Selected by Beverly Nichols - "Book of Old Ballads"

Arnold Bennett - "How to Live on 24 Hours a Day"

Josiah Quincy - "Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams."

Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.) - "English Fairy Tales"

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




It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her
guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do
not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these
tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any
act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the
instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and
in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's
work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to
forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more
wholesome lesson--more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more
conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand
that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the
limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the
victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were
but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.

The student running over the records of other times finds certain
salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that
the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by
the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of
every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the
monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed
over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this
present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a
time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at
certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation,
may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand
it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy
which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary
life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in
Scottish character.




THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.[C]


Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he
considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he
said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he
stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they
could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of
the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to understand the
conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for
them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it
is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a
conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere
absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee,
and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably
silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have
allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion,
self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among them; surely there
were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time,
and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a
very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their
opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's
acceptance of it? and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago
deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right
have we to hope that with the same natures, the same passions, the same
understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are
not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres
(bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant;
and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed,
the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy
an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate
possession of the vacant pedestal?

I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of my friend. In the
opinion even of Goethe, who was not troubled with credulity, the human
race can never attain to anything higher than Christianity--if we mean
by Christianity the religion which was revealed to the world in the
teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more limited
reprobation by our own Reformers of the creed of mediaeval Europe is not
more just or philosophical.

Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at
Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without
the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it
with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown
through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors
of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we
shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have
learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth,
hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The
promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the
possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the
wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.
We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and
inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable
epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has done its work,
and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it
is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor
for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient
examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us
farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.

In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually
repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time
of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows
through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the
people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the
idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life
shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea
becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in
the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers,
and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will
not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing; and habit and
superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft
upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined
action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
symbolism becomes at last no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of
dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the
era of the Caesars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in
the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the
deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could
offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and
on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.

Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had
not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own
nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a
liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising
such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that
it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad
man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There
is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There
is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a
Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But
Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small
wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other
such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical
phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The
study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with
the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
importance, the intensity of which made every other question
insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how
God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his
creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity
of philosophic speculation.

Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be,
the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether
_matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato
thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret
of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection,
reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God
would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He
worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung
necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and
want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its
purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion--the
fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul.

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to
conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its
control.

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of
Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent
by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make
good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy
God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from
immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who
had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent
evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the
difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle,
and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable
fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various
proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the
Hellenists, the Therapeutae, those strange Essene communists, with the
innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle
was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the
best of the remainder had ranged themselves--Manicheism and Catholic
Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian--Catholicism in which the
Jewish--element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the
fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge
how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the
mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us
trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's
Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle
fighting over words and straws.

Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as
the philosophers had seen, in _matter_, it was so far a conclusion which
both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of
it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic
Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution
of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created
could be of its own nature imperfect. God made it very good; some other
cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced
the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into
a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of
death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural
strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under
the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his
sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all
which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a
garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and
flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of
prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion
browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither
decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.

But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation
as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no
matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was
brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of
committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease,
storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of
the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of
carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic
strength--the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds,
rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches
of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal
change which had passed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore,
thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the
curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward
contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the
philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by
theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by
disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a 'possession' by
the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from Adam till Christ, groaned
and travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in man still made
itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will
to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over-strong for
it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy
detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came
forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protestants are compelled
to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is
now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to
modern thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. Unless
the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; because from
the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable. Without his
flesh, man was not, or would cease to be. But the natural organisation
of the flesh was infected with evil, and unless organisation could begin
again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at
all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into
the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a
new organic cell; and around it, through the virtue of his creative
energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure
of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it
passed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus
wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of
mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, He took a human body,
and He kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it
could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared
what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the
limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible
that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were
allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to assure
their senses. But space had no power over it, nor any of the material
obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and his body obeyed.
He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in
the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone
whither who could tell? At last He passed away to heaven; but while in
heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on
earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!--his very material body, in which
and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were
thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat
ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material
substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to
itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become
their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death,
but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had
no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a _new
creature_--and this new creature, which the child first put on in
baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the
Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to
strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to
render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God
through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but
because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would
necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth
could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes,
like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith
he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last
victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own
destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old
substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed
away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in
immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.

The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the
first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but
God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power
which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal
adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the
second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no
original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being
Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his
resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except
for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity,
the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was
the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.
Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the
penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been
alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints. They
desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work
of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the
destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and
Him.

Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed
which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the
noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time
went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own
philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the
common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God,
the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed
over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests,
a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, represented
Christ and administered his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was
presented in the Temple, and first entered on his Father's business; and
the baptised child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of
its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what
it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to
assist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share
its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the
union. Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate
the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made
holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent
his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at
times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and
move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance
forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his own flesh--for that
which was already perfect did not need subduing--but to give to penance
a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ
consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure
unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us
when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious
body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue
of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living
on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with
us--when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near,
beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his
tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death,
but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without
special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He
sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last
anointing before his passion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem
to decay--to decay--but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last
remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but
the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and
is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but passes
off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where
there is no sin, and God is all and in all!

FOOTNOTES:

[C] From the _Leader_, 1851.




A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.[D]


In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious
questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of
scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very
source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been
regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had
been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had
been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the
prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy
to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would
at present be found. Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and
the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New
diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance;
new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously
unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of
the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board
of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the
hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been
thousands and tens of thousands.

Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the
present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by
the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased,
might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute,
without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if
the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few
years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole
science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena
still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others
more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of
Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to
return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has
seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new
Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords
which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free
air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.

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