Cheiro - "Palmistry for All"

Ralph Henry Barbour - "Left End Edwards"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret"

United States Department of the Interior - "The Nation's River"

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




Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason is beyond its
depth, that the wise and the unwise are on the same level of incapacity,
and that we must accept what we find established, or we must believe
nothing. We presume that Mr. Mansell's dilemma itself is a conclusion
of reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our ultimate
authority; and were the collective sense of mankind to declare Mr.
Mansell right, we should submit to that opinion as readily as to
another. But the collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has
been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and deliberately
sawing off his seat. It seems never to have occurred to him that, if he
is right, he has no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says
to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and
Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was unreasonable;
Gardiner answered that there was the letter of Scripture for it, and
that the human intellect was no measure of the power of God. Yet the
Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church
of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so
wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than
none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in
heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural
body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was
of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an end.

There have been 'Aids to Faith' produced lately, and 'Replies to the
Seven Essayists,' 'Answers to Colenso,' and much else of the kind. We
regret to say that they have done little for us. The very life of our
souls is at issue in the questions which have been raised, and we are
fed with the professional commonplaces of the members of a close guild,
men holding high office in the Church, or expecting to hold high office
there; in either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence of
the institution which they represent. We desire to know what those of
the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with their prospects
in life; we desire to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the
historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and these are for
the most part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The
professional theologians alone are loud and confident; but they speak in
the old angry tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.
They do not meet the real difficulties; they mistake them, misrepresent
them, claim victories over adversaries with whom they have never even
crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at which we
can only smile. It has been the unhappy manner of their class from
immemorial time; they call it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond
all doubt that they were on God's side--as if serious enquiry after
truth was something which they were entitled to resent. They treat
intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be condemned and
punished than considered and weighed, and rather stop their ears and run
with one accord upon anyone who disagrees with them than listen
patiently to what he has to say.

We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular points which
demand re-discussion. It is enough that the more exact habit of thought
which science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of the value and
nature of evidence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds
should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that one country and
one people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles different
from those which we now find to prevail universally. One of many
questions, however, shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue
seems habitually to be evaded.

Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity of the
Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament. The
Bishop of Natal has thrown out in a crude form the critical results of
the enquiries of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical
calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He supposes himself
to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation
of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. The
apologists have replied that the objections are not absolutely
conclusive, that the events described in the Book of Exodus might
possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances, have actually
taken place; and they then pass to the assumption that because a story
is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. We have no
intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes his
arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may
settle their differences between themselves. The question is at once
wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that controversy.
Were it proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
written by Moses, that those and all the books of the Old and New
Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear;
were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were
the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should not have
advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the
Bible, that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its parts.
The 'genuineness and authenticity' argument is irrelevant and needless.
The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of the Pentateuch
proves nothing about its immunity from errors. If there are no mistakes
in it, it was not the workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand of Moses was the
instrument made use of. To the most excellent of contemporary histories,
to histories written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
we accord but a limited confidence. The highest intellectual competence,
the most admitted truthfulness, immunity from prejudice, and the absence
of temptation to misstate the truth; these things may secure great
credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and circumstantial
exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal
opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way. Two
witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably
differ in some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate facts
precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of a
story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the
circumstances pass through it, alters their proportions unconsciously,
or shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to the most
authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance
which is demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is
a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this
infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved,
demands our belief. Very likely, the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it
is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it
records; and though there may be intellectual error in denying them,
there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenticated;
but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of
the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It
might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no
one would call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment when
they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name
of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found allusions there to the
Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been
found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired
truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure
way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine Oracles may be true, and may
be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them
so. No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophecies of Isaiah
and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of Assyria or the
Assyrian Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage
some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of the
battle of Cannae; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the
inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the
inspiration of the whole Latin literature.

We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infallible; we desire
only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it
properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser
than argument--as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal
and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity
depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of
marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells the
same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the appearances of the gods
upon earth, and of their intercourse with men. The lives of the saints
of the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the present
day, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling and rivalling those of
the Gospels. Some of these stories are romantic and imaginative; some
clear, literal, and prosaic; some rest on mere tradition; some on the
sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are obvious fables; some are as
well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.
The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects them without
enquiry--involves those for which there is good authority and those for
which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and
sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the
words of Hume, that men should deceive or be deceived, than that the
laws of nature should be violated. At this moment we are beset with
reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of
hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An
unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with
common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for
business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who
was my informant's intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life. We
should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary
matter: they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses
in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word. The
person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our
experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so
large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are
contented to smile; and we do not care so much as to turn out of our way
to examine them.

The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories
we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we
insist on the universal acceptance: the former are all false, the latter
are all true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as
these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called
historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole, the miracles of
the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we
should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one
set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The
writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books
themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are
lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a
counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediaeval saints. In many
instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions
and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or
Elisha took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the account of
St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should not God
give a power to the saint which He had given to the prophet? We can
produce no reason from the nature of things, for we know not what the
nature of things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the
ministers of religion were allowed to prove their commission by working
miracles, what right have we, on grounds either of history or
philosophy, to draw a clear line at the death of St. John--to say that
before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were
false?

There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real
question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who
withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all
which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.
They assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and
proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow understanding into
a measure of the possibilities of the universe; nor does any person with
any pretensions to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of a sick friend,
for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of any calamity, we expect
that God will do something by an act of his personal will which
otherwise would not have been done--that he will suspend the ordinary
relations of natural cause and effect; and this is the very idea of a
miracle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no miracle may have
taken place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and would have
occurred whether we had prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very
essence implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which
is above nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so strong that no room
is left for mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evidence is
required to establish a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient
for a common occurrence.

It has been said recently by 'A Layman,' in a letter to Mr. Maurice,
that the resurrection of our Lord is as well authenticated as the death
of Julius Caesar. It is far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken
in supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence that inward
assurance of the Christian, which would make him rather die than
disbelieve a truth so dear to him. But if the layman meant that there
was as much proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in a
court of justice, he could scarcely have considered what he was saying.
Julius Caesar was killed in a public place, in the presence of friend
and foe, in a remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The
circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and were never
denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, on the other hand, seems
purposely to have withheld such public proof of his resurrection as
would have left no room for unbelief. He showed himself, 'not to all the
people'--not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have
overwhelmed--but 'to witnesses chosen before;' to the circle of his own
friends. There is no evidence which a jury could admit that he was ever
actually dead. So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,
that Pilate, we are told, 'marvelled.' The subsequent appearances were
strange, and scarcely intelligible. Those who saw Him did not recognise
Him till He was made known to them in the breaking of bread. He was
visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those who were most intimate
with Him for another person; nor do the accounts agree which are given
by the different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern sense
(except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was rather
rebuked than praised) there was none, and could be none. The evidence
offered was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those who
satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a searching enquiry,
but who gave their assent with the unhesitating confidence of love.

St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an instance of the kind of
testimony which then worked the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery
fanatic on a mission of persecution with the midday Syrian sun streaming
down upon his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our
Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the present day, and
if a modern physician were consulted about it, he would say, without
hesitation, that it was an effect of an overheated brain and that there
was nothing in it extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by
the appearance had been too strong for such an explanation to be
satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, especially if he was a man
of St Paul's intellectual stature, would have at once examined into the
facts otherwise known, connected with the subject of what he had seen.
St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resurrection--had
disbelieved it fiercely and passionately; we should have expected that
he would at once have sought for those who could best have told him the
details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He
went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned to Jerusalem,
he rather held aloof from those who had been our Lord's companions, and
who had witnessed his ascension. He saw Peter, he saw James; 'of the
rest of the apostles saw he none.' To him evidently the proof of the
resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It was to that
which he always referred when called on for a defence of his faith.

Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense of the word, there
may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not
enough, unless we assume the fact to be true on far other grounds, to
produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the
resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be
something far different from that suspended judgment in which history
alone would leave us.

Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances
imaginable, knows nothing of 'absolute certainty;' and if historical
facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must
rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness
in ourselves. On human evidence the miracles of St. Teresa and St.
Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.

M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story
which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination,
is spreading rapidly through the educated world. Carrying out the
principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of
miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is
miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the
original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died in Palestine
eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.
He will be read soon enough by many who would better consider their
peace of mind by leaving him alone. For ourselves, we are unable to see
by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of the narrative, he
retains the rest; the imagination and the credulity which invent
extraordinary incidents, invent ordinary incidents also; and if the
divine element in the life is legendary, the human may be legendary
also. But there is one lucid passage in the introduction which we
commend to the perusal of controversial theologians:--

'No miracle such as those of which early histories are full has taken
place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows,
without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in
which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are
disposed to believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before an
assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality. Neither
uneducated people, nor even men of the world, have the requisite
capacity; great precautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific
research. Have we not seen men of the world in our own time become the
dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain
that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it not
possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to examine into
them in detail, would be found equally to contain an element of error?
It is not in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of
an experience which never varies, that we banish miracles from history.
We do not say a miracle is impossible--we say only that no miracle has
ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow
with pretensions serious enough to deserve examination. Let us suppose
him to announce that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would
be done? A committee would be appointed, composed of physiologists,
physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed to exact investigation; a
body would then be selected which the committee would assure itself was
really dead; and a place would be chosen where the experiment was to
take place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no opening for
uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the restoration to life was
effected, a probability would be arrived at which would be almost equal
to certainty. An experiment, however, should always admit of being
repeated. What a man has done once he should be able to do again; and in
miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty. The performer
would be requested to repeat the operation under other circumstances
upon other bodies; and if he succeeded on every occasion, two points
would be established: first, that there may be in this world such things
as supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to perform
them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular persons. But who does
not perceive that no miracle was ever performed under such conditions as
these?'

We have quoted this passage because it expresses with extreme precision
and clearness the common-sense principle which we apply to all
supernatural stories of our own time, which Protestant theologians
employ against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which M. Renan
is only carrying to its logical conclusions in applying to the history
of our Lord, if the Gospels are tried by the mere tests of historical
criticism. The Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions were
never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in the presence of sceptics
to establish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation sought
after a sign, the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the
presence of unbelief, our Lord was not able to work miracles. But
science has less respect for that undoubting and submissive willingness
to believe; and it is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the
truth of the New Testament on the principles of Paley--if with Professor
Jowett 'we interpret the Bible as any other book,' the element of
miracle which has evaporated from the entire surface of human history
will not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels, and the
facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like a snowball.

Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain the credibility of
miracles, and nothing could be more likely, if revelation be a reality
and not a dream, than that the history containing it should be saved in
its composition from the intermixture of human infirmity. This is the
position in which instinct long ago taught Protestants to entrench
themselves, and where alone they can hope to hold their ground: once
established in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it
could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in the Bible were
certainly untrue.

Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the subject. Those who
believed Christianity would admit the assumption; those who disbelieved
Christianity would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed to that
plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external
evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their
feebleness. Unfortunately--and this is the true secret of our present
distractions--it seems certain that in some way or other this belief in
inspiration itself requires to be revised. We are compelled to examine
more precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the creation of
man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St.
Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts
which science knows to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's
sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no
ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognising, men and
women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of
Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake. Neither has any
such deluge as that from which, according to the received
interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the
human period. We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
the natural course of discovery: as the story of the creation was
written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to
the existing state of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not
intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for
the moral training of their souls. It may be that this is true.
Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their
intellect unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible
when it touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, there
are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its
geology or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of the
Jewish people. Let it be once established that there is room for error
anywhere, and we have no security for the accuracy of this history. The
inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it
is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot live on
probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace
must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it
is nothing. It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are
in vain; that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld
from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that the existing belief
is undergoing a silent modification, like those to which the
dispensations of religion have been successively subjected; or, again,
it may be that to the creed as it is already established there is
nothing to be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it. At this
moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to see their way
to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building,
the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt
is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the
sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were
educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe;
but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe,
they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church
and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the
testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the
contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are
tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific
investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural
occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical
work; we believe, perhaps, that the situation is desperate, and hopeless
of improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But we
cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of uncertainty will haunt
the world like an uneasy ghost, till we take it by the throat like men.

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