H. Irving Hancock - "The Grammar School Boys Snowbound"

William Henry Gladstone - "The Hawarden Visitors' Hand Book"

Colonel Mildred Duff - "Catherine Booth"

Various - "Eighth Annual Report"

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




Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural
and moral; the first, indeed, being in no proper sense a religion at
all, as we understand religion; and only assuming the character of it in
the minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their
time and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, with
an effort and with indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under
the systems which they found, emotions which had no proper place in
them.

Of the transition periods which we have described as taking place under
the religion which we call moral, the first known to us is marked at its
opening by the appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision
of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it.

The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral
government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things
are constituted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are
miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very
near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to
obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws,
even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain
extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and
those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were
perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets
of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia,
and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have
approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of
life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern
distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins
were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever
it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle
advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple,
without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the
complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury
of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily
understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would,
on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward
prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and
punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the
administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of
mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.
Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute,
universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.
Superficial generalisations were construed into immutable decrees; the
God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or
wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His
subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards
completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found
generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with
falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed
through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of
nature--earthquakes, storms, and pestilences--were the ministers of
God's justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.
That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too
high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were
no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men
could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if God's
hand was not there it was nowhere. We might have expected that such a
theory of things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions of
experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power
is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished
convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed
which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water
dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the
Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity
of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it
lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in
spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves,
is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a
potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a
moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of
all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.

At what period in the world's history misgivings about it began to show
themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably,
of the patriarchal period, when men who really _thought_ must have found
the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings
are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name
of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of
deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and
forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of
Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after
enjoyment; searching after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures
of intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such
methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had
squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and
had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to
mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble
nature. The writer's own personal happiness had been all for which he
had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to
fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment
with which his own spirit had been clouded.

Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which
it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown
authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange
allusions, un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it
hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of
it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty,
yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded
to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had
heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.

The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of this book are so
various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the
best of them must rest. The language is no guide, for although
unquestionably of Hebrew origin, the poem bears no analogy to any of the
other books in the Bible; while of its external history nothing is
known at all, except that it was received into the canon at the time of
the great synagogue. Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it
belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer was a
contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters,
and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received
among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, however (and the
reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures),
these opposite considerations may be of moment. It is only natural that
at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to
the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was
generally at its best; but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of
prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions
of another kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,
dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round
them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient
spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding
themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra, despised and
disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying
people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the
shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that God
will not leave them for ever, and in His own time will take His chosen
to Himself again. But such a period is an ill occasion for searching
into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important
and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only
out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot
conceive of as possible under such conditions.

The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us
that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the
central falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced
himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away
into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.
Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from
the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we
said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land
and parentage--a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,
the customs are of all varieties and places--Egypt, with its river and
its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia;
the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the
heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or
hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or
Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate
themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile
annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the
plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not
a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of
them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange
un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of
the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, 'the sweet
influences of the seven stars,' and the glittering fragments of the
sea-snake Rahab[J] trailing across the northern sky. Again, God is not
the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a
chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar
privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince
of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the
accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and
carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe
that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.
In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some [Greek: aner
polutropos] who, like the old hero of Ithaca,

[Greek:
pollon anthropon iden astea kai noon egno,
polla d' hog' en ponto pathen algea hon kata thumon,
arnumenos psuchen.... ]

but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to
baffle curiosity--as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that
it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it
belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with
Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.

No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of
the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything
which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history
of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of
Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the
problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is
described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man
upon the earth, 'and the same was the greatest man in all the east.' So
far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the
popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in
the progress of the poem. He was 'the father of the oppressed, and of
those who had none to help them.' When he sat as a judge in the
market-places, 'righteousness clothed him' there, and 'his justice was a
robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the
spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did
not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they
contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the
multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful,
to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's
pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)--knowing that 'He who had
made him had made them,' and _one_ 'had fashioned them both in the
womb.' Above all, he was the friend of the poor; 'the blessing of him
that was ready to perish came upon him,' and he 'made the widow's heart
to sing for joy.'

Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his
unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a
picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic,
living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and
blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room
might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself bears
the emphatic testimony, that 'there was none like him upon the earth, a
perfect and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil.' If such a
person as this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the
current belief of the Jews was false to the root; and tradition
furnished the fact that he had been visited by every worst calamity. How
was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand possible
explanations, the poet introduces a single one. He admits us behind the
veil which covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel
charging Job with an interested piety, and of being obedient because it
was his policy. 'Job does not serve God for nought,' he says; 'strip him
of his splendour, and see if he will care for God then. Humble him into
poverty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his heart.'
The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with
its 'rewards and punishments,' immediately fostered selfishness; and the
poem opens with a double action, on one side to try the question whether
it is possible for man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which
trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the progress of it
with an anxious and fearful interest; on the other side, to bring out,
in contrast to the truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of
the popular faith--to show how, instead of leading men to mercy and
affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their sympathies, and
enhances the trials of the sufferer, by refinements which even Satan had
not anticipated. The combination of evils, as blow falls on blow,
suddenly, swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed
visitation (as indeed it was); if ever outward incidents might with
justice be interpreted as the immediate action of Providence, those
which fell on Job might be so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully
from the fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his chosen
friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, without
one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see in them a judgment
upon his secret sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even (such
are the paralogisms of men of this description) a proof of their theory
that 'the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while;' and instead of
the comfort and help which they might have brought him, and which in the
end they were made to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for
the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer
himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to
see the hand of God in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the
bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction
of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised
were distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.

The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as
it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the
inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that
they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away
together.

A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is
arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely
intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for
the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its
defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to
believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not
as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate
bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset,
at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they
have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is
vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural
outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man,
are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and
mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such
persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider
sacred truth against the assaults of folly and scepticism. How beautiful
is their first introduction:--

'Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon
him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and
Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an
appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And
when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted
up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and
sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. So they sat down with
him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word
unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great.'

What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness! His wife had scoffed
at his faith, bidding him 'leave God and die.' 'His acquaintance had
turned from him.' He 'had called his servant, and he had given him no
answer.' Even the children, in their unconscious cruelty, had gathered
round and mocked him as he lay among the ashes. But 'his friends
sprinkle dust towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him
seven days and seven nights upon the ground.' That is, they were
true-hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men; and yet they, with
their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant
sufferings, the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was,
and is, and will be--of such materials is this human life of ours
composed.

And now, remembering the double action of the drama--the actual trial of
Job, the result of which is uncertain; and the delusion of these men,
which is, at the outset, certain--let us go rapidly through the
dialogue. Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.
Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his
wife, in Satan's own words, had tempted Job to say, 'Farewell to
God,'--think no more of God or goodness, since this was all which came
of it; and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the foolish women.
He 'had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive
evil?' But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart
melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a
passionate regret that he had ever been born. In the agony of his
sufferings, hope of better things had died away. He does not complain of
injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he
makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life given to him at
all, if only for this? Sick in mind, and sick in body, but one wish
remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry
from the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for such
simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit;
possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a
fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a
man, the justice of God would not have permitted it, unless they had
been deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion
was but impenitence and rebellion.

Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that
God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only
natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which
would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest
and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain,
contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the
extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal,
indirect,--the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not
accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather
for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off,
as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the
infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal
weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it,
and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the
blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be
well.

This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in
the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself,
but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far
from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it
from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should
consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as
of charges against himself. He will not listen to the 'corruption of
humanity,' because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows
that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and
we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already passed. He
will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he
could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.
He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had
learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had
been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more
nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the
tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to
it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, 'It is ill talking between
a full man and a fasting:' and in Job such equanimity would have been
but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others'
theories. Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had
befallen him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and
unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he should assume it)
that those who loved him should not have been hasty to believe evil of
him; he had spoken to them as he really felt, and he thought that he
might have looked to them for something warmer and more sympathising
than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of
what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to
them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of understanding.
Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.
They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his
passionate cry for death. 'Do ye reprove words?' he says, 'and the
speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?' It was but poor
friendship and narrow wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for
comfort, and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the
desert for the water-streams, and 'his brethren had dealt deceitfully
with him.' The brooks, in the cool winter, roll in a full turbid
torrent; 'what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are
consumed out of their place; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the
companies of Sheba waited for them; they were confounded because they
had hoped; they came thither, and there was nothing.' If for once these
poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have
believed that there might be 'more things in heaven and earth' than were
dreamt of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which they
could not do, which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And
thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might
have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong
gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out
in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them
or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now
appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now praying for
death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which he
cannot understand, he may not, perhaps, after all, really have sinned,
and praying to be shown his fault; and then staggering further into the
darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the Power which has
become so dreadful an enigma to him. 'Thou enquirest after my iniquity,
thou searchest after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why
didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the
ghost, and no eye had seen me. Cease, let me alone. It is but a little
while that I have to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a
little before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of darkness
and the shadow of death.' In what other poem in the world is there
pathos deep as this? With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job
to be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words. He speaks not
what he knows, but what he feels; and without fear the writer allows him
to throw out his passion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring
how nice ears might be offended, but contented to be true to the real
emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs on to the end of the
first answer to Zophar.

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