Blake Savage - "Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet"

Andre Norton - "Storm Over Warlock"

George Mueller - "A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller"

Henry Beam Piper - "The Cosmic Computer"

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




'If man or woman be suspected of heresy, no one shall shelter or protect
him or her; and no stranger shall be admitted to lodge in any inn or
dwelling-house unless he bring with him a testimonial of orthodoxy from
the priest of his parish.

'The Inquisition shall enquire into the private opinions of every
person, of whatever degree; and all officers of all kinds shall assist
the Inquisition at their peril. Those who know where heretics are
concealed, shall denounce them, or they shall suffer as heretics
themselves. Heretics (observe the malignity of this paragraph)--heretics
who will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be pardoned
if they will promise to conform for the future.'

Under this edict, in the Netherlands alone, more than fifty thousand
human beings, first and last, were deliberately murdered. And,
gentlemen, I must say that proceedings of this kind explain and go far
to excuse the subsequent intolerance of Protestants.

Intolerance, Mr. Gibbon tells us, is a greater crime in a Protestant
than a Catholic. Criminal intolerance, as I understand it, is the
intolerance of such an edict as that which I have read to you--the
unprovoked intolerance of difference of opinion. I conceive that the
most enlightened philosopher might have grown hard and narrow-minded if
he had suffered under the administration of the Duke of Alva.

Dismissing these considerations, I will now go on with my subject.

Never in all their history, in ancient times or modern, never that we
know of, have mankind thrown out of themselves anything so grand, so
useful, so beautiful, as the Catholic Church once was. In these times of
ours, well-regulated selfishness is the recognised rule of action--every
one of us is expected to look out first for himself, and take care of
his own interests. At the time I speak of, the Church ruled the State
with the authority of a conscience; and self-interest, as a motive of
action, was only named to be abhorred. The bishops and clergy were
regarded freely and simply as the immediate ministers of the Almighty;
and they seem to me to have really deserved that high estimate of their
character. It was not for the doctrines which they taught, only or
chiefly, that they were held in honour. Brave men do not fall down
before their fellow-mortals for the words which they speak, or for the
rites which they perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness,
purity, highmindedness,--these are the qualities before which the
free-born races of Europe have been contented to bow; and in no order of
men were such qualities to be found as they were found six hundred years
ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called themselves the
successors of the Apostles. They claimed in their Master's name
universal spiritual authority, but they made good their pretensions by
the holiness of their own lives. They were allowed to rule because they
deserved to rule, and in the fulness of reverence kings and nobles bent
before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and
subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed defenceless men reigned
supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors
who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them--they
brought them really and truly to believe--that they had immortal souls,
and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment bar and give
account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, and the
good--with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed their
neighbour's landmark--with those who had been just in all their
dealings--with those who had fought against evil, and had tried
valiantly to do their Master's will,--at that great day, it would be
well. For cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and
pleasure and self-indulgence, there was the blackness of eternal death.

An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy had effectually
instilled into the mind of Europe. It was not a PERHAPS; it was a
certainty. It was not a form of words repeated once a week at church; it
was an assurance entertained on all days and in all places, without any
particle of doubt. And the effect of such a belief on life and
conscience was simply immeasurable.

I do not pretend that the clergy were perfect. They were very far from
perfect at the best of times, and the European nations were never
completely submissive to them. It would not have been well if they had
been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in
the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns
continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness.
They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They
could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and
political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from
the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on
the common level of sinful humanity. Into their ranks high birth was no
passport. They were themselves for the most part children of the people;
and the son of the artisan or peasant rose to the mitre and the triple
crown, just as nowadays the rail-splitter and the tailor become
Presidents of the Republic of the West.

The Church was essentially democratic, while at the same time it had the
monopoly of learning; and all the secular power fell to it which
learning, combined with sanctity and assisted by superstition, can
bestow.

The privileges of the clergy were extraordinary. They were not amenable
to the common laws of the land. While they governed the laity, the laity
had no power over them. From the throne downwards, every secular office
was dependent on the Church. No king was a lawful sovereign till the
Church placed the crown upon his head: and what the Church bestowed, the
Church claimed the right to take away. The disposition of property was
in their hands. No will could be proved except before the bishop or his
officer; and no will was held valid if the testator died out of
communion. There were magistrates and courts of law for the offences of
the laity. If a priest committed a crime, he was a sacred person. The
civil power could not touch him; he was reserved for his ordinary.
Bishops' commissaries sate in town and city, taking cognizance of the
moral conduct of every man and woman. Offences against life and property
were tried here in England, as now, by the common law; but the Church
Courts dealt with sins--sins of word or act. If a man was a profligate
or a drunkard; if he lied or swore; if he did not come to communion, or
held unlawful opinions; if he was idle or unthrifty; if he was unkind
to his wife or his servants; if a child was disobedient to his father,
or a father cruel to his child; if a tradesman sold adulterated wares,
or used false measures or dishonest weights,--the eye of the parish
priest was everywhere, and the Church Court stood always open to examine
and to punish.

Imagine what a tremendous power this must have been! Yet it existed
generally in Catholic Europe down to the eve of the Reformation. It
could never have established itself at all unless at one time it had
worked beneficially--as the abuse of it was one of the most fatal causes
of the Church's fall.

I know nothing in English history much more striking than the answer
given by Archbishop Warham to the complaints of the English House of
Commons after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. The House of Commons
complained that the clergy made laws in Convocation which the laity were
excommunicated if they disobeyed. Yet the laws made by the clergy, the
Commons said, were often at variance with the laws of the realm.

What did Warham reply? He said he was sorry for the alleged discrepancy;
but, inasmuch as the laws made by the clergy were always in conformity
with the will of God, the laws of the realm had only to be altered and
then the difficulty would vanish.

What must have been the position of the clergy in the fulness of their
power, when they could speak thus on the eve of their prostration? You
have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city,
and you will see in a moment the mediaeval relations between Church and
State. The cathedral _is_ the city. The first object you catch sight of
as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers
holding possession of the centre of the landscape--majestically
beautiful--imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature
herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you
more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its
feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down
below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even
now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have
stretched upwards from two stories to five; when the great chimneys are
vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples of modern
industry--the workshops and the factories--spread their long fronts
before the eye, the cathedral is still the governing form in the
picture--the one object which possesses the imagination and refuses to
be eclipsed.

As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church of the middle
ages to the secular institutions of the world. Its very neighbourhood
was sacred; and its shadow, like the shadow of the Apostles, was a
sanctuary. When I look at the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see
in them a type of the change which has passed over us. The House of
Commons of the Plantagenets sate in the Chapter House of Westminster
Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform Bill, five-and-thirty years ago,
debated in St. Stephen's Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by
the side of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's
ashes, the proud Minster itself is dwarfed into insignificance.

Let us turn to another vast feature of the middle ages--I mean the
monasteries.

Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has lived or died at a
particular spot. He has been distinguished by his wisdom, by his piety,
by his active benevolence; and in an age when conjurors and witches were
supposed to be helped by the devil to do evil, he, on his part, has been
thought to have possessed in larger measure than common men the favour
and the grace of heaven. Blessed influences hang about the spot which he
has hallowed by his presence. His relics--his household possessions, his
books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they
received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly
unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At
worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence.

Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, so in the middle ages
they built shrines or chapels on the spots which saints had made holy,
and communities of pious people gathered together there--beginning with
the personal friends the saint had left behind him--to try to live as he
had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to die as he had died.
Thus arose religious fraternities--companies of men who desired to
devote themselves to goodness--to give up pleasure, and amusement, and
self-indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works of
charity.

These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The monks, as the
brotherhoods were called, were organised in different orders, with some
variety of rule, but the broad principle was the same in all. They were
to live for others, not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that
they might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They took vows of
chastity, that the care of a family might not distract them from the
work which they had undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not
limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in
study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors
of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding
for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory.

The world, as it always will, paid honour to exceptional excellence. The
system spread to the furthest limits of Christendom. The religious
houses became places of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and
queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their
splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world
had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying
pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were
filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of
rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and
wealth, and social dignity--all gratefully extended to men who deserved
so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than
they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well
as themselves.

Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the wildest parts of it
innumerable remains of religious houses, which had grown up among a
people who acknowledged no rule among themselves except the sword, and
where every chief made war upon his neighbour as the humour seized him.
The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as defenceless as sheep among
the wolves; but the wolves spared them for their character. In such a
country as Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived for
a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which surrounded them.

Of authority, the religious orders were practically independent. They
were amenable only to the Pope and to their own superiors. Here in
England, the king could not send a commissioner to inspect a monastery,
nor even send a policeman to arrest a criminal who had taken shelter
within its walls. Archbishops and bishops, powerful as they were, found
their authority cease when they entered the gates of a Benedictine or
Dominican abbey.

So utterly have times changed, that with your utmost exertions you will
hardly be able to picture to yourselves the Catholic Church in the days
of its greatness. Our school-books tell us how the Emperor of Germany
held the stirrup for Pope Gregory the Seventh to mount his mule; how our
own English Henry Plantagenet walked barefoot through the streets of
Canterbury, and knelt in the Chapter House for the monks to flog him.
The first of these incidents, I was brought up to believe, proved the
Pope to be the Man of Sin. Anyhow, they are both facts, and not
romances; and you may form some notion from them how high in the world's
eyes the Church must have stood.

And be sure it did not achieve that proud position without deserving it.
The Teutonic and Latin princes were not credulous fools; and when they
submitted, it was to something stronger than themselves--stronger in
limb and muscle, or stronger in intellect and character.

So the Church was in its vigour: so the Church was _not_ at the opening
of the sixteenth century. Power--wealth--security--men are more than
mortal if they can resist the temptations to which too much of these
expose them. Nor were they the only enemies which undermined the
energies of the Catholic clergy. Churches exist in this world to remind
us of the eternal laws which we are bound to obey. So far as they do
this, they fulfil their end, and are honoured in fulfilling it. It would
have been better for all of us--it would be better for us now, could
Churches keep this their peculiar function steadily and singly before
them. Unfortunately, they have preferred in later times the speculative
side of things to the practical. They take up into their teaching
opinions and theories which are merely ephemeral; which would naturally
die out with the progress of knowledge; but, having received a spurious
sanctity, prolong their days unseasonably, and become first unmeaning,
and then occasions of superstition.

It matters little whether I say a paternoster in English or Latin, so
that what is present to my mind is the thought which the words express,
and not the words themselves. In these and all languages it is the most
beautiful of prayers. But you know that people came to look on a Latin
paternoster as the most powerful of spells--potent in heaven, if said
straightforward; if repeated backward, a charm which no spirit in hell
could resist.

So it is, in my opinion, with all forms--forms of words, or forms of
ceremony and ritualism. While the meaning is alive in them, they are not
only harmless, but pregnant and life-giving. When we come to think that
they possess in themselves material and magical virtues, then the
purpose which they answer is to hide God from us and make us practically
into Atheists.

This is what I believe to have gradually fallen upon the Catholic Church
in the generations which preceded Luther. The body remained; the mind
was gone away: the original thought which its symbolism represented was
no longer credible to intelligent persons.

The acute were conscious unbelievers. In Italy, when men went to mass
they spoke of it as going to a comedy. You may have heard the story of
Luther in his younger days saying mass at an altar in Rome, and hearing
his fellow-priests muttering at the consecration of the Eucharist,
'Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain.'

Part of the clergy were profane scoundrels like these; the rest repeated
the words of the service, conceiving that they were working a charm.
Religion was passing through the transformation which all religions have
a tendency to undergo. They cease to be aids and incentives to holy
life; they become contrivances rather to enable men to sin, and escape
the penalties of sin. Obedience to the law is dispensed with if men will
diligently profess certain opinions, or punctually perform certain
external duties. However scandalous the moral life, the participation of
a particular rite, or the profession of a particular belief, at the
moment of death, is held to clear the score.

The powers which had been given to the clergy required for their
exercise the highest wisdom and the highest probity. They had fallen at
last into the hands of men who possessed considerably less of these
qualities than the laity whom they undertook to govern. They had
degraded their conceptions of God; and, as a necessary consequence, they
had degraded their conceptions of man and man's duty. The aspirations
after sanctity had disappeared, and instead of them there remained the
practical reality of the five senses. The high prelates, the cardinals,
the great abbots, were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendour
and luxury. The friars and the secular clergy, following their superiors
with shorter steps, indulged themselves in grosser pleasures; while
their spiritual powers, their supposed authority in this world and the
next, were turned to account to obtain from the laity the means for
their self-indulgence.

The Church forbade the eating of meat on fast days, but the Church was
ready with dispensations for those who could afford to pay for them. The
Church forbade marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity, but
loving cousins, if they were rich and open-handed, could obtain the
Church's consent to their union. There were toll-gates for the priests
at every halting-place on the road of life--fees at weddings, fees at
funerals, fees whenever an excuse could be found to fasten them. Even
when a man was dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or
death present was exacted of his family.

And then those Bishop's Courts, of which I spoke just now: they were
founded for the discipline of morality--they were made the instruments
of the most detestable extortion. If an impatient layman spoke a
disrespectful word of the clergy, he was cited before the bishop's
commissary and fined. If he refused to pay, he was excommunicated, and
excommunication was a poisonous disease. When a poor wretch was under
the ban of the Church no tradesman might sell him clothes or food--no
friend might relieve him--no human voice might address him, under pain
of the same sentence; and if he died unreconciled, he died like a dog,
without the sacraments, and was refused Christian burial.

The records of some of these courts survive: a glance at their pages
will show the principles on which they were worked. When a layman
offended, the single object was to make him pay for it. The magistrates
could not protect him. If he resisted, and his friends supported him, so
much the better, for they were now all in the scrape together. The next
step would be to indict them in a body for heresy; and then, of course,
there was nothing for it but to give way, and compound for absolution by
money.

It was money--ever money. Even in case of real delinquency, it was
still money. Money, not charity, covered the multitude of sins.

I have told you that the clergy were exempt from secular jurisdiction.
They claimed to be amenable only to spiritual judges, and they extended
the broad fringe of their order till the word clerk was construed to
mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence from a book. A
robber or a murderer at the assizes had but to show that he possessed
either of these qualifications, and he was allowed what was called
benefit of clergy. His case was transferred to the Bishops' Court, to an
easy judge, who allowed him at once to compound.

Such were the clergy in matters of this world. As religious instructors,
they appear in colours if possible less attractive.

Practical religion throughout Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth
century was a very simple affair. I am not going to speak of the
mysterious doctrines of the Catholic Church. The creed which it
professed in its schools and theological treatises was the same which it
professes now, and which it had professed at the time when it was most
powerful for good. I do not myself consider that the formulas in which
men express their belief are of much consequence. The question is rather
of the thing expressed; and so long as we find a living consciousness
that above the world and above human life there is a righteous God, who
will judge men according to their works, whether they say their prayers
in Latin or English, whether they call themselves Protestants or call
themselves Catholics, appears to me of quite secondary importance. But
at the time I speak of, that consciousness no longer existed. The
formulas and ceremonies were all in all; and of God it is hard to say
what conceptions men had formed, when they believed that a dead man's
relations could buy him out of purgatory--buy him out of purgatory,--for
this was the literal truth--by hiring priests to sing masses for his
soul.

Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the keys of the
other world were held by the clergy. If a man confessed regularly to his
priest, received the sacrament, and was absolved, then all was well with
him. His duties consisted in going to confession and to mass. If he
committed sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be commuted for
money. If he was sick or ill at ease in his mind, he was recommended a
pilgrimage--a pilgrimage to a shrine or a holy well, or to some
wonder-working image--where, for due consideration, his case would be
attended to. It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of
the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an
image of a Virgin and Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good
handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was
unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till
the purse-strings were untied again.

There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent,
where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when
it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its
good-will.

When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the
images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady
was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our
Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was
afterwards torn in pieces by the people.

Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the
gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a
man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.
If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had
not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was
in purgatory--Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it--and
a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.

To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in
which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He
had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words,
and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The masses were paid
for at so much a dozen, and for every mass that was said, so many years
were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be
seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a
couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the
same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.
If they got the masses, and the priests got the money, all parties
concerned were satisfied.

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