Mary Hallock Foote - "The Desert and The Sown"

Ellis Towne; Sophie May and Ella Farman - "Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land"

Anonymous - "Little Cinderella"

Emile Zola - "La Conquete De Plassans"

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




And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it
would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you
rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his
character how he came to achieve what he did.

You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent
him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or
kidnapped. He remained there many months; and during that time the old
ecclesiastical institutions of Germany were burning like a North
American forest. The monasteries were broken up; the estates were
appropriated by the nobles; the monks were sent wandering into the
world. The bishops looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual
dominion was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector of
Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of the princes,
declared for the Reformation. The Protestants had a majority in the
Diet, and controlled the force of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy
with his French wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to
a crisis which he had not power to cope with; and he was obliged for a
time to recognise what he could not prevent. You would have thought
Luther would have been well pleased to see the seed which he had sown
bear fruit so rapidly; yet it was exactly while all this was going on
that he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he has left
so wonderful an account.

We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these apparitions. But
Luther, it is quite certain, believed that Satan himself attacked him in
person. Satan, he tells us, came often to him, and said, 'See what you
have done. Behold this ancient Church--this mother of saints--polluted
and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you--you, a poor ignorant
monk, that have set the people on to their unholy work. Are you so much
wiser than the saints who approved the things which you have denounced?
Popes, bishops, clergy, kings, emperors--are none of these--are not all
these together--wiser than Martin Luther the monk?'

The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these suggestions. He fell
into deep fits of doubt and humiliation and despondency. And wherever
these thoughts came from, we can only say that they were very natural
thoughts--natural and right. He called them temptations; yet these were
temptations which would not have occurred to any but a high-minded man.

He had, however, done only what duty had forced him to do. His business
was to trust to God, who had begun the work and knew what He meant to
make of it. His doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan,
and his enormous imaginative vigour gave body to the voice which was
speaking in him.

He tells many humorous stories--not always producible--of the means with
which he encountered his offensive visitor.

'The devil,' he says, 'is very proud, and what he least likes is to be
laughed at.' One night he was disturbed by something rattling in his
room; the modern unbeliever will suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit
a candle, searched the apartment through, and could find nothing--the
Evil One was indisputably there.

'Oh!' he said, 'it is you, is it?' He returned to bed, and went to
sleep.

Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but remember that
Luther had not the least doubt that he was alone in the room with the
actual devil, who, if he could not overcome his soul, could at least
twist his neck in a moment--and then think what courage there must have
been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a presence!

During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last
became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing
that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to
Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used
to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his
bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there
Duke George would kill him.

'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges
for nine days!'

No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one
there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther
outlived him--lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil,
re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.

Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The
corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root--the notion that
the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through
episcopal ordination.

Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done
to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each
individual soul to the service of God. Masses were nothing, and
absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in
being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.

I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a
matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he
dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous
conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious
life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while
priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they
live, and move, and have their being.

Enough of this.

The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe under Luther's name
is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of
party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become
barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by
Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was,
and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the
conviction of every generous-minded man.

The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of
desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in
the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the
reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for
money to those who needed.

'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff
as man? The better a man is--the more clearly he sees how little he is
good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of
having deserved reward.'

'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin.
Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep
and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest
of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and
then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God
a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can
merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two
hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours!
Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'

A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and
stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven--this was the best which
would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the
infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the
intention for the deed--who, when there is a sincere desire to serve
Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.

Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when
petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real
faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and
clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes
it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise
it.

'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image--'the barley
which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised
and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must
Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The
old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to
nobleness, he must first be slain.'

In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The
natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is
smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new
nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'

It was this doctrine--it was this truth rather (the word doctrine
reminds one of quack medicines)--which, quickening in Luther's mind,
gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small
spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.

Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He
might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his
enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.

He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, and delighted to
encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of
the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about
the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and
principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal;
and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his
larder among the poor.

All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of
nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them--naked,
shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were
wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he
said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him
presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and
food for the wretched.

Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and
tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the
necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more
than he did, yet he said:--

'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not
follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will
hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I
live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last--every
man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer
for his belief to his Maker.'

Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he
wrote like an apostle--sometimes like a raving ribald.

Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry,
invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks down a mountain torrent
in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to
understand it.

Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life
as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the
Papacy.

Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his
own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the
English bishops--'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the
beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if
you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to
all the winds--spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you
still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe
twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way--the
lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther
shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows
of brass and dashed out your iron brains.'

Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he
supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield
with the reek of burning human flesh.

Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature
herself--terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of
vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said;
'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been
crucified for the world?'

I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression
of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the
grandest and sweetest gift of God to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said;
'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'

He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of
botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable
life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said;
'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'

A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as
a finished piece of poetry.

One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:--

'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive
again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the
resurrection of the dead! Winter is death--summer is the resurrection.
Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and
change. The proverb says--

Trust not a day
Ere birth of May.

Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'

'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are
beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in
Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory
of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand--the infinite goodness--in
the humblest flower. We praise Him--we thank Him--we glorify Him--we
recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there.
The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it
when the time comes. An egg--what a thing is that! If an egg had never
been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how
would all the world have wondered!'

And again:--

'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet
roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over
the world, and no one regards them.'

There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about
Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a
single matter--for which more than any other he has been blamed--I mean
his marriage.

He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person
whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy
also.

The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to
middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose
their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought
against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with
incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed;
and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical
usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required
it of him.

Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on
the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and
productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders
had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the
distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was
impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the
natural companionship which nature had provided for them--who were thus
exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to
resist.

The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the
problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women
adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and
advice was of little service without example.

The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might
have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much
about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a
kind of incest.

Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy
state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality
was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament--impious, loathsome,
and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at
once purest, best, and happiest.

For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the
injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time
and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue
but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion
to the malice of his enemies.

But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide
them--guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied
himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him
and them--that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the
devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him--that it was no use to
tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and
married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to
do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his
full thought upon the matter.

That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.

'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must
protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is
an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that
I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should
have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'

He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the
moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those
who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the
world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with
remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar
situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and
your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the
whole world in my way.'

Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good
family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.
She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in
mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible,
commonplace Haus Frau.

The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never
marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect,
and ended with steady affection.

The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good
wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God
thanks.

He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not
clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their
adventures together.

'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals,
where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you
wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the
pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she
ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask
me.

'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the
brother of the Margrave?"'

She was an odd woman.

'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we
prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and
seldom?'

Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of
every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She
said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he
said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will
rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the
corner.'

His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The
recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them,
and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.

Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said,
'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung
with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their
simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'

One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children
were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in
which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.'

His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss
with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a
man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was
passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the
other disguised or suppressed.

You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of
what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be
called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now
return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general
conclusion, the argument of these Lectures.

In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words.

One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or knowing him,
should not have treated him with more forbearance.

Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. He interceded for
him, defended him, and only with the utmost reluctance was driven into
controversy with him.

Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who was false to his
convictions; who played with truth; who, in his cold, sarcastic
scepticism, believed in nothing--scarcely even in God. He was unaware of
his own obligations to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would
trumpet out his own good deeds.

Thus Luther says:--

'All you who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and
a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and
Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the
Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with
a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and I say with
Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He thinks we should trim to the
times, and hang our cloaks to the wind. He is himself his own first
object; and as he lived, he died.

'I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand
years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the
things of God, it laughs at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by-and-by
he will say, Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we
counted for folly.

'I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a
fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for the ignorant to
believe.'

Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and untrue. Erasmus knew
many things which it would have been well for Luther to have known; and,
as a man, he was better than his principles.

But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory of human things
which Erasmus represented, between that creed and Luther there is, and
must be, an eternal antagonism.

If to be true in heart and just in act are the first qualities necessary
for the elevation of humanity--if without these all else is worthless,
intellectual culture cannot give what intellectual culture does not
require or imply. You cultivate the plant which has already life; you
will waste your labour in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the
counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, and alike
visible only in its effects.

Intellectual gifts are like gifts of strength, or wealth, or rank, or
worldly power--splendid instruments if nobly used--but requiring
qualities to use them nobler and better than themselves.

The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. The clever man may
live for intellectual enjoyment--refined enjoyment it may be--but
enjoyment still, and still centering in self.

If the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, it would have been with modern
Europe as with the Roman Empire in its decay. The educated would have
been mere sceptics; the multitude would have been sunk in superstition.
In both alike all would have perished which deserves the name of
manliness.

And this leads me to the last observation that I have to make to you. In
the sciences, the philosopher leads; the rest of us take on trust what
he tells us. The spiritual progress of mankind has followed the opposite
course. Each forward step has been made first among the people, and the
last converts have been among the learned.

The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences there is no
temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and
conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are
enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better
trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them
arguments for believing what they wish to believe.

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