Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch - "Fort Amity"

Charles Neville Buck - "The Call of the Cumberlands"

Huguette Bertrand - "Dans le fondu des mots, poesie"

Colonel Charles Jean Jacques Joseph Ardant du Picq - "Battle Studies"

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 healthy reaction from this vicious condition began about 1855, with
the introduction of hymn-and-tune books and the revival of
congregational singing. From that time the progressive improvement of
the public taste may be traced in the character of the books that have
succeeded one another in the churches, until the admirable compositions
of the modern English school of psalmody tend to predominate above those
of inferior quality. It is the mark of a transitional period that both
in church music and in church architecture we seem to depend much on
compositions and designs derived from older countries. The future of
religious art in America is sufficiently well assured to leave no cause
for hurry or anxiety.

* * * * *

In glancing back over this chapter, it will be strange if some are not
impressed, and unfavorably impressed, with a disproportion in the names
cited as representative, which are taken chiefly from some two or three
sects. This may justly be referred in part, no doubt, to the author's
point of view and to the "personal equation"; but it is more largely due
to the fact that in the specialization of the various sects the work of
theological literature and science has been distinctively the lot of the
Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, and preeminently of the
former.[394:1] It is matter of congratulation that the inequality among
the denominations in this respect is in a fair way to be outgrown.

Special mention must be made of the peculiarly valuable contribution to
the liturgical literature of America that is made by the oldest of our
episcopal churches, the Moravian. This venerable organization is rich
not only in the possession of a heroic martyr history, but in the
inheritance of liturgic forms and usages of unsurpassed beauty and
dignity. Before the other churches had emerged from a half-barbarous
state in respect to church music, this art was successfully cultivated
in the Moravian communities and missions. In past times these have had
comparatively few points of contact and influence with the rest of the
church; but when the elements of a common order of divine worship shall
by and by begin to grow into form, it is hardly possible that the
Moravian traditions will not enter into it as an important factor.

A combination of conditions which in the case of other bodies in the
church has been an effective discouragement to literary production has
applied with especial force to the Roman Catholic Church in America.
First, its energies and resources, great as they are, have been
engrossed by absolutely prodigious burdens of practical labor; and
secondly, its necessary literary material has been furnished to it from
across the sea, ready to its hand, or needing only the light labor of
translation. But these two conditions are not enough, of themselves, to
account for the very meager contribution of the Catholic Church to the
common religious and theological literature of American Christendom.
Neither is the fact explained by the general low average of culture
among the Catholic population; for literary production does not
ordinarily proceed from the man of average culture, but from men of
superior culture, such as this church possesses in no small number, and
places in positions of undisturbed "learned leisure" that would seem in
the highest degree promotive of intellectual work. But the comparative
statistics of the Catholic and the Protestant countries and universities
of Germany seem to prove conclusively that the spirit and discipline of
the Roman Church are unfavorable to literary productiveness in those
large fields of intellectual activity that are common and free alike to
the scholars of all Christendom. It remains to be seen whether the
stimulating atmosphere and the free and equal competitions of the New
World will not show their invigorating effect in the larger activity of
Catholic scholars, and their liberation from within the narrow lines of
polemic and defensive literature. The republic of Christian letters has
already shown itself prompt to welcome accessions from this quarter. The
signs are favorable. Notwithstanding severe criticisms of their methods
proceeding from the Catholic press, or rather in consequence of such
criticisms, the Catholic institutions of higher learning are rising in
character and in public respect; and the honorable enterprise of
establishing at Washington an American Catholic university, on the
upbuilding of which shall be concentrated the entire intellectual
strength and culture of this church, promises an invigorating influence
that shall extend through that whole system of educational institutions
which the church has set on foot at immense cost, and not with wholly
satisfactory results.

Recent events in the Catholic Church in America tend to reassure all
minds on an important point on which not bigots and alarmists only, but
liberal-minded citizens apostolically willing to "look not only on their
own things but also on the things of others," have found reasonable
ground for anxiety. The American Catholic Church, while characterized in
all its ranks, in respect of loyal devotion to the pope, by a high type
of ultramontane orthodoxy, is to be administered on patriotic American
principles. The brief term of service of Monsignor Satolli as papal
legate clothed with plenipotentiary authority from the Roman see stamped
out the scheme called from its promoter "Cahenslyism," which would have
divided the American Catholic Church into permanent alien communities,
conserving each its foreign language and organized under its separate
hierarchy. The organization of parishes to be administered in other
languages than English is suffered only as a temporary necessity. The
deadly warfare against the American common-school system has abated. And
the anti-American denunciations contained in the bull and syllabus of
December 8, 1864, are openly renounced as lacking the note of
infallibility.[396:1]

Of course, as in all large communities of vigorous vitality, there will
be mutually antagonist parties in this body; but it is hardly to be
doubted that with the growth and acclimatization of the Catholic Church
in America that party will eventually predominate which is most in
sympathy with the ruling ideas of the country and the age.


FOOTNOTES:

[377:1] For fuller accounts of "the Mercersburg theology," with
references to the literature of the subject, see Dubbs, "The Reformed
Church, German" (American Church History Series, vol. viii.), pp. 219,
220, 389-378; also, Professor E. V. Gerhart in "Schaff-Herzog
Encyclopedia," pp. 1473-1475.

[384:1] See above, p. 375.

[386:1] The program of Yale Divinity School for 1896-97 announces among
the "required studies in senior year" lectures "on some important
problems of American life, such as Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism;
Races in the United States; Immigration; the Modern City; the Wage
System; the Relations of Employer and Employed; Social Classes; the
Causes, Prevention, and Punishment of Crime; and University
Settlements."

[386:2] Williston Walker, "The Congregationalists," pp. 245, 246.

[387:1] See above, pp. 182-184.

[387:2] The only relic of this work that survives in common use is the
immortal lyric, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," founded on a motif in the
one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. This, with Doddridge's hymn, "My
God, and is thy table spread?" continued for a long time to be the most
important church hymn and eucharistic hymn in the English language. We
should not perhaps have looked for the gift of them to two
Congregationalist ministers, one in New England and the other in old
England. There is no such illustration of the spiritual unity of "the
holy catholic church, the fellowship of the holy," as is presented in a
modern hymn-book.

[388:1] Professor Gerhart, in "Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia," p. 1475.

[391:1] "Massachusetts Historical Collections," second series, vol. iv.,
p. 301; quoted in the "New Englander," vol. xiii., p. 467 (August,
1855).

[392:1] This was the criticism of the late Rev. Mr. Havergal, of
Worcester Cathedral, to whom Dr. Mason had sent copies of some of his
books. The incident was freely told by Dr. Mason himself.

[394:1] For many generations the religious and theological literature of
the country proceeded almost exclusively, at first or second hand, from
New England. The Presbyterian historian, Professor Robert Ellis
Thompson, remarks that "until after the division of 1837 American
Presbyterianism made no important addition to the literature of
theology" ("The Presbyterians," p. 143). The like observation is true
down to a much more recent date of the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Noble progress has been made in both these denominations in reversing
this record.

[396:1] So (for example) Bishop O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholics," p. 434.
And yet, at the time, the bull with its appendix was certainly looked
upon as "an act of infallibility." See, in "La Bulle _Quanta Cura_ et la
Civilisation Moderne, par l'Abbe Pelage" (Paris, 1865), the utterances
of all the French bishops. The language of Bishop Plantier of Poitiers
seems decisive: "The Vicar of Jesus Christ, doctor and pastor charged
with the teaching and ruling of the entire church, addressed to the
bishops, and through them to all the Christian universe, instructions,
the object of which is to settle the mind and enlighten the conscience
on sundry points of Christian doctrine and morals" (pp. 103, 104). See
also pp. 445, 450. This brings it within the Vatican Council's
definition of an infallible utterance. But we are bound to bear in mind
that not only is the infallible authority of this manifesto against
"progress, liberalism, and modern civilization" disclaimed, but the
meaning of it, which seems unmistakably clear, is disputed. "The
syllabus," says Bishop O'Gorman, "is technical and legal in its
language, ... and needs to be interpreted to the lay reader by the
ecclesiastical lawyer" (p. 435).

A seriously important desideratum in theological literature is some
authoritative canon of the infallible utterances of the Roman see. It is
difficult to fix on any one of them the infallible authority of which is
not open to dispute within the church itself; while the liability of
them to misinterpretation (as in the case of the _Quanta Cura_ and
_Syllabus_) brings in still another element of vagueness and
uncertainty.




CHAPTER XXII.

TENDENCIES TOWARD A MANIFESTATION OF THE UNITY OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH.


The three centuries of history which we have passed under rapid review
comprise a series of political events of the highest importance to
mankind. We have seen, from our side-point of view, the planting, along
the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean, without mutual concert or
common direction, of many independent germs of civilization. So many of
these as survived the perils of infancy we have seen growing to a lusty
youth, and becoming drawn each to each by ties of common interest and
mutual fellowship. Releasing themselves from colonial dependence on a
transatlantic power, we find these several communities, now grown to be
States, becoming conscious, through common perils, victories, and hopes,
of national unity and life, and ordaining institutes of national
government binding upon all. The strong vitality of the new nation is
proved by its assimilating to itself an immense mass of immigrants from
all parts of Europe, and by expanding itself without essential change
over the area of a continent. It triumphs again and again, and at last
in a struggle that shakes the world, over passions and interests that
threaten schism in the body politic, and gives good reason to its
friends to boast the solid unity of the republic as the strongest
existing fact in the political world. The very great aggrandizement of
the nation has been an affair of the last sixty years; but already it
has recorded itself throughout the vast expanse of the continent in
monuments of architecture and engineering worthy of the national
strength.

The ecclesiastical history which has been recounted in this volume,
covering the same territory and the same period of time, runs with equal
pace in many respects parallel with the political history, but in one
important respect with a wide divergence. As with civilization so with
Christianity: the germs of it, derived from different regions of
Christendom, were planted without concert of purpose, and often with
distinct cross-purposes, in different seed-plots along the Atlantic
seaboard. Varying in polity, in forms of dogmatic statement, and even in
language, the diverse growths were made, through wonders of spiritual
influence and through external stress of trial, to feel their unity in
the one faith. The course of a common experience tended to establish a
predominant type of religious life the influence of which has been
everywhere felt, even when it has not been consented to. The vital
strength of the American church, as of the American nation, has been
subjected to the test of the importation of enormous masses of more or
less uncongenial population, and has shown an amazing power of digestion
and assimilation. Its resources have been taxed by the providential
imposition of burdens of duty and responsibility such, in magnitude and
weight, as never since the early preaching of the gospel have pressed
upon any single generation of the church. Within the space of a single
lifetime, at an expenditure of toil and treasure which it is idle to
attempt to compute, the wide and desolate wilderness, as fast as
civilization has invaded it, has been occupied by the church with
churches, schools, colleges, and seminaries of theology, with pastors,
evangelists, and teachers, and, in one way or another, has been
constrained to confess itself Christian. The continent which so short a
time ago had been compassionately looked upon from across the sea as
missionary ground has become a principal base of supplies, and
recruiting-ground for men and women, for missionary operations in
ancient lands of heathenism and of a decayed Christianity.

So much for the parallel. The divergence is not less impressive. In
contrast with the solid political unity into which the various and
incongruous elements have settled themselves, the unity of the Christian
church is manifested by oneness neither of jurisdiction nor of
confederation, nor even by diplomatic recognition and correspondence.
Out of the total population of the United States, amounting, according
to the census of 1890, to 62,622,000 souls, the 57,000,000 accounted as
Christians, including 20,000,000 communicant church-members, are
gathered into 165,297 congregations, assembling in 142,000 church
edifices containing 43,000,000 sittings, and valued (together with other
church property) at $670,000,000; and are served in the ministry of the
gospel by more than 111,000 ministers.[400:1] But this great force is
divided among 143 mutually independent sects, larger and smaller. Among
these sects is recognized no controlling and cooerdinating authority;
neither is there any common leadership; neither is there any system of
mutual counsel and concert. The mutual relations of the sects are
sometimes those of respect and good will, sometimes of sharp competition
and jealousy, sometimes of eager and conscientious hostility. All have
one and the same unselfish and religious aim--to honor God in serving
their fellow-men; and each one, in honestly seeking this supreme aim, is
affected by its corporate interests, sympathies, and antipathies.

This situation is too characteristic of America, and too distinctly
connected with the whole course of the antecedent history, not to be
brought out with emphasis in this concluding chapter. In other lands the
church is maintained, through the power of the civil government, under
the exclusive control of a single organization, in which the element of
popular influence may be wholly wanting, or may be present (as in many
of the "Reformed" polities) in no small measure. In others yet, through
government influence and favor, a strong predominance is given to one
organized communion, under the shadow of which dissentient minorities
are tolerated and protected. Under the absolute freedom and equality of
the American system there is not so much as a predominance of any one of
the sects. No one of them is so strong and numerous but that it is
outnumbered and outweighed by the aggregate of the two next to it. At
present, in consequence of the rush of immigration, the Roman Catholic
Church is largely in advance of any single denomination besides, but is
inferior in numerical strength and popular influence to the Methodists
and Baptists combined--if they _were_ combined.

And there is no doubt that this comminution of the church is frankly
accepted, for reasons assigned, not only as an inevitable drawback to
the blessings of religious freedom, but as a good thing in itself. A
weighty sentence of James Madison undoubtedly expresses the prevailing
sentiment among Americans who contemplate the subject merely from the
political side: "In a free government the security for civil rights must
be the same as that for religious rights. It consists, in the one case,
in the multiplicity of interests, and, in the other, in the multiplicity
of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number
of interests and sects."[402:1] And no student of history can deny that
there is much to justify the jealousy with which the lovers of civil
liberty watch the climbing of any sect, no matter how purely spiritual
its constitution, toward a position of command in popular influence. The
influence of the leaders of such a sect may be nothing more than the
legitimate and well-deserved influence of men of superior wisdom and
virtue; but when reinforced by the weight of official religious
character, and backed by a majority, or even a formidable minority, of
voters organized in a religious communion, the feeling is sure to gain
ground that such power is too great to be trusted to the hands even of
the best of men. Whatever sectarian advantage such a body may achieve in
the state by preponderance of number will be more than offset by the
public suspicion and the watchful jealousy of rival sects; and the
weakening of it by division, or the subordination of it by the
overgrowth of a rival, is sure to be regarded with general complacency.

It is not altogether a pleasing object of contemplation--the citizen and
the statesman looking with contentment on the schism of the church as
averting a danger to the state. It is hardly more gratifying when we
find ministers of the church themselves accepting the condition of
schism as being, on the whole, a very good condition for the church of
Christ, if not, indeed, the best possible. It is quite unreservedly
argued that the principle, "Competition is the life of business," is
applicable to spiritual as well as secular concerns; and the
"emulations" reprobated by the Apostle Paul as "works of the flesh" are
frankly appealed to for promoting the works of the spirit. This debasing
of the motive of church work is naturally attended by a debasement of
the means employed. The competitive church resorts to strange business
devices to secure its needed revenue. "He that giveth" is induced to
give, not "with simplicity," but with a view to incidental advantages,
and a distinct understanding is maintained between the right hand and
the left. The extent and variety of this influence on church life in
America afford no occasion for pride, but the mention of them could not
rightly be omitted. It remains for the future to decide whether they
must needs continue as an inevitable attendant on the voluntary system.

Sectarian divisions tend strongly to perpetuate themselves. The starting
of schism is easy and quick; the healing of it is a matter of long
diplomatic negotiations. In a very short time the division of the
church, with its necessary relations to property and to the employment
of officials, becomes a vested interest. Provision for large expenditure
unnecessary, or even detrimental, to the general interests of the
kingdom of Christ, which had been instituted in the first place at heavy
cost to the many, is not to be discontinued without more serious loss to
influential individuals. Those who would set themselves about the
healing of a schism must reckon upon personal and property interests to
be conciliated.

This least amiable characteristic of the growth of the Christian church
in America is not without its compensations. The very fact of the
existence, in presence of one another, of these multitudinous rival
sects, all equal before the law, tends in the long run, under the
influence of the Holy Spirit of peace, to a large and comprehensive
fellowship.[404:1] The widely prevalent acceptance of existing
conditions as probably permanent, even if not quite normal, softens the
mutual reproaches of rival parties. The presumption is of course
implied, if not asserted, in the existence of any Christian sect, that
it is holding the absolute right and truth, or at least more nearly that
than other sects; and the inference, to a religious mind, is that the
right and true must, in the long run, prevail. But it is only with a
high act of faith, and not as a matter of reasonable probability, that
any sect in America can venture to indulge itself in the expectation of
a supremacy, or even a predominance, in American Christendom. The
strongest in numbers, in influence, in prestige, however tempted to
assert for itself exclusive or superior rights, is compelled to look
about itself and find itself overwhelmingly outnumbered and outdone by a
divided communion--and yet a communion--of those whom Christ "is not
ashamed to call his brethren"; and just in proportion as it has the
spirit of Christ, it is constrained in its heart to treat them as
brethren and to feel toward them as brethren. Its protest against what
it regards as their errors and defects is nowise weakened by the most
unreserved manifestations of respect and good will as toward
fellow-Christians. Thus it comes to pass that the observant traveler
from other countries, seeking the distinctive traits of American social
life, "notes a kindlier feeling between all denominations, Roman
Catholics included, a greater readiness to work together for common
charitable aims, than between Catholics and Protestants in France or
Germany, or between Anglicans and nonconformists in England."[405:1]

* * * * *

There are many indications, in the recent history of the American
church, pointing forward toward some higher manifestation of the true
unity of the church than is to be found in occasional, or even habitual,
expressions of mutual good will passing to and fro among sharply
competing and often antagonist sects. Instead of easy-going and playful
felicitations on the multitude of sects as contributing to the total
effectiveness of the church, such as used to be common enough on
"anniversary" platforms, we hear, in one form and another, the
acknowledgment that the divided and subdivided state of American
Christendom is not right, but wrong. Whose is the wrong need not be
decided; certainly it does not wholly belong to the men of this
generation or of this country; we are heirs of the schisms of other
lands and ages, and have added to them schisms of our own making. The
matter begins to be taken soberly and seriously. The tender entreaty of
the Apostle Paul not to suffer ourselves to be split up into
sects[405:2] begins to get a hearing in the conscience. The _nisus_
toward a more manifest union among Christian believers has long been
growing more and more distinctly visible, and is at the present day one
of the most conspicuous signs of the times.

Already in the early history we have observed a tendency toward the
healing, in America, of differences imported from over sea. Such was the
commingling of Separatist and Puritan in New England; the temporary
alliance of Congregationalist and Presbyterian to avert the imposition
of a state hierarchy; the combination of Quaker and Roman Catholic to
defeat a project of religious oppression in Maryland; the drawing
together of Lutheran and Reformed Germans for common worship, under the
saintly influence of the Moravian Zinzendorf; and the "Plan of Union" by
which New Englander and Scotch-Irishman were to labor in common for the
evangelization of the new settlements.[406:1] These were sporadic
instances of a tendency that was by and by to become happily epidemic. A
more important instance of the same tendency was the organization of
societies for charitable work which should unite the gifts and personal
labors of the Christians of the whole continent. The chief period of
these organizations extended from 1810, the date of the beginning of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to 1826, when the
American Home Missionary Society was founded.[406:2] The "catholic
basis" on which they were established was dictated partly by the
conscious weakness of the several sects as they drew near to
undertakings formidable even to their united forces, and partly by the
glow of fraternal affection, and the sense of a common spiritual life
pervading the nation, with which the church had come forth from the
fervors of "the second awakening."[406:3] The societies, representing
the common faith and charity of the whole church as distinguished from
the peculiarities of the several sects, drew to themselves the affection
and devotion of Christian hearts to a degree which, to those who highly
valued these distinctions, seemed to endanger important interests. And,
indeed, the situation was anomalous, in which the sectarian divisions of
the Christian people were represented in the churches, and their
catholic unity in charitable societies. It would have seemed more
Pauline, not to say more Christian, to have had voluntary societies for
the sectarian work, and kept the churches for Christian communion. It is
no wonder that High-church champions, on one side and another, soon
began to shout to their adherents, "To your tents, O Israel!" Bishop
Hobart played not in vain upon his pastoral pipe to whistle back his
sheep from straying outside of his pinfold, exhorting them, "in their
endeavors for the general advancement of religion, to use only the
instrumentality of their own church."[407:1] And a jealousy of the
growing influence of a wide fellowship, in charitable labors, with
Christians of other names, led to the enunciation of a like doctrine by
High-church Presbyterians,[407:2] and contributed to the convulsive and
passionate rending of the Presbyterian Church, in 1837, into nearly
equal fragments. So effective has been the centrifugal force that of
the extensive system of societies which from the year 1810 onward first
organized works of national beneficence by enlisting the cooeperation of
"all evangelical Christians," the American Bible Society alone continues
to represent any general and important combination from among the
different denominations.

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