W. D. Howells - "A Traveler from Altruria: Romance"

Samuel Wilberforce - "The Rocky Island"

G. MITTAG LEFFLER - "NIELS HENRIK ABEL"

Emma Leslie - "Kate's Ordeal"

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.

A History of American Christianity

L >> Leonard Woolsey Bacon >> A History of American Christianity




With equal and unlimited liberty, was to follow, as a prevailing
characteristic of American Christianity, a large diversity of
organization. Not only that men disagreeing in their convictions of
truth would be enrolled in different bodies, but that men holding the
same views, in the same statement of them, would feel free to go apart
from one another, and stay apart. There was not even to be any one
generally predominating organization from which minor ones should be
reckoned as dissenting. One after another the organizations which should
be tempted by some period of exceptional growth and prosperity to
pretend to a hegemony among the churches--Catholic, Episcopalian,
Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist--would meet with some set-back as
inexorable as "the law of nature that prevents the trees from growing up
into the sky."

By a curious paradox, the same spiritual agitation which deepened the
divisions of the American church aroused in the colonies the
consciousness of a national religious unity. We have already seen that
in the period before the Awakening the sole organ of fellowship reaching
through the whole chain of the British colonies was the correspondence
of the Quaker meetings and missionaries. In the glow of the revival the
continent awoke to the consciousness of a common spiritual life. Ranging
the continent literally from Georgia to Maine, with all his weaknesses
and indiscretions, and with his incomparable eloquence, welcomed by
every sect, yet refusing an exclusive allegiance to any, Whitefield
exercised a true apostolate, bearing daily the care of all the churches,
and becoming a messenger of mutual fellowship not only between the ends
of the continent, but between the Christians of two hemispheres. Remote
churches exchanged offices of service. Tennent came from New Jersey to
labor in New England; Dickinson and Burr and Edwards were the gift of
the northern colonies to the college at Princeton. The quickened sense
of a common religious life and duty and destiny was no small part of the
preparation for the birth of the future nation.

Whether for good or for evil, the few years from 1740 to 1750 were
destined to impress upon the American church in its various orders, for
a hundred years to come, the character of _Methodism_.[176:1]

In New England, the idea, into which the first pastors had been trained
by their experience as parish ministers in the English established
church, of the parochial church holding correlative rights and duties
toward the community in all its families, succumbed at last, after a
hundred years of more or less conscious antagonism, to the incompatible
principle, adopted from the Separatists of Plymouth, of the church
formed according to elective affinity by the "social compact" of persons
of the age of discretion who could give account to themselves and to one
another of the conscious act and experience of conversion. This view,
subject to important mitigations or aggravations in actual
administration, held almost unquestioned dominance in the New England
churches until boldly challenged by Horace Bushnell, in his
"epoch-making" volume on "Christian Nurture" (1846), as a departure from
the orthodoxy of the fathers.

In the Presbyterian Church, revivalism as a principle of church life had
to contend with rules distinctly articulated in its constitutional
documents. So exclusively does the Westminster institute contemplate the
church as an established parish that its "Directory for Worship"
contains no provision for so abnormal an incident as the baptism of an
adult, and all baptized children growing up and not being of scandalous
life are to be welcomed to the Lord's Supper. It proves the immense
power of the Awakening, that this rigid and powerful organization, of a
people tenacious of its traditions to the point of obstinacy, should
have swung so completely free at this point, not only of its
long-settled usages, but of the distinct letter of its standards.

The Episcopal Church of the colonies was almost forced into an attitude
of opposition to the revival. The unspeakable folly of the English
bishops in denouncing and silencing the most effective preachers in the
national church had betrayed Whitefield into his most easily besetting
sin, that of censorious judgment, and his sweeping counter-denunciations
of the Episcopalian clergy in general as unconverted closed to him many
hearts and pulpits that at first had been hospitably open to him. Being
human, they came into open antagonism to him and to the revival. From
the protest against extravagance and disorder, it was a short and
perilously easy step to the rejection of religious fervor and
earnestness. The influence of the mother church of that dreary period
and the influence of the official rings around every royal governor were
all too potent in the same direction. The Propagation Society's
missionaries boasted, with reason, of large accessions of proselytes
alienated from other churches by their distaste for the methods of the
revival. The effect on the Episcopal Church itself was in some respects
unhappy. It "lowered a spiritual temperature already too low,"[177:1]
and weakened the moral influence of the church, and the value of its
testimony to important principles which there were few besides
efficiently to represent--the duty of the church not to disown or shut
out those of little faith, and the church's duty toward its children.
Never in the history of the church have the Lord's husbandmen shown a
fiercer zeal for rooting up tares, regardless of damage to the wheat,
than was shown by the preachers of the Awakening. Never was there a
wider application of the reproach against those who, instead of
preaching to men that they should be converted and become as little
children, preach to children that they must be converted and become like
grown folks.[178:1] The attitude of the Episcopal Church at that period
was not altogether admirable; but it is nothing to its dishonor that it
bore the reproach of being a friend of publicans and sinners, and
offered itself as a _refugium peccatorum_, thus holding many in some
sort of relation to the kingdom of Christ who would otherwise have
lapsed into sheer infidelity.

In all this the Episcopal Church was affected by the Awakening only by
way of reaction. But it owes a debt to the direct influence of the
Awakening which it has not always been careful to acknowledge. We have
already seen that the requickening of the asphyxiated church of Virginia
was part of the great revival, and this character remains impressed on
that church to this day. The best of those traits by which the American
Episcopal Church is distinguished from the Church of England, as, for
instance, the greater purity of the ministry and of the membership, are
family traits of the revival churches; the most venerated of its early
bishops, White and Griswold, bore the same family likeness; and the
"Evangelical party," for a time so influential in its counsels, was a
tardy and mild afterglow from the setting of the Great Awakening.[179:1]

An incident of the revival, failing which it would have lacked an
essential token of the presence of the Spirit of Christ, was the
kindling of zeal for communicating the gospel to the ignorant, the
neglected, and the heathen. Among the first-fruits of Whitefield's
preaching at the South was a practical movement among the planters for
the instruction of their slaves--devotees, most of them, of the most
abject fetich-worship of their native continent. Of the evangelists and
pastors most active in the revival, there were few, either North or
South, whose letters or journals do not report the drawing into the
churches of large numbers of negroes and Indians, whose daily lives
witnessed to the sincerity of their profession of repentance and
Christian faith. The Indian population of the southeastern corner of
Connecticut with such accord received the gospel at the hands of the
evangelists that heathenism seemed extinct among them.[179:2]

Among the first trophies of the revival at Norwich was a Mohegan boy
named Samson Occum. Wheelock, pastor at Lebanon, one of the most ardent
of the revival preachers, took him into his family as a student. This
was the beginning of that school for the training of Indian preachers
which, endowed in part with funds gathered by Occum in England, grew at
last into Dartmouth College. The choicest spiritual gifts at the
disposal of the church were freely spent on the missions. Whitefield
visited the school and the field, and sped Kirkland on his way to the
Oneidas. Edwards, leaving Northampton in sorrow of heart, gave his
incomparable powers to the work of the gospel among the Stockbridge
Indians until summoned thence to the presidency of Princeton College.
When Brainerd fainted under his burden, it was William Tennent who went
out into the wilderness to carry on the work of harvest. But the great
gift of the American church to the cause of missions was the gift of
David Brainerd himself. His life was the typical missionary's life--the
scattering of precious seed with tears, the heart-sickness of hope
deferred, at last the rejoicing of the harvest-home. His early death
enrolled him in the canon of the saints of modern Christendom. The story
of his life and death, written by Jonathan Edwards out of that fatherly
love with which he had tended the young man's latest days and hours, may
not have been an unmixed blessing to the church. The long-protracted
introspections, the cherished forebodings and misgivings, as if doubt
was to be cultivated as a Christian virtue, may not have been an
altogether wholesome example for general imitation. But think what the
story of that short life has wrought! To how many hearts it has been an
inspiration to self-sacrifice and devotion to the service of God in the
service of man, we cannot know. Along one line its influence can be
partly traced. The "Life of David Brainerd" made Henry Martyn a
missionary to the heathen. As spiritual father to Henry Martyn, Brainerd
may be reckoned, in no unimportant sense, to be the father of modern
missions to the heathen.


FOOTNOTES:

[156:1] Of how little relative importance was this charge may be judged
from the fact that a quarter-century later, when the famous Joseph
Bellamy was invited to it from his tiny parish of Bethlem, Conn., the
council called to advise in the case judged that the interests of
Bethlem were too important to be sacrificed to the demands of New York.

[156:2] See the altogether admirable monograph of Professor A. V. G.
Allen on "Jonathan Edwards," p. 23.

[159:1] Allen, "Jonathan Edwards," pp. 164-174.

[162:1] Joseph Tracy, "The Great Awakening," chap. ii. This work, of
acknowledged value and authority, is on the list of the Congregational
Board of Publication. It is much to be regretted that the Board does not
publish it as well as announce it. A new edition of it, under the hand
of a competent editor, with a good index, would be a useful service to
history.

[168:1] The critical historian has the unusual satisfaction, at this
point, of finding a gauge by which to discount the large round numbers
given in Whitefield's journal. He speaks of preaching in the Old South
Church to six thousand persons. The now venerable building had at that
time a seating capacity of about twelve hundred. Making the largest
allowance for standing-room, we may estimate his actual audience at two
thousand. Whitefield was an honest man, but sixty-six per cent. is not
too large a discount to make from his figures; his estimates of
spiritual effect from his labor are liable to a similar deduction.

[169:1] Tracy, "Great Awakening," p. 51.

[169:2] _Ibid._, pp. 114-120.

[170:1] Letter of September 24, 1743, quoted in McConnell, "American
Episcopal Church," p. 142, note.

[171:1] Chauncy, "Seasonable Thoughts," pp. 220-223.

[172:1] Tracy, "Great Awakening," p. 389.

[173:1] See the autobiographical narrative in Tracy, p. 377.

[173:2] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," p. 45.

[176:1] "The Great Awakening ... terminated the Puritan and inaugurated
the Pietist or Methodist age of American church history" (Thompson,
"Presbyterian Churches in the United States," p. 34). It is not
unnecessary to remark that the word "Methodist" is not used in the
narrow sense of "Wesleyan."

[177:1] Unpublished lectures of the Rev. W. G. Andrews on "The
Evangelical Revival of 1740 and American Episcopalians." It is much to
be hoped that these valuable studies of the critical period of American
church history may not long remain unpublished.

[178:1] This sharp antithesis is quoted at second hand from Charles
Kingsley. The stories of little children frightened into screaming, and
then dragged (at four years of age, says Jonathan Edwards) through the
agitating vicissitudes of a "revival experience," occupy some of the
most pathetic, not to say tragical, pages of the history of the
Awakening.

[179:1] McConnell, pp. 144-146; W. G. Andrews, Lecture III.

[179:2] Tracy, pp. 187-192.




CHAPTER XII.

CLOSE OF THE COLONIAL ERA--THE GERMAN CHURCHES--THE BEGINNINGS OF THE
METHODIST CHURCH.


The quickening of religious feeling, the deepening of religious
conviction, the clearing and defining of theological opinions, that were
incidental to the Great Awakening, were a preparation for more than
thirty years of intense political and warlike agitation. The churches
suffered from the long distraction of the public mind, and at the end of
it were faint and exhausted. But for the infusion of a "more abundant
life" which they had received, it would seem that they could hardly have
survived the stress of that stormy and revolutionary period.

The religious life of this period was manifested in part in the growth
of the New England theology. The great leader of this school of
theological inquiry, the elder Edwards, was born at the opening of the
eighteenth century. The oldest and most eminent of his disciples and
successors, Bellamy and Hopkins, were born respectively in 1719 and
1721, and entered into the work of the Awakening in the flush of their
earliest manhood. A long dynasty of acute and strenuous argumentators
has continued, through successive generations to the present day, this
distinctly American school of theological thought. This is not the
place for tracing the intricate history of their discussions,[182:1]
but the story of the Awakening could not be told without some mention of
this its attendant and sequel.

Not less notable than the new theology of the revival was the new
psalmody. In general it may be said that every flood-tide of spiritual
emotion in the church leaves its high-water mark in the form of "new
songs to the Lord" that remain after the tide of feeling has assuaged.
In this instance the new songs were not produced by the revival, but
only adopted by it. It is not easy for us at this day to conceive the
effect that must have been produced in the Christian communities of
America by the advent of Isaac Watts's marvelous poetic work, "The
Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament."
Important religious results have more than once followed in the church
on the publication of religious poems--notably, in our own century, on
the publication of "The Christian Year." But no other instance of the
kind is comparable with the publication in America of Watts's Psalms.
When we remember how scanty were the resources of religious poetry in
American homes in the early eighteenth century, and especially how rude
and even grotesque the rhymes that served in the various churches as a
vehicle of worship, it seems that the coming of those melodious stanzas,
in which the meaning of one poet is largely interpreted by the
sympathetic insight of another poet, and the fervid devotion of the Old
Testament is informed with the life and transfigured in the language of
the New, must have been like a glow of sunlight breaking in upon a gray
and cloudy day. Few pages of biography can be found more vividly
illustrative of the times and the men than the page in which Samuel
Hopkins recites the story of the sufferings of his own somber and
ponderous mind under the rebuke of his college friend David Brainerd. He
walked his solitary room in tears, and (he says) "took up Watts's
version of the Psalms, and opened it at the Fifty-first Psalm, and read
the first, second, and third parts in long meter with strong affections,
and made it all my own language, and thought it was the language of my
heart to God." There was more than the experience of a great and simple
soul, there was the germ of a future system of theology, in the
penitential confession which the young student "made his own language,"
and in the exquisite lines which, under the figure of a frightened bird,
became the utterance of his first tremulous and faltering faith:

Lord, should thy judgment grow severe,
I am condemned, but thou art clear.

Should sudden vengeance seize my breath,
I must pronounce thee just in death;
And if my soul were sent to hell,
Thy righteous law approves it well.

Yet save a trembling sinner, Lord,
Whose hope, still hovering round thy word,
Would light on some sweet promise there,
Some sure support against despair.

The introduction of the new psalmody was not accomplished all at once,
nor without a struggle. But we gravely mistake if we look upon the
controversy that resulted in the adoption of Watts's Psalms as a mere
conflict between enlightened good taste and stubborn conservatism. The
action proposed was revolutionary. It involved the surrender of a
long-settled principle of Puritanism. At the present day the objection
to the use of "human composures" in public worship is unintelligible,
except to Scotchmen. In the later Puritan age such use was reckoned an
infringement on the entire and exclusive authority and sufficiency of
the Scriptures, and a constructive violation of the second commandment.
By the adoption of the new psalmody the Puritan and Presbyterian
churches, perhaps not consciously, but none the less actually, yielded
the major premiss of the only argument by which liturgical worship was
condemned on principle. Thereafter the question of the use of liturgical
forms became a mere question of expediency. It is remarkable that the
logical consequences of this important step have been so tardy and
hesitating.

* * * * *

It was not in the common course of church history that the period under
consideration should be a period of vigorous internal activity and
development in the old settled churches of America. The deep, often
excessive, excitements of the Awakening had not only ceased, but had
been succeeded by intense agitations of another sort. Two successive
"French and Indian" wars kept the long frontier, at a time when there
was little besides frontier to the British colonies, in continual peril
of fire and scalping-knife.[184:1] The astonishingly sudden and complete
extinction of the French politico-religious empire in Canada and the
West made possible, and at no remote time inevitable, the separation of
the British colonies from the mother country and the contentions and
debates that led into the Revolutionary War began at once.

Another consequence of the prostrating of the French power in America
has been less noticed by historians, but the course of this narrative
will not be followed far without its becoming manifest as not less
momentous in its bearing on the future history of the church. The
extinction of the French-Catholic power in America made possible the
later plantation and large and free development of the Catholic Church
in the territory of the United States. After that event the Catholic
resident or citizen was no longer subject to the suspicion of being a
sympathizer with a hostile neighboring power, and the Jesuit missionary
was no longer liable to be regarded as a political intriguer and a
conspirator with savage assassins against the lives of innocent settlers
and their families. If there are those who, reading the earlier pages of
this volume, have mourned over the disappointment and annihilation of
two magnificent schemes of Catholic domination on the North American
continent as being among the painful mysteries of divine providence,
they may find compensation for these catastrophes in later advances of
Catholicism, which without these antecedents would seem to have been
hardly possible.

Although the spiritual development of the awakened American churches,
after the Awakening until the independence of the States was established
and acknowledged, was limited by these great hindrances, this period was
one of momentous influences from abroad upon American Christianity.

* * * * *

The Scotch-Irish immigration kept gathering volume and force. The great
stream of immigrants entering at the port of Philadelphia and flowing
westward and southwestward was joined by a tributary stream entering at
Charleston. Not only the numbers of this people, occupying in force the
hill-country from Pennsylvania to Georgia, but still more its
extraordinary qualities and the discipline of its history, made it a
factor of prime importance in the events of the times just before and
just after the achievement of the national independence. For generations
it had been schooled to the apprehension and acceptance of an
elaborately articulated system of theology and church order as of divine
authority. Its prejudices and animosities were quite as potent as its
principles. Its fixed hereditary aversion to the English government and
the English church was the natural fruit of long memories and traditions
of outrages inflicted by both these; its influence was now about to be
powerfully manifested in the overthrow of the English power and its
feeble church establishments in the colonies. At the opening of the War
of Independence the Presbyterian Church, reunited since the schism of
1741, numbered one hundred and seventy ministers in seventeen
presbyteries; but its weight of influence was out of all proportion to
its numbers, and this entire force, not altogether at unity with itself
on ecclesiastical questions, was united as one man in the maintenance of
American rights.

The great German immigration begins to flow in earnest in this period.
Three successive tides of migration have set from Germany to America.
The first was the movement of the petty sects under the invitation and
patronage of William Penn, quartering themselves in the eastern parts of
Pennsylvania. The second was the transportation of "the Palatines,"
expatriated by stress of persecution and war, not from the Rhenish
Palatinate only, but from the archduchy of Salzburg and from other parts
of Germany and Switzerland, gathered up and removed to America, some of
them directly, some by way of England, as an act of political charity by
Queen Anne's government, with the idea of strengthening the colonies by
planting Protestant settlers for a safeguard against Spanish or French
aggressions. The third tide continues flowing, with variable volume, to
this day. It is the voluntary flow of companies of individual emigrants
seeking to better the fortunes of themselves or their families. But this
voluntary migration has been unhealthily and sometimes dishonestly
stimulated, from the beginning of it, by the selfish interests of those
concerned in the business of transportation or in the sale of land. It
seems to have been mainly the greed of shipping merchants, at first,
that spread abroad in the German states florid announcements of the
charms and riches of America, decoying multitudes of ignorant persons to
risk everything on these representations, and to mortgage themselves
into a term of slavery until they should have paid the cost of their
passage by their labor. This class of bondmen, called "redemptioners,"
made no inconsiderable part of the population of the middle colonies;
and it seems to have been a worthy part. The trade of "trepanning" the
unfortunates and transporting them and selling their term of service was
not by several degrees as bad as the African slave-trade; but it was of
the same sort, and the deadly horrors of its "middle passage" were
hardly less.

In one way and another the German immigration had grown by the middle of
the eighteenth century to great dimensions. In the year 1749 twelve
thousand Germans landed at the port of Philadelphia. In general they
were as sheep having no shepherd. Their deplorable religious condition
was owing less to poverty than to diversity of sects.[188:1] In many
places the number of sects rendered concerted action impossible, and the
people remained destitute of religious instruction.

The famine of the word was sorely felt. In 1733 three great Lutheran
congregations in Pennsylvania, numbering five hundred families each,
sent messengers with an imploring petition to their coreligionists at
London and Halle, representing their "state of the greatest
destitution." "Our own means" (they say) "are utterly insufficient to
effect the necessary relief, unless God in his mercy may send us help
from abroad. It is truly lamentable to think of the large numbers of the
rising generation who know not their right hand from their left; and,
unless help be promptly afforded, the danger is great that, in
consequence of the great lack of churches and schools, the most of them
will be led into the ways of destructive error."

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