Alan Douglas - "Afloat"

Morris Jastrow - "The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria"

James Buchanan - "Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws"

Mary Robinson - "Beaux and Belles of England"

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




There seemed little reason to doubt that the French empire in America,
which for a century and a half had gone on expanding and strengthening,
would continue to expand and strengthen for centuries to come. Sudden as
lightning, in August, 1756, the Seven Years' War broke out on the other
side of the globe. The treaty with which it ended, in February, 1763,
transferred to Great Britain, together with the Spanish territory of
Florida, all the French possessions in America, from the Arctic Ocean to
the Gulf of Mexico. "As a dream when one awaketh," the magnificent
vision of empire, spiritual and secular, which for so many generations
had occupied the imagination of French statesmen and churchmen, was
rudely and forever dispelled. Of the princely wealth, the brilliant
talents, the unsurpassed audacity of adventure, the unequaled heroism of
toil and martyrdom expended on the great project, how strangely meager
and evanescent the results! In the districts of Lower Canada there
remain, indeed, the institutions of a French Catholic population; and
the aspect of those districts, in which the pledge of full liberty to
the dominant church has been scrupulously fulfilled by the British
government, may reasonably be regarded as an indication of what France
would have done for the continent in general. But within the present
domain of the United States the entire results of a century and a half
of French Catholic colonization and evangelization may be summed up as
follows: In Maine, a thousand Catholic Indians still remain, to remind
one of the time when, as it is boldly claimed, the whole Indian
population of that province were either converted or under Jesuit
training.[23:1] In like manner, a scanty score of thousands of Catholic
Indians on various reservations in the remote West represent the time
when, at the end of the French domination, "all the North American
Indians were more or less extensively converted" to Catholic
Christianity, "all had the gospel preached to them."[23:2] The splendid
fruits of the missions among the Iroquois, from soil watered by the
blood of martyrs, were wasted to nothing in savage intertribal wars.
Among the Choctaws and Chickasaws of the South and Southwest, among whom
the gospel was by and by to win some of its fairest trophies, the French
missionaries achieved no great success.[23:3] The French colonies from
Canada, planted so prosperously along the Western rivers, dispersed,
leaving behind them some straggling families. The abundant later growth
of the Catholic Church in that region was to be from other seed and
stock. The region of Louisiana alone, destined a generation later to be
included within the boundaries of the great republic, retained
organized communities of French descent and language; but, living as
they were in utter unbelief and contempt of religion and morality, it
would be an unjust reproach on Catholicism to call them Catholic. The
work of the gospel had got to be begun from the foundation. Nevertheless
it is not to be doubted that remote memories or lingering traditions of
a better age survived to aid the work of those who by and by should
enter in to rebuild the waste places.[24:1]

There are not a few of us, wise after the event, who recognize a final
cause of this surprising and almost dramatic failure, in the manifest
intent of divine Providence that the field of the next great empire in
the world's history should not become the exclusive domain of an
old-world monarchy and hierarchy; but the immediate efficient causes of
it are not so obvious. This, however, may justly be said: some of the
seeming elements of strength in the French colonization proved to be
fatal elements of weakness.

1. The French colonies had the advantage of royal patronage,
endowment,[24:2] and protection, and of unity of counsel and direction.
They were all parts of one system, under one control. And their centers
of vitality, head and heart, were on the other side of the sea.
Subsisting upon the strength of the great monarchy, they must needs
share its fortunes, evil as well as good. When, after the reverses of
France in the Seven Years' War, it became necessary to accept hard terms
of peace, the superb framework of empire in the West fell to the
disposal of the victors. "America," said Pitt, "was conquered in
Germany."

2. The business basis of the French colonies, being that of trade with
the Indians rather than a self-supporting agriculture, favored the swift
expansion of these colonies and their wide influence among the Indians.
Scattered companies of fur-traders would be found here and there,
wherever were favorable points for traffic, penetrating deeply into the
wilderness and establishing friendly business relations with the
savages. It has been observed that the Romanic races show an alacrity
for intermarriage with barbarous tribes that is not to be found in the
Teutonic. The result of such relations is ordinarily less the elevating
of the lower race than the dragging down of the higher; but it tends for
the time to give great advantage in maintaining a powerful political
influence over the barbarians. Thus it was that the French, few in
number, covered almost the breadth of the continent with their
formidable alliances; and these alliances were the offensive and
defensive armor in which they trusted, but they were also their peril.
Close alliance with one savage clan involved war with its enemies. It
was an early misfortune of the French settlers that their close friendly
relations with their Huron neighbors embattled against them the
fiercest, bravest, and ablest of the Indian tribes, the confederacy of
the Six Nations, which held, with full appreciation of its strategic
importance, the command of the exits southward from the valley of the
St. Lawrence. The fierce jealousy of the Iroquois toward the allies of
their hereditary antagonists, rather than any good will toward white
settlers of other races, made them an effectual check upon French
encroachments upon the slender line of English, Dutch, and Swedish
settlements that stretched southward from Maine along the Atlantic
coast.

3. In one aspect it was doubtless an advantage to the French missions in
America that the sharp sectarian competitions between the different
clerical orders resulted finally in the missions coming almost
exclusively under the control of the Jesuit society. This result insured
to the missions the highest ability in administration and direction,
ample resources of various sorts, and a force of missionaries whose
personal virtues have won for them unstinted eulogy even from unfriendly
sources--men the ardor of whose zeal was rigorously controlled by a more
than martial severity of religious discipline. But it would be uncandid
in us to refuse attention to those grave charges against the society
brought by Catholic authorities and Catholic orders, and so enforced as,
after long and acrimonious controversy, to result in the expulsion of
the society from almost every nation of Catholic Europe, in its being
stigmatized by Pope Benedict XIV., in 1741, as made up of "disobedient,
contumacious, captious, and reprobate persons," and at last in its being
suppressed and abolished by Pope Clement XIV., in 1773, as a nuisance to
Christendom. We need, indeed, to make allowance for the intense
animosity of sectarian strife among the various Catholic orders in which
the charges against the society were engendered and unrelentingly
prosecuted; but after all deductions it is not credible that the almost
universal odium in which it was held was provoked solely by its virtues.
Among the accusations against the society which seem most clearly
substantiated these two are likely to be concerned in that "brand of
ultimate failure which has invariably been stamped on all its most
promising schemes and efforts":[26:1] first, a disposition to compromise
the essential principles of Christianity by politic concessions to
heathenism, so that the successes of the Jesuit missions are magnified
by reports of alleged conversions that are conversions only in name and
outward form; second, a constantly besetting propensity to political
intrigue.[27:1] It is hardly to be doubted that both had their part in
the prodigious failure of the French Catholic missions and settlements
within the present boundaries of the United States.

4. The conditions which favored the swift and magnificent expansion of
the French occupation were unfavorable to the healthy natural growth of
permanent settlements. A post of soldiers, a group of cabins of trappers
and fur-traders, and a mission of nuns and celibate priests, all
together give small promise of rapid increase of population. It is
rather to the fact that the French settlements, except at the seaboard,
were constituted so largely of these elements, than to any alleged
sterility of the French stock, that the fatal weakness of the French
occupation is to be ascribed. The lack of French America was men. The
population of Canada in 1759, according to census, was about eighty-two
thousand;[27:2] that of New England in 1754 is estimated at four hundred
and twenty-five thousand. "The white population of five, or perhaps even
of six, of the American provinces was greater singly than that of all
Canada, and the aggregate in America exceeded that in Canada
fourteenfold."[27:3] The same sign of weakness is recognized at the
other extremity of the cordon of French settlements. The vast region of
Louisiana is estimated, at fifty years from its colonization, at one
tenth of the strength of the coeval province of Pennsylvania.[27:4]

Under these hopeless conditions the French colonies had not even the
alternative of keeping the peace. The state of war was forced by the
mother countries. There was no recourse for Canada except to her savage
allies, won for her through the influence of the missionaries.

It is justly claimed that in the mind of such early leaders as Champlain
the dominant motive of the French colonization was religious; but in the
cruel position into which the colony was forced it was almost inevitable
that the missions should become political. It was boasted in their
behalf that they had taught the Indians "to mingle Jesus Christ and
France together in their affections."[28:1] The cross and the lilies
were blazoned together as the sign of French dominion. The missionary
became frequently, and sometimes quite undisguisedly, a political agent.
It was from the missions that the horrible murderous forays upon
defenseless villages proceeded, which so often marked the frontier line
of New England and New York with fire and blood. It is one of the most
unhappy of the results of that savage warfare that in the minds of the
communities that suffered from it the Jesuit missionary came to be
looked upon as accessory to these abhorrent crimes. Deeply is it to be
lamented that men with such eminent claims on our admiration and
reverence should not be triumphantly clear of all suspicion of such
complicity. We gladly concede the claim[28:2] that the proof of the
complicity is not complete; we could welcome some clear evidence in
disproof of it--some sign of a bold and indignant protest against these
crimes; we could wish that the Jesuit historian had not boasted of these
atrocities as proceeding from the fine work of his brethren,[29:1] and
that the antecedents of the Jesuits as a body, and their declared
principles of "moral theology," were such as raise no presumption
against them even in unfriendly minds. But we must be content with
thankfully acknowledging that divine change which has made it impossible
longer to boast of or even justify such deeds, and which leaves no
ground among neighbor Christians of the present day for harboring mutual
suspicions which, to the Christian ministers of French and English
America of two hundred years ago and less, it was impossible to repress.

I have spoken of the complete extinction within the present domain of
the United States of the magnificent beginnings of the projected French
Catholic Church and empire. It is only in the most recent years, since
the Civil War, that the results of the work inaugurated in America by
Champlain begin to reappear in the field of the ecclesiastical history
of the United States. The immigration of Canadian French Catholics into
the northern tier of States has already grown to considerable volume,
and is still growing in numbers and in stability and strength, and adds
a new and interesting element to the many factors that go to make up the
American church.


FOOTNOTES:

[18:1] So Parkman.

[19:1] Bancroft's "United States," vol. iv., p. 267.

[21:1] Bancroft's "United States," vol. iii., p. 131.

[21:2] _Ibid._, p. 175.

[22:1] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 121.

[23:1] Bishop O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholic Church in the United
States," p. 136.

[23:2] _Ibid._, pp. 191-193.

[23:3] _Ibid._, p. 211.

[24:1] See O'Gorman, chaps. ix.-xiv., xx.

[24:2] Mr. Bancroft, describing the "sad condition" of La Salle's colony
at Matagorda after the wreck of his richly laden store-ship, adds that
"even now this colony possessed, from the bounty of Louis XIV., more
than was contributed by all the English monarchs together for the twelve
English colonies on the Atlantic. Its number still exceeded that of the
colony of Smith in Virginia, or of those who embarked in the
'Mayflower'" (vol. iii., p. 171).

[26:1] Dr. R. F. Littledale, in "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xiii.,
pp. 649-652.

[27:1] Both these charges are solemnly affirmed by the pope in the bull
of suppression of the society (Dr. R. F. Littledale, in "Encyclopaedia
Britannica," vol. xiii., p. 655).

[27:2] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 320.

[27:3] _Ibid._, pp. 128, 129.

[27:4] The contrast is vigorously emphasized by Mr. Bancroft: "Such was
Louisiana more than a half-century after the first attempt at
colonization by La Salle. Its population may have been five thousand
whites and half that number of blacks. Louis XIV. had fostered it with
pride and liberal expenditures; an opulent merchant, famed for his
successful enterprise, assumed its direction; the Company of the
Mississippi, aided by boundless but transient credit, had made it the
foundation of their hopes; and, again, Fleury and Louis XV. had sought
to advance its fortunes. Priests and friars, dispersed through nations
from Biloxi to the Dahcotas, propitiated the favor of the savages; but
still the valley of the Mississippi was nearly a wilderness. All its
patrons--though among them it counted kings and ministers of state--had
not accomplished for it in half a century a tithe of the prosperity
which within the same period sprang naturally from the benevolence of
William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware" (vol. iii., p.
369).

[28:1] "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xiii., p. 654.

[28:2] Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 137-142.

[29:1] Bancroft, vol. iii., pp. 187, 188.




CHAPTER IV.

ANTECEDENTS OF PERMANENT CHRISTIAN COLONIZATION--THE DISINTEGRATION OF
CHRISTENDOM--CONTROVERSIES--PERSECUTIONS.


We have briefly reviewed the history of two magnificent schemes of
secular and spiritual empire, which, conceived in the minds of great
statesmen and churchmen, sustained by the resources of the mightiest
kingdoms of that age, inaugurated by soldiers of admirable prowess,
explorers of unsurpassed boldness and persistence, and missionaries
whose heroic faith has canonized them in the veneration of Christendom,
have nevertheless come to naught.

We turn now to observe the beginnings, coinciding in time with those of
the French enterprise, of a series of disconnected plantations along the
Atlantic seaboard, established as if at haphazard, without plan or
mutual preconcert, of different languages and widely diverse Christian
creeds, depending on scanty private resources, unsustained by
governmental arms or treasuries, but destined, in a course of events
which no human foresight could have calculated, to come under the
plastic influence of a single European power, to be molded according to
the general type of English polity, and to become heir to English
traditions, literature, and language. These mutually alien and even
antagonistic communities were to be constrained, by forces superior to
human control, first into confederation and then into union, and to
occupy the breadth of the new continent as a solid and independent
nation. The history reads like a fulfillment of the apocalyptic imagery
of a rock hewn from the mountain without hands, moving on to fill the
earth.

Looking back after the event, we find it easy to trace the providential
preparations for this great result. There were few important events in
the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that did not
have to do with it; but the most obvious of these antecedents are to be
found in _controversies_ and _persecutions_.

The protest of northern Europe against the abuses and corruptions
prevailing in the Roman Church was articulated in the Augsburg
Confession. Over against it were framed the decrees of the Council of
Trent. Thus the lines were distinctly drawn and the warfare between
contending principles was joined. Those who fondly dreamed of a
permanently united and solid Protestantism to withstand its powerful
antagonist were destined to speedy and inevitable disappointment. There
have been many to deplore that so soon after the protest of Augsburg was
set forth as embodying the common belief of Protestants new parties
should have arisen protesting against the protest. The ordinance of the
Lord's Supper, instituted as a sacrament of universal Christian
fellowship, became (as so often before and since) the center of
contention and the badge of mutual alienation. It was on this point that
Zwingli and the Swiss parted from Luther and the Lutherans; on the same
point, in the next generation of Reformers, John Calvin, attempting to
mediate between the two contending parties, became the founder of still
a third party, strong not only in the lucid and logical doctrinal
statements in which it delighted, but also in the possession of a
definite scheme of republican church government which became as
distinctive of the Calvinistic or "Reformed" churches as their doctrine
of the Supper. It was at a later epoch still that those insoluble
questions which press most inexorably for consideration when theological
thought and study are most serious and earnest--the questions that
concern the divine sovereignty in its relation to human freedom and
responsibility--arose in the Catholic Church to divide Jesuit from
Dominican and Franciscan, and in the Reformed churches to divide the
Arminians from the disciples of Gomar and Turretin. All these divisions
among the European Christians of the seventeenth century were to have
their important bearing on the planting of the Christian church in
America.

In view of the destined predominance of English influence in the
seaboard colonies of America, the history of the divisions of the
Christian people of England is of preeminent importance to the
beginnings of the American church. The curiously diverse elements that
entered into the English Reformation, and the violent vicissitudes that
marked the course of it, were all represented in the parties existing
among English Christians at the period of the planting of the colonies.

The political and dynastic character of the movements that detached the
English hierarchy from the Roman see had for one inevitable result to
leaven the English church as a lump with the leaven of Herod. That
considerable part of the clergy and people that moved to and fro,
without so much as the resistance of any very formidable _vis inertiae_,
with the change of the monarch or of the monarch's caprice, might leave
the student of the history of those times in doubt as to whether they
belonged to the kingdom of heaven or to the kingdom of this world. But,
however severe the judgment that any may pass upon the character and
motives of Henry VIII. and of the councilors of Edward, there will
hardly be any seriously to question that the movements directed by these
men soon came to be infused with more serious and spiritual influences.
The Lollardy of Wycliffe and his fellows in the fourteenth century had
been severely repressed and driven into "occult conventicles," but had
not been extinguished; the Bible in English, many times retouched after
Wycliffe's days, and perfected by the refugees at Geneva from the Marian
persecutions, had become a common household book; and those exiles
themselves, returning from the various centers of fervid religious
thought and feeling in Holland and Germany and Switzerland, had brought
with them an augmented spiritual faith, as well as intensified and
sharply defined convictions on the questions of theology and church
order that were debated by the scholars of the Continent. It was
impossible that the diverse and antagonist elements thus assembled
should not work on one another with violent reactions. By the beginning
of the seventeenth century not less than four categories would suffice
to classify the people of England according to their religious
differences. First, there were those who still continued to adhere to
the Roman see. Secondly, those who, either from conviction or from
expediency or from indifference, were content with the state church of
England in the shape in which Elizabeth and her parliaments had left it;
this class naturally included the general multitude of Englishmen,
religious, irreligious, and non-religious. Thirdly, there were those
who, not refusing their adhesion to the national church as by law
established, nevertheless earnestly desired to see it more completely
purified from doctrinal errors and practical corruptions, and who
qualified their conformity to it accordingly. Fourthly, there were the
few who distinctly repudiated the national church as a false church,
coming out from her as from Babylon, determined upon "reformation
without tarrying for any." Finally, following upon these, more radical,
not to say more logical, than the rest, came a fifth party, the
followers of George Fox. Not one of these five parties but has valid
claims, both in its principles and in its membership, on the respect of
history; not one but can point to its saints and martyrs; not one but
was destined to play a quite separate and distinct and highly important
part in the planting of the church of Christ in America. They are
designated, for convenience' sake, as the Catholics, the Conformists,
the Puritans or Reformists, the Separatists (of whom were the Pilgrims),
and the Quakers.

Such a Christendom was it, so disorganized, divided, and subdivided into
parties and sects, which was to furnish the materials for the peopling
of the new continent with a Christian population. It would seem that the
same "somewhat not ourselves," which had defeated in succession the
plans of two mighty nations to subject the New World to a single
hierarchy, had also provided that no one form or organization of
Christianity should be exclusive or even dominant in the occupation of
the American soil. From one point of view the American colonies will
present a sorry aspect. Schism, mutual alienation, antagonism,
competition, are uncongenial to the spirit of the gospel, which seeks
"that they all may be one." And yet the history of the church has
demonstrated by many a sad example that this offense "must needs come."
No widely extended organization of church discipline in exclusive
occupation of any country has ever long avoided the intolerable
mischiefs attendant on spiritual despotism. It was a shock to the hopes
and the generous sentiments of those who had looked to see one undivided
body of a reformed church erected over against the medieval church,
from the corruptions of which they had revolted, when they saw
Protestantism go asunder into the several churches of the Lutheran and
the Reformed confessions; there are many even now to deplore it as a
disastrous set-back to the progress of the kingdom of Christ. But in the
calmness of our long retrospect it is easy for us to recognize that
whatever jurisdiction should have been established over an undivided
Protestant church would inevitably have proved itself, in no long time,
just such a yoke as neither the men of that time nor their fathers had
been able to bear. Fifteen centuries of church history have not been
wasted if thereby the Christian people have learned that the pursuit of
Christian unity through administrative or corporate or diplomatic union
is following the wrong road, and that the one Holy Catholic Church is
not the corporation of saints, but their communion.

The new experiment of church life that was initiated in the colonization
of America is still in progress. The new States were to be planted not
only with diverse companies from the Old World, but with all the
definitely organized sects by which the map of Christendom was at that
time variegated, to which should be added others of native origin.
Notwithstanding successive "booms" now of one and then of another, it
was soon to become obvious to all that no one of these mutually jealous
sects was to have any exclusive predominance, even over narrow precincts
of territory. The old-world state churches, which under the rule, _cujus
regio ejus religio_, had been supreme and exclusive each in its
jurisdiction, were to find themselves side by side and mingled through
the community on equal terms with those over whom in the old country
they had domineered as dissenters, or whom perhaps they had even
persecuted as heretics or as Antichrist. Thus placed, they were to be
trained by the discipline of divine Providence and by the grace of the
Holy Spirit from persecution to toleration, from toleration to mutual
respect, and to cooeperation in matters of common concern in the
advancement of the kingdom of Christ. What further remains to be tried
is the question whether, if not the sects, then the Christian hearts in
each sect, can be brought to take the final step from mutual respect to
mutual love, "that we henceforth, speaking truth in love, may grow up in
all things into him, which is the head, even Christ; from whom all the
body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint
supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part,
shall make the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in
love." Unless we must submit to those philosophers who forbid us to find
in history the evidences of final cause and providential design, we may
surely look upon this as a worthy possible solution of the mystery of
Providence in the planting of the church in America in almost its
ultimate stage of schism--that it is the purpose of its Head, out of the
mutual attrition of the sects, their disintegration and comminution, to
bring forth such a demonstration of the unity and liberty of the
children of God as the past ages of church history have failed to show.

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