as such, so it
is with each of its numerous commandments. The man who professes to
obey the spirit of a commandment is in secret revolt against its
divine authority. For he is presuming to criticise it in the light
of his own conscience and insight, and to limit his obedience to it
to that particular aspect of it which he judges to be worthy of his
devotion. From such a criticism of the Fourth Commandment as "the
Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath" to open violation
of the letter of the commandment (on this occasion or on that) there
is but a single step. The whole structure of legalism would collapse
if men were allowed to absolve themselves from obedience to the
letter of the Law, out of regard for what they conceived to be its
spirit. To interpret a commandment, in the sense of providing for its
application to the fresh cases that may arise for treatment, is the
work, not of poets and prophets but of Doctors and Scribes. The path
of literal, and therefore of mechanical, obedience is the only path
of safety; and the more punctiliously the letter is obeyed, the more
perfect will be the machinery of salvation, and the nearer will
legalism get to the appointed goal of its labours,--the extinction
of spiritual life.

As is the life that legalism expects us to lead, so is the scheme of
rewards and punishments by which (as we have already seen) it
constrains us to lead it. The materialisation of life that takes
place under the sway of the Law is accurately matched and measured by
the materialisation of the doctrine of moral retribution. The general
idea that virtue is rewarded and vice punished is profoundly true.
But the idea is easily misinterpreted; and it necessarily shares in
the degradation of one's general conception of life. Virtue rewards
the virtuous by making them more virtuous. Vice punishes the vicious
by making them more vicious. So long as the rewards for which we hope
and the punishments which we dread are conceived of as inward and
spiritual, we are on safe ground. But such a scheme of rewards and
punishments is wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism. It
is not by becoming more virtuous that we are saved. It is not by
becoming more vicious that we are lost. We are saved by obedience,
we are lost by disobedience, to the formulated rules of a
divinely-delivered law. To appeal to Man's higher self, when there is
no higher self to appeal to,--to set before him as the supreme reward
of virtue the development of his better nature, when his nature is
intrinsically evil,--would be an obvious waste of labour. And as,
apart from the presumed repugnance of the "natural man" to the
presumed delights of the Law, the intrinsic attractiveness of the
life that legalism prescribes must needs diminish in exact proportion
as the authority of the Law becomes oppressive and vexatious, and the
letter of it tends to establish itself at the expense of the
spirit,--it is clear that a scheme of rewards and punishments will
become, in effect as well as in theory, the only weapon in the
armoury of the legalist. It is also clear that there will be much
work for that one weapon to do. The central tendencies of Man's
nature, besides being _ex hypothesi_ evil, are antagonistic _de
facto_ to the galling despotism and the irrational requirements of
the Law; and the lawgiver, far from being able to enlist those
tendencies under his banner by appealing to the highest of them--the
natural leaders of the rest,--must be prepared to overcome their
collective resistance by winning to his side the lowest of them, by
terrifying Man's weaker self with threats, by corrupting his baser
self with bribes. The ruin of Man's nature, whether hypothetical or
actual,[4] has left intact (or relatively intact) only the animal
base of it. It is to his animal instincts, then, that legalism must
appeal in its endeavour to influence his conduct. In other words, the
punishments and the rewards to which Man is to look forward must be
of the same _genus_, if not of the same _species_, as the lash of
the whip that punishes the lagging race-horse, or the lump of sugar
that rewards his exertions. And with the inevitable growth of egoism
and individualism in the demoralising atmosphere with which legalism
(and its lineal successors) must needs invest human life, Man's
conception of the rewards and punishments that await him will
deteriorate rather than improve. The Jewish desire for national
prosperity was an immeasurably nobler motive to action than is the
Christian's fear of the quasi-material fires of Hell. Indeed it is
nothing but our familiarity with the latter motive that has blinded
us to its inherent baseness. It is no exaggeration to say that there
have been epochs in the history of Christendom (as there are still
quarters of Christian thought and phases of Christian faith) in which
the trumpet-call that was meant to rouse the soldiers of God to
renewed exertion has rung in their ears as an ignominious "_sauve qui
peut_."

The tendency of legalism to externalise life has another aspect. In
the eyes of the strict legalist there is no such thing as an inward
state of human worth. The doctrine of the corruption of Man's nature
is incompatible with the idea of "goodness" being measurable
(potentially if not actually) in terms of the health and happiness
of the "inward man." Goodness, as the legalist conceives it, is
measurable in terms of correctness of outward conduct, and of that
only. And when life is regulated by an elaborate Law, the rules of
which are familiar to all men, there is no reason why a man's outward
conduct should not be appraised, with some approach to accuracy, by
his neighbours and friends. Hence it is that in the atmosphere of
legalism an excessive deference is wont to be paid to public, and
even to parochial, opinion. The life of the votary of the Law is
lived under strict and constant _surveillance_; and a man learns
at last to value himself as his conduct is valued by a critical
onlooker, and to make it the business of his life to produce
"results" which can be weighed and measured by conventional
standards, rather than to grow in grace,--with silent, subtle,
unobtrusive growth.

Were I to try to prove that the _regime_ of the Law was necessarily
fatal to the development of Man's higher faculties--conscience,
freedom, reason, imagination, intuition, aspiration, and the rest--I
should waste my time. Legalism, as a scheme of life, is based on the
assumption that development along the lines of Man's nature is a
movement towards perdition; and to reproach the legalist for having
arrested the growth of the human spirit by the pressure of the Law
were to provoke the rejoinder that he had done what he intended
to do. The two schemes of Salvation--the mechanical and the
evolutional--have so little in common that neither can pass judgment
on the other without begging the question that is in dispute. When I
come to consider the effect of legalism--or rather of the philosophy
that underlies legalism--on education, I may perhaps be able to find
some court of law in which the case between the two schemes can be
tried with the tacit consent of both. Meanwhile I can but note
that in the atmosphere of the Law growth is as a matter of fact
arrested,--arrested so effectually that the counter process of
degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of this statement,
if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has
been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of
Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count
himself to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his
spiritual achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has
closed his account with God.

Pharisaism is at once the logical consummation and the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of legalism. It is to the genius of Israel that we owe that
practical interpretation of the fundamental principle of
supernaturalism, which was embodied in the doctrine of salvation
through obedience to the letter of a Law. And it is to the genius
of Israel that we owe that rigorously logical interpretation of
the _axiomata media_ of legalism, which issued in due season in
Pharisaism. The world owes much to the courage and sincerity
of Israel,--to his unique force of character, to his fanatical
earnestness, to his relentless tenacity of purpose. In particular,
it owes a debt which it can never liquidate to what was at once the
cause and the result of his over-seriousness,--to his lack of any
sense of humour,--a negative quality which allowed his practical
logic to run its course without let or hindrance, and prevented
the "brakes" of common-sense from acting when he found himself, in
his very zeal for the Law, descending an inclined plane into an
unfathomable abyss of turpitude and folly. The man (or people) who is
able, of his own experience, to tell the rest of mankind what a given
scheme of life really means and is really worth, owing to his having
offered himself as the _corpus vile_ for the required experiment, is
one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. Had Israel been
less sincere or less courageous, we might never have known what
deadly fallacies lurk in the seemingly harmless dualism of popular
thought.

* * * * *

But the West, it will be said, is Christian, not Jewish. Is it
Christian? If the word "Christian" connotes acceptance of the
teaching as well as devotion to the person of Christ, it is scarcely
applicable either to the official or to the popular religion of
the West. For Christ, the stern denouncer of the Pharisees, was
the whole-hearted enemy of legalism; and the legal conception of
salvation through mechanical obedience still dominates the religion
and life of Christendom.

The Jewish Law tried to cover, and tended more and more to cover, the
whole of human life. It is true that it controlled the details rather
than the totality of life; but the reason why it dealt with life,
detail by detail, was that its exponents, owing to their spiritual
purblindness, were unable to see the wood for the trees. In
Christendom, while the doctrine of salvation through mechanical
obedience was retained, the authority of a Church was substituted
for that of a Code of Law. The growth of the idea of Humanity, as
opposed to that of mere nationality, made this necessary. As the
former idea began to compete with the latter, the need for a
divinely-commissioned society which should declare the will and
communicate the grace of God, not to one nation only but to all men
who were willing to hearken and obey,--and whose action, as a channel
of intercourse between God and Man, should be continuous rather
than spasmodic,--began to make itself felt. A Code of Law might
conceivably suffice to regulate the life of one small nation;
but when we consider under what varying conditions of climate,
occupation, custom, tradition, and so forth, the general life of
Humanity is carried on, we see clearly that no one Code can even
begin to suffice for the needs of the whole human race. Hence, and
for other reasons which we need not now consider, the West, in
accepting the philosophy of Israel, translated its master idea of
salvation through mechanical obedience into the notation of
ecclesiastical, as distinguished from legal, control.

That obedience to a supernaturally-commissioned Church, or rather to
the One supernaturally-commissioned Church, is the first and last
duty of Man, is the fundamental assumption on which the stately
fabric of Catholic Christianity has been reared. In various ways the
Church has striven to exact implicit obedience from her children.
Through the medium of the Confessional she has secured some measure
of control over their morals. By regulating the worship of God--both
public and private--she has been able to rule off a sphere of human
conduct in which her own authority is necessarily paramount. By
supplying the faithful with rations of "theological information" (to
quote the apt phrase of a pillar of orthodoxy), and requiring them to
accept these on her authority as indisputably true, she has succeeded
in imposing her yoke on thought as well as on conduct. By claiming
to control the outflow of Divine grace, through the channels of
the Sacraments, she has been able to threaten the rebellious with
the dread penalty of being cut off from intercourse with God.
And by telling men, with stern insistence, that the choice between
obedience and disobedience to herself is the choice between eternal
happiness and eternal misery, she has sought to extend her dominion
beyond the limits of time and to raise to an infinite power her
supremacy over the souls of men.

But just because the life of collective Humanity is large, complex,
and full of change and variety, the Church which aspires to be
universal, however strong may be her desire to superintend all the
details of human thought and conduct, and however ready she may be
to adapt herself to local and temporal variations, must needs allow
whole aspects and whole spheres of human life to escape from her
control. The history of Christendom is the history of the gradual
emancipation of the Western world from the despotism of the Church.
The various activities of the human spirit--art, science, literature,
law, statecraft, and the rest--have, one and all, freed themselves by
slow degrees from ecclesiastical control, till little or nothing has
been left for the Church to regulate but her own rites and
ceremonies, the morals (in a narrow and ever-narrowing sense of the
word), and the faith (in the theological sense of the word), of the
faithful.

With the emancipation of Man's higher activities from ecclesiastical
control, the distinction between the _religious_ and the _secular_
life has gradually established itself. That this should happen was
inevitable. Mechanical obedience being of the essence of supernatural
religion, the secularising of human life became absolutely necessary
if any vital progress was to be made. The Church patronised art,
music, and the drama so far as they served her purposes. When they
outgrew those purposes, in response to the expansive forces of human
nature, she treated them as secular and let them go their several
ways. In the interests of theology she tried to keep physical science
in leading-strings; but when, after a bitter struggle, science broke
loose from her control, she treated it too as secular and let it go
its way.

Let us see what this distinction involves. As salvation is to be
achieved by obedience to the Church and in no other way, it follows
that in all those spheres of life which are outside the jurisdiction
of the Church (except, of course, so far as questions of "morals" may
arise in connection with them), Man's conduct and general demeanour
are supposed to have no bearing on his eternal destiny. This is the
view of the secular life which is taken by the Church. And not by the
Church alone. As, little by little, the Institution--be it Church, or
Sect, or Code, or Scripture--which claims to be the sole accredited
agent of the Eternal God, relaxes its hold upon the ever-expanding
life of Humanity, all those developments of human nature which cease
to be amenable to its control come to be regarded as mundane, as
unspiritual, as carnal, as matters with which God has no concern.

Were this view of the secular life confined to those who call
themselves religious, no great harm would be done. Unfortunately, the
secular life, which is under the influence of the current conception
of God as one who holds no intercourse with Man except through
certain accredited agents, is ready to acquiesce in the current
estimate of itself as godless, and to accept as valid the distinction
between the religious life and its own. Hence comes a general
lowering of Man's aims. As the secular life is content to regard
itself as godless, and so deprives itself of any central and unifying
aim, it is but natural that success in each of its many branches
should come to be regarded as an end in itself. It is but natural, to
take examples at random, that the artist should follow art for art's
sake, that the man of science should deify positive knowledge, that
the statesman should regard political power as intrinsically
desirable, that the merchant and the manufacturer should live to make
money, and that the highest motive which appeals to all men alike
should be the desire to bulk large in the eyes of their fellow-men.
Even the ardent reformer, whose enthusiasm makes him unselfish,
pursues the ideal to which he devotes himself, as an end in itself,
and makes no attempt to define or interpret it in terms of its
relation to that supreme and central ideal which he ought to regard
as the final end of human endeavour. When we remind ourselves,
further, that secularism, equally with supernaturalism, tends to
identify "Nature" with lower nature--in other words, with the
material side of the Universe and the carnal side of Man's being,--we
shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost,
through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central
aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of
materialism,--a materialism of conduct as well as of thought.

But if the loss to the secular life, from its compulsory
despiritualisation, is great, the loss to religion, from the
secularisation of so much of Man's rational activity, is greater
still. The very distinction between the secular and the religious
life is profoundly irreligious, in that it rests on the tacit
assumption that there is no unity, no central aim, in human life;
and the fact that official religion is ready to acquiesce in the
distinction, is ready, in other words, to make a compromise with its
enemy "the world," is a proof that it is secretly conscious of its
own failing power, and is even beginning to despair of itself. As it
resigns itself to this feeling (as yet perhaps but dimly realised),
its reasons for entertaining it must needs grow stronger. The
progressive enlargement of the sphere of Man's secular activities is
accompanied, step for step, by the devitalisation of the idea of the
Divine. What kind of intercourse can God be supposed to hold with Man
if the latter is to be left to his own devices in what he must needs
regard as among the more important aspects of his life,--in his
commercial and industrial enterprises, in his art, in his literature,
in his study of Nature's laws, in his mastery of Nature's forces,
in his pursuit of positive truth and practical good? As in these
matters Man frees himself, little by little, from the yoke of
supernaturalism, which he has been accustomed to identify with
religion, his formal conception of his relation to God and of the
part that God plays in his life--the conception that is defined and
elucidated for him by religious "orthodoxy"--becomes of necessity
more irrational, more mechanical, more unreal, more repugnant to his
better nature and to the higher developments of his "common-sense."
The tendency to exalt the letter of what is spoken or written, at the
expense of the spirit, is as much of the essence of ecclesiasticism
as of legalism. "_Si dans les regles du salut le fond l'emporterait
sur la forme, ce serait la ruine du sacerdoce._" And, as a matter of
experience, the hair-splitting puerilities of Pharisaism under the
Old Dispensation have been matched, and more than matched, in the
spheres of ritual, of dogmatic theology, and of casuistical morality,
under the New. As Man gradually shifts the centre of gravity of his
being from the religious to the secular side of his life, this
puerile element in religion--the element of ultra-formalism, of
irrationality, of unreality--tends, like a morbid growth, to draw to
itself the vital energies of what was once a healthy organism but
is now degenerating into a "body of death." If, in these days of
absorbing secular activity, Man continues to tolerate the theories
and practices of the religious experts, the reason is--apart from the
influence of custom and tradition and of his respect for venerable
and "established" institutions--that they are things which he has
neither time nor inclination to investigate, and which he can
therefore afford to tolerate as being far removed from what is vital
and central in his life. I am told that the Catholic Church holds, in
the case of a dying man, "that the eternal fate of the soul, for good
or for evil, may depend upon the reception or the non-reception of
absolution, and even of extreme unction." That the truly appalling
conception of God which is implicit in this sentence should still
survive, that it should not yet have been swept out of existence by
the outraged common-sense and good feeling of Humanity, is a proof of
the immense indifference with which the Western world, absorbed as it
is in secular pursuits, regards religion.

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