Milo Hastings - "City of Endless Night"

Dillon Wallace - "Left on the Labrador"

Richard F. Burton - "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3"

Ignatius Donnelly - "The Antediluvian World"

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.

Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects




Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the
realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.

Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from
Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new
life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the
Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire
went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a
second revelation.

So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great teacher comes
again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ
found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned,
the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in
impotence on the bookshelves.

In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me,
that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to
the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead
superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.




THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.


I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the
Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to
have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject
is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great
national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose
disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that
only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen
once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part,
he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We
seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound
by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing
or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever,
especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the
English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go
fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with
every considerable nation. They work out their own political and
spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to
themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is
required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should
feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not
conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The
blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times
can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if
people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the
struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to
wound without intending it.

My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious
convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on
both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can
take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for
something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is
plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only
rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided,
the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely
what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to
fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They
make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all
the right is theirs--that their enemies have all the bad qualities which
their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which
I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review,
newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that
opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or
Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither
wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser
nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the
Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad
company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.

Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either not come here at
all, or else should have chosen some other matter to talk about. In
excuse for persisting, I can but say that the subject is one about which
I have been led by circumstances to read and think considerably; and
though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about himself and his own
affairs than anyone else can possibly know, yet a stranger's eye will
sometimes see things which escape those more immediately interested; and
I allow myself to hope that I may have something to say not altogether
undeserving your attention. I shall touch as little as possible on
questions of opinion; and if I tread by accident on any sensitive
point, I must trust to your kindness to excuse my awkwardness.

Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in the first quarter
of the sixteenth century, we see a country in which the old feudal
organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more
vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the
growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an
organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the
towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the
most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live
nearest to them; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords,
knights, abbots, or prelates, under whose rule they were born, had as
yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and the soil was very
miserably tilled) lived under the shadow of the castle or the monastery.
They followed their lord's fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his
politics, and supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as
the case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life of those
times. The loyal attachment of man to man--of liege servant to liege
lord--of all forms under which human beings can live and work together,
has most of grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without mutual
confidence and affection--mutual benefits given and received. The length
of time which the system lasted proves that in the main there must have
been a fine fidelity in the people--truth, justice, generosity in their
leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out of those times;
just as in these islands nowadays you may find bad instances of the
abuses of rights of property. You may find stories--too many also--of
husbands ill-using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay
the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of property on
the whole does more harm than good. I do not doubt that down in that
feudal system somewhere lie the roots of some of the finest qualities in
the European peoples.

So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not
very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of
the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked
after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very
largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and
active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just
Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It
taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of
life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It
taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now
consider to have been a mistake--a great many theories of earthly things
which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward
forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not
think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are
hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth
has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the
Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented,
was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork
without which further progress in that science would have been probably
impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited
well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when
superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told
here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual
darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say,
as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that
it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the
thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the
Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue
that the old fading tree could never have been green and young.
Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and
usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.

So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough,
and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems,
however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within
moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that,
measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the
mediaeval institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these
countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could
hardly have mended them if they had tried.

But times change, and good things as well as bad grow old and have to
die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was
the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made
up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of
human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this
would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take
us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while
the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is
expressed changes and has changed--changes as living languages change
and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change,
as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the
theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change--that
is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas,
instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs.
The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the
effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made
itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far
monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked
and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates,
priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages
themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people
believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living
reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps
everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and
cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry,
cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life
both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible
council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been
among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was
something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to
be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of
Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles
were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was
and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to
help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or
something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the
Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They
decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed;
and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and
faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of
theirs, we all know tolerably well.

The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland,
the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came
about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by
princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up
with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and
Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted
early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised.
Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the
creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been
created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men,
belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the
earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in
Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in
the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part,
farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and
thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation
of men detached from the lords and from the Church--brave, noble,
resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised
by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting
allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of
Scotland--that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and
determined its after fortunes as a nation--had its first germ in these
half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the
Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part
of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing--created already
by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not
materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons,
as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the
Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been
that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social
constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the
Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it
was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.

How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give
but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows
the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward
revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It
would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole
nation--as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily
united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the
greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing
about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it
than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how
came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little
sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the
explanation.

The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was
their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a
passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended
their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner
or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how
that union was to be brought about--how they were to make sure that,
when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals,
and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary
Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be
settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had
had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their
bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the
Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an
opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother
governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country
would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an
English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her
great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be
anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers
in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church
was rich--much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry
the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English
monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability
of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the
French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came
about that the great families--even those who, like the Hamiltons, were
most closely connected with France--were tempted over by the bait to the
other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the
Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers,
because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and
thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of
France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in
favour of the revolution.

And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last,
at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in
succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of
Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was
supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of
her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her
father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two?
Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to
shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join
the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative
position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a
new dynasty.

I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so
much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the
story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus,
and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed
which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its
possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The
French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers
took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a
clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country.
Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility, having once
accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it--especially if
Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the
marriage--the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something
extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were
perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters
on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from
them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would
have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed
compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the
English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair
dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear
that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which
would receive consideration from any of the high political personages
concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had
seen working under Calvin at Geneva--a constitution in which the clergy
as ministers of God should rule all things--rule politically at the
council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made
plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger
Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House
of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the
worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to
religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that.
Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn,
Ruthven, young Argyll--above all, the Earl of Moray--really did in some
degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was
perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a
bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman
of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable,
no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of
the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth
would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their
intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in
all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one
side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the
two crowns after the fashion proposed by the Scotch Parliament she
utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far
as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely
perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the
country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and
what to do next they did not very well know.

It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis
the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion
with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to
the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having
failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the
English Crown--as good as he, or better, for she would have the English
Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and
making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before
were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to
Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now
encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of
England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had
assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it,
but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her
promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English
Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well
known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some
rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The
object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For
religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted
with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly
or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and
on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend
them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a
move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more
terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country--and
he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood
that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time
would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet
he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched with the notion
of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak
to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the
rest--their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course
Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself
prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground
intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to
invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its
soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a
dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained
unchanged from what it had been--had the direction of its fortunes
remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would
have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power
in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.

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