Grace S. Richmond - "Under the Country Sky"

E. Phillips Oppenheim - "Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo"

Charles Clark Munn - "Pocket Island"

F. Scott Fitzgerald - "Flappers and Philosophers"

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




* * * * *

A natural sequel to the organization and success of the Young Men's
Christian Association is the institution of the Young Women's Christian
Association, having like objects and methods in its proper sphere. This
institution, too, owes the reason of its existence to changed social
conditions. The plausible arguments of some earnest reformers in favor
of opening careers of independent self-support to women, and the
unquestionable and pathetic instances by which these arguments are
enforced, are liable to some most serious and weighty offsets. Doubtless
many and many a case of hardship has been relieved by the general
introduction of this reform. But the result has been the gathering in
large towns of populations of unmarried, self-supporting young women,
severed from home duties and influences, and, out of business hours,
under no effective restraints of rule. There is a rush from the country
into the city of applicants for employment, and wages sink to less than
a living rate. We are confronted with an artificial and perilous
condition for the church to deal with, especially in the largest cities.
And of the various instrumentalities to this end, the Young Women's
Christian Association is one of the most effective.

* * * * *

The development of organized activity among women has been a conspicuous
characteristic of this period. From the beginning of our churches the
charitable sewing-circle or "Dorcas Society" has been known as a center
both of prayer and of labor. But in this period the organization of
women for charitable service has been on a continental scale.

In 1874, in an outburst of zeal, "women's crusades" were undertaken,
especially in some western towns, in which bands of singing and praying
women went in person to tippling-houses and even worse resorts, to
assail them, visibly and audibly, with these spiritual weapons. The
crusades, so long as they were a novelty, were not without result.
Spectacular prayers, offered with one eye on the heavens and the other
eye watching the impressions made on the human auditor, are not in vain;
they have their reward. But the really important result of the
"crusades" was the organization of the "Women's Christian Temperance
Union," which has extended in all directions to the utmost bounds of the
country, and has accomplished work of undoubted value, while attempting
other work the value of which is open to debate.

The separate organization of women for the support and management of
missions began on an extensive scale, in 1868, with the Women's Board of
Missions, instituted in alliance with the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions of the Congregationalist churches.
The example at once commended itself to the imitation of all, so that
all the principal mission boards of the Protestant churches are in
alliance with actively working women's boards.

The training acquired in these and other organizations by many women of
exceptional taste and talent for the conduct of large affairs has tended
still further to widen the field of their activity. The ends of the
earth, as well as the dark places nearer home, have felt the salutary
results of it.[367:1]

In this brief and most incomplete sketch of the origin of one of the
distinguishing features of contemporary Christianity--the application of
the systematized activity of private Christians--no mention has been
made of the corps of "colporteurs," or book-peddlers, employed by
religious publication societies, nor of the vastly useful work of
laymen employed as city missionaries, nor of the houses and orders of
sisters wholly devoted to pious and charitable work. Such work, though
the ceremony of ordination may have been omitted, is rather clerical or
professional than laical. It is on this account the better suited to the
genius of the Catholic Church, whose ages of experience in the conduct
of such organizations, and whose fine examples of economy and efficiency
in the use of them, have put all American Christendom under obligation.
Among Protestant sects the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the
Methodists have (after the Moravians) shown themselves readiest to
profit by the example. But a far more widely beneficent service than
that of all the nursing "orders" together, both Catholic and Protestant,
and one not less Christian, while it is characteristically American in
its method, is that of the annually increasing army of faithful women
professionally educated to the work of nursing, at a hundred hospitals,
and fulfilling their vocation individually and on business principles.
The education of nurses is a sequel of the war and one of the beneficent
fruits of it.

* * * * *

Not the least important item in the organization of lay activity is the
marvelously rapid growth of the "Young People's Society of Christian
Endeavor." In February, 1881, a pastor in Portland, Me., the Rev.
Francis E. Clark, organized into an association within his church a
number of young people pledged to certain rules of regular attendance
and participation in the association meetings and of cooeperation in
useful service. There seems to have been no particular originality in
the plan, but through some felicity in arrangement and opportuneness in
the time it caught like a forest fire, and in an amazingly short time
ran through the country and around the world. One wise precaution was
taken in the basis of the organization: it was provided that it should
not interfere with any member's fidelity to his church or his sect, but
rather promote it. Doubtless jealousy of its influence was thus in some
measure forestalled and averted. But in the rapid spread of the Society
those who were on guard for the interests of the several sects
recognized a danger in too free affiliations outside of sectarian lines,
and soon there were instituted, in like forms of rule, "Epworth Leagues"
for Methodists, "Westminster Leagues" for Presbyterians, "Luther
Leagues" for Lutherans, "St. Andrew's Brotherhoods" for Episcopalians,
"The Baptist Young People's Union," and yet others for yet other sects.
According to the latest reports, the total pledged membership of this
order of associated young disciples, in these various ramifications, is
about 4,500,000[369:1]--this in the United States alone. Of the
Christian Endeavor Societies still adhering to the old name and
constitution, there are in all the world 47,009, of which 11,119 are
"Junior Endeavor Societies." The total membership is 2,820,540.[369:2]

Contemporary currents of theological thought, setting away from the
excessive individualism which has characterized the churches of the
Great Awakening, confirm the tendency of the Christian life toward a
vigorous and even absorbing external activity. The duty of the church to
human society is made a part of the required curriculum of study in
preparation for the ministry, in fully equipped theological seminaries.
If ever it has been a just reproach of the church that its frequenters
were so absorbed in the saving of their own souls that they forgot the
multitude about them, that reproach is fast passing away. "The
Institutional Church," as the clumsy phrase goes, cares for soul and
body, for family and municipal and national life. Its saving sacraments
are neither two nor seven, but seventy times seven. They include the
bath-tub as well as the font; the coffee-house and cook-shop as well as
the Holy Supper; the gymnasium as well as the prayer-meeting. The
"college settlement" plants colonies of the best life of the church in
regions which men of little faith are tempted to speak of as
"God-forsaken." The Salvation Army, with its noisy and eccentric ways,
and its effective discipline, and its most Christian principle of
setting every rescued man at work to aid in the rescue of others, is
welcomed by all orders of the church, and honored according to the
measure of its usefulness, and even of its faithful effort to be useful.

* * * * *

It is not to be supposed that this immense, unprecedented growth of
outward activity can have been gained without some corresponding loss.
The time is not long gone by, when the sustained contemplation of the
deep things of the cross, and the lofty things in the divine nature, and
the subtile and elusive facts concerning the human constitution and
character and the working of the human will, were eminently
characteristic of the religious life of the American church. In the
times when that life was stirred to its most strenuous activity, it was
marked by the vicissitude of prolonged passions of painful sensibility
at the consciousness of sin, and ecstasies of delight in the
contemplation of the infinity of God and the glory of the Saviour and
his salvation. Every one who is conversant with the religious biography
of the generations before our own, knows of the still hours and days set
apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and "frames" and the
grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge
that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly
introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none
the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is
providing for itself a new reaction. "The contemplative orders," whether
among Catholics or Protestants, do not find the soil and climate of
America congenial. And yet there is a mission-field here for the mystic
and the quietist; and when the stir-about activity of our generation
suffers their calm voices to be heard, there are not a few to give ear.

* * * * *

An event of great historical importance, which cannot be determined to a
precise date, but which belongs more to this period than to any other,
is the loss of the Scotch and Puritan Sabbath, or, as many like to call
it, the American Sabbath. The law of the Westminster divines on this
subject, it may be affirmed without fear of contradiction from any
quarter, does not coincide in its language with the law of God as
expressed either in the Old Testament or in the New. The Westminster
rule requires, as if with a "Thus saith the Lord," that on the first day
of the week, instead of the seventh, men shall desist not only from
labor but from recreation, and "spend the whole time in the public and
private exercises of God's worship, except so much as is to be taken up
in the works of necessity and mercy."[371:1] This interpretation and
expansion of the Fourth Commandment has never attained to more than a
sectarian and provincial authority; but the overmastering Puritan
influence, both of Virginia and of New England, combined with the
Scotch-Irish influence, made it for a long time dominant in America.
Even those who quite declined to admit the divine authority of the
glosses upon the commandment felt constrained to "submit to the
ordinances of man for the Lord's sake." But it was inevitable that with
the vast increase of the travel and sojourn of American Christians in
other lands of Christendom, and the multitudinous immigration into
America from other lands than Great Britain, the tradition from the
Westminster elders should come to be openly disputed within the church,
and should be disregarded even when not denied. It was not only
inevitable; it was a Christian duty distinctly enjoined by apostolic
authority.[372:1] The five years of war, during which Christians of
various lands and creeds intermingled as never before, and the Sunday
laws were dumb "_inter arma_" not only in the field but among the home
churches, did perhaps even more to break the force of the tradition, and
to lead in a perilous and demoralizing reaction. Some reaction was
inevitable. The church must needs suffer the evil consequence of
overstraining the law of God. From the Sunday of ascetic self-denial--"a
day for a man to afflict his soul"--there was a ready rush into utter
recklessness of the law and privilege of rest. In the church there was
wrought sore damage to weak consciences; men acted, not from intelligent
conviction, but from lack of conviction, and allowing themselves in
self-indulgences of the rightfulness of which they were dubious, they
"condemned themselves in that which they allowed." The consequence in
civil society was alike disastrous. Early legislation had not steered
clear of the error of attempting to enforce Sabbath-keeping as a
religious duty by civil penalties; and some relics of that mistake
remained, and still remain, on some of the statute-books. The just
protest against this wrong was, of course, undiscriminating, tending to
defeat the righteous and most salutary laws that aimed simply to secure
for the citizen the privilege of a weekly day of rest and to secure the
holiday thus ordained by law from being perverted into a nuisance. The
social change which is still in progress along these lines no wise
Christian patriot can contemplate with complacency. It threatens, when
complete, to deprive us of that universal quiet Sabbath rest which has
been one of the glories of American social life, and an important
element in its economic prosperity, and to give in place of it, to some,
no assurance of a Sabbath rest at all, to others, a Sabbath of revelry
and debauch.


FOOTNOTES:

[354:1] Thompson, "The Presbyterians," chap. xiii.; Johnson, "The
Southern Presbyterians," chap. v.

[357:1] The immigration is thus given by decades, with an illustrative
diagram, by Dr. Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," p. 759:

1825-35 330,737
1835-45 707,770
1845-55 2,944,833
1855-65 1,578,483
1865-75 3,234,090
1875-85 4,061,278

[358:1] _Ibid._, p. 714. We have quoted in round numbers. The figures do
not include the large sums expended annually in the colportage work of
Bible and tract societies, in Sunday school missions, and in the
building of churches and parsonages. In the accounts of the last-named
most effective enterprise the small amounts received and appropriated to
aid in building would represent manifold more gathered and expended by
the pioneer churches on the ground.

[359:1] Dorchester, _op. cit._, p. 709.

[359:2] Above, pp. 259, 260.

[359:3] A pamphlet published at the office of the New York "Sun," away
back in the early thirties, was formerly in my possession, which
undertook to give, under the title "The Rich Men of New York," the name
of every person in that city who was worth more than one hundred
thousand dollars--and it was not a large pamphlet, either. As nearly as
I remember, there were less than a half-dozen names credited with more
than a million, and one solitary name, that of John Jacob Astor, was
reported as good for the enormous and almost incredible sum of ten
millions.

[361:1] Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," p. 715.

[361:2] See above, p. 70.

[363:1] Bishop Vincent, in "Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia," p. 441. The
number of students in the "Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle"
already in 1891 exceeded twenty-five thousand.

[367:1] Among the titles omitted from this list are the various
"Lend-a-Hand Clubs," and "10 x 1 = 10 Clubs," and circles of "King's
Daughters," and like coteries, that have been inspired by the tales and
the "four mottoes" of Edward Everett Hale.

[369:1] Dr. H. K. Carroll, in "The Independent," April 1, 1897.

[369:2] "Congregationalist Handbook for 1897," p. 35.

[371:1] Westminster Shorter Catechism, Ans. 60. The commentaries on the
Catechism, which are many, like Gemara upon Mishna, build wider and
higher the "fence around the law," in a fashion truly rabbinic.

[372:1] Colossians, ii. 16.




CHAPTER XXI.

THE CHURCH IN THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE.


The rapid review of three crowded centuries, which is all that the
narrowly prescribed limits of this volume have permitted, has
necessarily been mainly restricted to external facts. But looking back
over the course of visible events, it is not impossible for acute minds
devoted to such study to trace the stream of thought and sentiment that
is sometimes hidden from direct view by the overgrowth which itself has
nourished.

We have seen a profound spiritual change, renewing the face of the land
and leaving its indelible impress on successive generations, springing
from the profoundest contemplations of God and his work of salvation
through Jesus Christ, and then bringing back into thoughtful and
teachable minds new questions to be solved and new discoveries of truth
to be pondered. The one school of theological opinion and inquiry that
can be described as characteristically American is the theology of the
Great Awakening. The disciples of this school, in all its divergent
branches, agree in looking back to the first Jonathan Edwards as the
founder of it. Through its generations it has shown a striking sequence
and continuity of intellectual and spiritual life, each generation
answering questions put to it by its predecessor, while propounding new
questions to the generation following. After the classical writings of
its first founders, the most widely influential production of this
school is the "Theology Explained and Defended in a Series of Sermons"
of President Dwight. This had the advantage over some other systems of
having been preached, and thus proved to be preachable. The "series of
sermons" was that delivered to successive generations of college
students at Yale at a time of prevailing skepticism, when every
statement of the college pulpit was liable to sharp and not too friendly
scrutiny; and it was preached with the fixed purpose of convincing and
converting the young men who heard it. The audience, the occasion, and
the man--a fervid Christian, and a born poet and orator--combined to
produce a work of wide and enduring influence. The dynasty of the
Edwardeans is continued down to the middle of the nineteenth century,
and later, through different lines, ending in Emmons of Franklin, Taylor
of New Haven, and Finney of Oberlin, and is represented among the living
by the venerable Edwards A. Park, of Andover, who adds to that power of
sustained speculative thinking in a straight line which is
characteristic of the whole school, a wide learning in the whole field
of theological literature, which had not been usual among his
predecessors. It is a prevailing trait of this theology, born of the
great revival, that it has constantly held before itself not only the
question, What is truth? but also the question, How shall it be
preached? It has never ceased to be a revival theology.

A bold and open breach of traditionary assumptions and habits of
reasoning was made by Horace Bushnell. This was a theologian of a
different type from his New England predecessors. He was of a temper
little disposed to accept either methods or results as a local
tradition, and inclined rather to prefer that which had been "hammered
out on his own anvil." And yet, while very free in manifesting his small
respect for the "logicking" by syllogistic processes which had been the
pride of the theological chair and even the pulpit in America, and while
declining the use of current phraseologies even for the expression of
current ideas, he held himself loyally subject to the canon of the
Scriptures as his rule of faith, and deferential to the voice of the
church catholic as uttered in the concord of testimony of holy men in
all ages. Endowed with a poet's power of intuition, uplifted by a fervid
piety, uttering himself in a literary style singularly rich and
melodious, it is not strange that such a man should have made large
contributions to the theological thought of his own and later times. In
natural theology, his discourses on "The Moral Uses of Dark Things"
(1869), and his longest continuous work, on "Nature and the
Supernatural" (1858), even though read rather as prose-poems than as
arguments, sound distinctly new notes in the treatment of their theme.
In "God in Christ" (1849), "Christ in Theology" (1851), "The Vicarious
Sacrifice" (1866), and "Forgiveness and Law" (1874), and in a notable
article in the "New Englander" for November, 1854, entitled "The
Christian Trinity a Practical Truth," the great topics of the Christian
system were dealt with all the more effectively, in the minds of
thoughtful readers in this and other lands, for cries of alarm and
newspaper and pulpit impeachments of heresy that were sent forth. But
that work of his which most nearly made as well as marked an epoch in
American church history was the treatise of "Christian Nurture" (1847).
This, with the protracted controversy that followed upon the publication
of it, was a powerful influence in lifting the American church out of
the rut of mere individualism that had been wearing deeper and deeper
from the days of the Great Awakening.

Another wholesome and edifying debate was occasioned by the publications
that went forth from the college and theological seminary of the German
Reformed Church, situated at Mercersburg in Pennsylvania. At this
institution was effected a fruitful union of American and German
theology; the result was to commend to the general attention aspects of
truth, philosophical, theological, and historical, not previously
current among American Protestants. The book of Dr. John Williamson
Nevin, entitled "The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or
Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist," revealed to the vast
multitude of churches and ministers that gloried in the name of
Calvinist the fact that on the most distinctive article of Calvinism
they were not Calvinists at all, but Zwinglians. The enunciation of the
standard doctrine of the various Presbyterian churches excited among
themselves a clamor of "Heresy!" and the doctrine of Calvin was put upon
trial before the Calvinists. The outcome of a discussion that extended
itself far beyond the boundaries of the comparatively small and
uninfluential German Reformed Church was to elevate the point of view
and broaden the horizon of American students of the constitution and
history of the church. Later generations of such students owe no light
obligation to the fidelity and courage of Dr. Nevin, as well as to the
erudition and immense productive diligence of his associate, Dr. Philip
Schaff.[377:1]

It is incidental to the prevailing method of instruction in theology by
a course of prelections in which the teacher reads to his class in
detail his own original _summa theologiae_, that the American press has
been prolific of ponderous volumes of systematic divinity. Among the
more notable of these systems are those of Leonard Woods (in five
volumes) and of Enoch Pond; of the two Drs. Hodge, father and son; of
Robert J. Breckinridge and James H. Thornwell and Robert L. Dabney; and
the "Systematic Theology" of a much younger man, Dr. Augustus H. Strong,
of Rochester Seminary, which has won for itself very unusual and wide
respect. Exceptional for ability, as well as for its originality of
conception, is "The Republic of God: An Institute of Theology," by
Elisha Mulford, a disciple of Maurice and of the realist philosophy, the
thought of whose whole life is contained in this and his kindred work on
"The Nation."

* * * * *

How great is the debt which the church owes to its heretics is
frequently illustrated in the progress of Christianity in America. If it
had not been for the Unitarian defection in New England, and for the
attacks from Germany upon the historicity of the gospels, the
theologians of America might to this day have been engrossed in
"threshing old straw" in endless debates on "fixed fate, free will,
foreknowledge absolute." The exigencies of controversy forced the study
of the original documents of the church. From his entrance upon his
professorship at Andover, in 1810, the eager enthusiasm of Moses Stuart
made him the father of exegetical science not only for America, but for
all the English-speaking countries. His not less eminent pupil and
associate, Edward Robinson, later of the Union Seminary, New York,
created out of nothing the study of biblical geography. Associating with
himself the most accomplished living Arabist, Eli Smith, of the American
mission at Beirut, he made those "Biblical Researches in Palestine"
which have been the foundation on which all later explorers have built.
Another American missionary, Dr. W. M. Thomson, has given the most
valuable popular exposition of the same subject in his volumes on "The
Land and the Book." With the exception of Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull in his
determination of the site of Kadesh-barnea, the American successors to
Robinson in the original exploration of the Bible lands have made few
additions to our knowledge. But in the department of biblical archaeology
the work of Drs. Ward, Peters, and Hilprecht in the mounds of Babylonia,
and of Mr. Bliss in Palestine, has added not a little to the credit of
the American church against the heavy balance which we owe to the
scholarship of Europe.

Copyright (c) 2007. topboookz.com. All rights reserved.