Samuel Pegge - "The Forme of Cury"

Ben Field - "Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin"

M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James - "A Thin Ghost and Others"

Gottfried Keller - "Die Leute von Seldwyla, Vol. 1"

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




For all the waning of interest in the "catholic basis" societies, the
sacred discontent of the Christian people with sectarian division
continued to demand expression. How early the aspiration for an
ecumenical council of evangelical Christendom became articulate, it may
not be easy to discover[408:1] In the year 1846 the aspiration was in
some measure realized in the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance
at London. No more mistakes were made in this meeting than perhaps were
necessarily incident to a first experiment in untried work. Almost of
course the good people began with the question, What good men shall we
keep out? for it is a curious fact, in the long and interesting history
of efforts after Christian union, that they commonly take the form of
efforts so to combine many Christians as to exclude certain others. In
this instance, beginning with the plan of including none but Protestant
Christians, they proceeded at once to frame a platform that should bar
out that "great number of the best and holiest men in England who are
found among the Quakers," thus making up, "designedly and with their
eyes open, a schismatic unity--a unity composed of one part of God's
elect, to the exclusion of another; and this in a grand effort after the
very unity of the body of Christ."[409:1] But in spite of this and other
like mistakes, or rather because of them (for it is through its mistakes
that the church is to learn the right way), the early and unsuccessful
beginnings of the Evangelical Alliance marked a stage in the slow
progress toward a "manifestation of the sons of God" by their love
toward each other and toward the common Lord.

It is in large part the eager appetency for some manifestation of
interconfessional fellowship that has hastened the acceptance of such
organizations as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young
People's Society of Christian Endeavor; just as, on the other hand, it
is the conscientious fear, on the part of watchful guardians of
sectarian interests, that habitual fellowship across the boundary lines
of denominations may weaken the allegiance to the sect, which has
induced the many attempts at substituting associations constituted on a
narrower basis. But the form of organization which most comprehensively
illustrates the unity of the church is that "Charity Organization" which
has grown to be a necessity to the social life of cities and
considerable towns, furnishing a central office of mutual correspondence
and cooerdination to all churches and societies and persons engaged in
the Christian work of relieving poverty and distress. This central
bureau of charitable cooeperation is not the less a center of catholic
fellowship for the fact that it does not shut its door against societies
not distinctively Christian, like Masonic fraternities, nor even against
societies distinctively non-Christian, like Hebrew synagogues and
"societies of ethical culture." We are coming to discover that the
essence of Christian fellowship does not consist in keeping people out.
Neither, so long as the apostolic rubric of Christian worship[410:1]
remains unaltered, is it to be denied that the fellowship thus provided
for is a fellowship in one of the sacraments of Christian service.

A notable advance in true catholicity of communion is reported from
among the churches and scattered missions in Maine. Hitherto, in the
various movements of Christian union, it was common to attempt to disarm
the suspicions of zealous sectarians by urgent disclaimers of any intent
or tendency to infringe on the rights or interests of the several sects,
or impair their claim to a paramount allegiance from their adherents.
The Christians of Maine, facing tasks of evangelization more than
sufficient to occupy all their resources even when well economized and
squandering nothing on needless divisions and competitions, have
attained to the high grace of saying that sectarian interests must and
shall be sacrificed when the paramount interests of the kingdom of
Christ require it.[410:2] When this attainment is reached by other
souls, and many other, the conspicuous shame and scandal of American
Christianity will begin to be abated.

Meanwhile the signs of a craving for larger fellowship continue to be
multiplied. Quite independently of practical results achieved, the mere
fact of efforts and experiments is a hopeful fact, even when these are
made in directions in which the past experience of the church has
written up "No Thoroughfare."

I. No one need question the sincerity or the fraternal spirit with which
some important denominations have each proposed the reuniting of
Christians on the simple condition that all others should accept the
distinctive tenet for which each of these denominations has contended
against others. The present pope, holding the personal respect and
confidence of the Christian world to a higher degree than any one of his
predecessors since the Reformation (to name no earlier date), has
earnestly besought the return of all believers to a common fellowship by
their acceptance of the authority and supremacy of the Roman see. With
equal cordiality the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church have
signified their longing for restored fellowship with their brethren on
the acceptance by these of prelatical episcopacy. And the Baptists,
whose constant readiness at fraternization in everything else is
emphasized by their conscientious refraining from the sacramental sign
of communion, are not less earnest in their desire for the unification
of Christendom by the general acceptance of that tenet concerning
baptism, the widespread rejection of which debars them, reluctant, from
unrestricted fellowship with the general company of faithful men. But
while we welcome every such manifestation of a longing for union among
Christians, and honor the aspiration that it might be brought about in
one or another of these ways, in forecasting the probabilities of the
case, we recognize the extreme unlikeliness that the very formulas which
for ages have been the occasions of mutual contention and separation
shall become the basis of general agreement and lasting concord.

II. Another indication of the craving for a larger fellowship is found
in the efforts made for large sectarian councils, representing closely
kindred denominations in more than one country. The imposing ubiquity of
the Roman Church, so impressively sustaining its claim to the title
_Catholic_, may have had some influence to provoke other denominations
to show what could be done in emulation of this sort of greatness. It
were wiser not to invite comparison at this point. No other Christian
organization, or close fellowship of organizations, can approach that
which has its seat at Rome, in the world-wideness of its presence, or
demand with so bold a challenge,

Quae regio in terris non nostri plena laboris?

The representative assembly of any other body of Christians, however
widely ramified, must seem insignificant when contrasted with the real
ecumenicity of the Vatican Council. But it has not been useless for the
larger sects of Protestantism to arrange their international assemblies,
if it were for nothing more than this, that such widening of the circle
of practical fellowship may have the effect to disclose to each sect a
larger Christendom outside to which their fellowship must sooner or
later be made to reach.

The first of these international sectarian councils was that commonly
spoken of as "the Pan-Anglican Synod," of Protestant Episcopal bishops
gathered at Lambeth by invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury in
1867 and thrice since. The example was bettered by the Presbyterians,
who in 1876 organized for permanence their "Pam-Presbyterian Alliance,"
or "Alliance of the Reformed Churches throughout the world holding
the Presbyterian System." The first of the triennial general councils
of this Alliance was held at Edinburgh in 1877, "representing more
than forty-nine separate churches scattered through twenty-five
different countries, and consisting of more than twenty thousand
congregations."[413:1] The second council was held at Philadelphia, and
the third at Belfast. The idea was promptly seized by the Methodists. At
the instance of the General Conference of the United States, a
Pam-Methodist Council was held in London in 1881,--"the first Ecumenical
Methodist Conference,"--consisting of four hundred delegates,
representing twenty-eight branches of Methodism, ten in the eastern
hemisphere and eighteen in the western, including six millions of
communicants and about twenty millions of people.[413:2] Ten years
later, in 1891, a second "Methodist Ecumenical Conference" was held at
Washington.

Interesting and useful as this international organization of sects is
capable of being made, it would be a mistake to look upon it as marking
a stage in the progress toward a manifest general unity of the church.
The tendency of it is, on the whole, in the opposite direction.

III. If the organization of "ecumenical" sects has little tendency
toward the visible communion of saints in the American church, not much
more is to be hoped from measures for the partial consolidation of
sects, such as are often projected and sometimes realized. The healing
of the great thirty years' schism of the Presbyterian Church, in 1869,
was so vast a gain in ecclesiastical economy, and in the abatement of a
long-reeking public scandal and of a multitude of local frictions and
irritations, that none need wonder at the awakening of ardent desires
that the ten Presbyterian bodies still surviving might "find room for
all within one fold"[413:3] in a national or continental Presbyterian
Church. The seventeen Methodist bodies, separated by no differences of
polity or of doctrine that seem important to anybody but themselves, if
consolidated into one, would constitute a truly imposing body, numbering
nearly five millions of communicants and more than fifteen millions of
people; and if this should absorb the Protestant Episcopal Church (an
event the possibility of which has often been contemplated with
complacency), with its half-million of communicants and its elements of
influence far beyond the proportion of its numbers, the result would be
an approximation to some good men's ideal of a national church, with its
army of ministers cooerdinated by a college of bishops, and its _plebs
adunata sacerdoti_. Consultations are even now in progress looking
toward the closer fellowship of the Congregationalists and the
Disciples. The easy and elastic terms of internal association in each of
these denominations make it the less difficult to adjust terms of mutual
cooeperation and union. Suppose that the various Baptist organizations
were to discover that under their like congregational government there
were ways in which, without compromising or weakening in the slightest
their protest against practices which they reprobate in the matter of
baptism, they could, for certain defined purposes, enter into the same
combination, the result would be a body of nearly five millions of
communicants, not the less strong for being lightly harnessed and for
comprehending wide diversities of opinion and temperament. In all this
we have supposed to be realized nothing more than friends of Christian
union have at one time or another urged as practicable and desirable. By
these few and, it would seem, not incongruous combinations there would
be four powerful ecclesiastical corporations,--one Catholic and three
Protestant,--which, out of the twenty millions of church communicants in
the United States, would include more than seventeen and one half
millions.[415:1]

The pondering of these possibilities is pertinent to this closing
chapter on account of the fact that, as we near the end of the
nineteenth century, one of the most distinctly visible tendencies is the
tendency toward the abatement of sectarian division in the church. It is
not for us simply to note the converging lines of tendency, without some
attempt to compute the point toward which they converge. There is grave
reason to doubt whether this line of the consolidation or confederation
of sects, followed never so far, would reach the desired result.

If the one hundred and forty-three sects enumerated in the eleventh
census of the United States[415:2] should by successful negotiation be
reduced to four, distinguished each from the others by strongly marked
diversities of organization and of theological statement, and united to
each other only by community of the one faith in Jesus Christ, doubtless
it would involve some important gains. It would make it possible to be
rid of the friction and sometimes the clash of much useless and
expensive machinery, and to extinguish many local schisms that had been
engendered by the zeal of some central sectarian propaganda. Would it
tend to mitigate the intensity of sectarian competition, or would it
tend rather to aggravate it? Is one's pride in his sect, his zeal for
the propagation of it, his jealousy of any influence that tends to
impair its greatness or hinder its progress, likely to be reduced, or is
it rather likely to be exalted, by the consciousness that the sect is a
very great sect, standing alone for important principles? Whatever
there is at present of asperity in the emulous labors of the competing
denominations, would it not be manifold exasperated if the competition
were restricted to four great corporations or confederations? If the
intestine conflict of the church of Christ in America should even be
narrowed down (as many have devoutly wished) to two contestants,--the
Catholic Church with its diversity of orders and rites, on the one hand,
and Protestantism with its various denominations solidly confederated,
on the other,--should we be nearer to the longed-for achievement of
Christian union? or should we find sectarian animosities thereby raised
to the highest power, and the church, discovering that it was on the
wrong track for the desired terminus, compelled to reverse and back in
order to be switched upon the right one?

Questions like these, put to be considered, not to be answered, raise in
the mind the misgiving that we have been seeking in diplomatic
negotiations between high contracting parties that which diplomacy can
do only a little toward accomplishing. The great aim is to be sought in
humbler ways. It is more hopeful to begin at the lower end. Not in great
towns and centers of ecclesiastical influence, but in villages and
country districts, the deadly effects of comminuted fracture in the
church are most deeply felt. It is directly to the people of such
communities, not through the medium of persons or committees that
represent national sectarian interests, that the new commandment is to
be preached, which yet is no new commandment, but the old commandment
which they have had from the beginning. It cannot always be that sincere
Christian believers, living together in a neighborhood in which the
ruinous effects of division are plain to every eye, shall continue to
misapprehend or disregard some of the tenderest and most unmistakable
counsels of their Lord and his apostles, or imagine the authority of
them to be canceled by the authority of any sect or party of Christians.
The double fallacy, first, that it is a Christian's prime duty to look
out for his own soul, and, secondly, that the soul's best health is to
be secured by sequestering it from contact with dissentient opinions,
and indulging its tastes and preferences wherein they differ from those
of its neighbor, must sometime be found out and exposed. The discovery
will be made that there is nothing in the most cherished sermons and
sacraments and prayers that is comparable in value, as a means of grace,
with the giving up of all these for God's reign and righteousness--that
he who will save his soul shall lose it, and he who will lose his soul
for Christ and his gospel shall save it to life eternal. These centuries
of church history, beginning with convulsive disruptions of the church
in Europe, with persecutions and religious wars, present before us the
importation into the New World of the religious divisions and
subdivisions of the Old, and the further division of these beyond any
precedent in history. It begins to look as if in this "strange work" God
had been grinding up material for a nobler manifestation of the unity of
his people. The sky of the declining century is red with promise.
Hitherto, not the decay of religious earnestness only, but the revival
of it, has brought into the church, not peace, but division. When next
some divine breathing of spiritual influence shall be wafted over the
land, can any man forbid the hope that from village to village the
members of the disintegrated and enfeebled church of Christ may be
gathered together "with one accord in one place" not for the transient
fervors of the revival only, but for permanent fellowship in work and
worship? A few examples of this would spread their influence through the
American church "until the whole was leavened."

The record of important events in the annals of American Christianity
may well end with that wholly unprecedented gathering at Chicago in
connection with the magnificent celebration of the four hundredth
anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus--I mean, of course,
the Parliament of Religions. In a land which bears among the nations the
reproach of being wholly absorbed in devotion to material interests, and
in which the church, unsupported and barely recognized by the state, and
unregulated by any secular authority, scatters itself into what seem to
be hopelessly discordant fragments, a bold enterprise was undertaken in
the name of American Christianity, such as the church in no other land
of Christendom would have had the power or the courage to venture on.
With large hospitality, representatives of all the religions of the
world were invited to visit Chicago, free of cost, as guests of the
Parliament. For seventeen days the Christianity of America, and of
Christendom, and of Christian missions in heathen lands, sat
confronted--no, not confronted, but side by side on the same
platform--with the non-Christian religions represented by their priests,
prelates, and teachers. Of all the diversities of Christian opinion and
organization in America nothing important was unrepresented, from the
authoritative dogmatic system and the solid organization of the Catholic
Church (present in the person of its highest official dignitaries) to
the broadest liberalism and the most unrestrained individualism. There
were those who stood aloof and prophesied that nothing could come of
such an assemblage but a hopeless jangle of discordant opinions. The
forebodings were disappointed. The diverse opinions were there, and were
uttered with entire unreserve. But the jangle of discord was not there.
It was seen and felt that the American church, in the presence of the
unchristian and antichristian powers, and in presence of those solemn
questions of the needs of humanity that overtask the ingenuity and the
resources of us all combined, was "builded as a city that is at unity
with itself." That body which, by its strength of organization, and by
the binding force of its antecedents, might have seemed to some most
hopelessly isolated from the common sympathies of the assembly, like all
the rest was faithful in the assertion of its claims, and, on the other
hand, was surpassed by none in the manifestation of fraternal respect
toward fellow-Christians of other folds. Since those seventeen wonderful
September days of 1893, the idea that has so long prevailed with
multitudes of minds, that the only Christian union to be hoped for in
America must be a union to the exclusion of the Roman Catholic Church
and in antagonism to it, ought to be reckoned an idea obsolete and
antiquated.

* * * * *

The theme prescribed for this volume gives no opportunity for such a
conclusion as the literary artist delights in--a climax of achievement
and consummation, or the catastrophe of a decline and fall. We have
marked the sudden divulging to the world of the long-kept secret of
divine Providence; the unveiling of the hidden continent; the progress
of discovery, of conquest, of colonization; the planting of the church;
the rush of immigration; the occupation of the continent with Christian
institutions by a strange diversity of sects; the great providential
preparations as for some "divine event" still hidden behind the curtain
that is about to rise on the new century,--and here the story breaks off
half told.

* * * * *

To so many of his readers as shall have followed him to this last page
of the volume, the author would speak a parting word. He does not
deprecate the criticisms that will certainly be pronounced upon his
work by those competent to judge both of the subject and of the style of
it. He would rather acknowledge them in advance. No one of his critics
can possibly have so keen a sense as the author himself of his
incompetency, and of the inadequacy of his work, to the greatness of the
subject. To one reproach, however, he cannot acknowledge himself justly
liable: he is not self-appointed to a task beyond his powers and
attainments, but has undertaken it at the instance of eminent men to
whose judgment he was bound to defer. But he cannot believe that even
his shortcomings and failures will be wholly fruitless. If they shall
provoke some really competent scholar to make a book worthy of so great
and inspiring a theme, the present author will be well content.


FOOTNOTES:

[400:1] These statistical figures are taken from the authoritative work
of Dr. H. K. Carroll, "The Religious Forces of the United States"
(American Church History Series, vol. i.). The volume gives no estimate
of the annual expenditure for the maintenance of religious institutions.
If we assume the small figure of $500 as the average annual expenditure
in connection with each house of worship, it makes an aggregate of
$82,648,500 for parochial expenses. The annual contributions to
Protestant foreign and home missions amount to $7,000,000. (See above,
pp. 358, 359.) The amounts annually contributed as free gifts for
Christian schools and colleges and hospitals and other charitable
objects can at present be only conjectured.

[402:1] The "Federalist," No. 51.

[404:1] "This habit of respecting one another's rights cherishes a
feeling of mutual respect and courtesy. If on the one hand the spirit of
independence fosters individualism, on the other it favors good
fellowship. All sects are equal before the law.... Hence one great cause
of jealousy and distrust is removed; and though at times sectarian zeal
may lead to rivalries and controversies unfavorable to unity, on the
other hand the independence and equality of the churches favor their
voluntary cooeperation; and in no country is the practical union of
Christians more beautifully or more beneficially exemplified than in the
United States. With the exception of the Roman Catholics, Christians of
all communions are accustomed to work together in the spirit of mutual
concession and confidence, in educational, missionary, and philanthropic
measures for the general good. The motto of the state holds of the
church also, _E pluribus unum_. As a rule, a bigoted church or a fierce
sectarian is despised" (Dr. J. P. Thompson, in "Church and State in the
United States," pp. 98, 99). See, to the like purport, the judicious
remarks of Mr. Bryce, "American Commonwealth," vol. ii., pp. 568, 664.

[405:1] Bryce, "American Commonwealth," vol. ii., p. 568.

[405:2] 1 Cor. i. 10.

[406:1] See above, pp. 61, 95, 190, 206, 220, 258.

[406:2] See above, pp. 252-259.

[406:3] Among the New England Congregationalists the zeal for union went
so far as to favor combination with other sects even in the work of
training candidates for the ministry. Among the "honorary
vice-presidents" of their "American Education Society" was Bishop
Griswold, of the Eastern Diocese of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

[407:1] Sermon at consecration of Bishop H. U. Onderdonk, 1827.

[407:2] Minutes of the Convention of Delegates met to consult on
Missions in the City of Cincinnati, A.D. 1831. The position of the
bishop was more logical than that of the convention, forasmuch as he
held, by a powerful effort of faith, that "his own" church is the church
of the United States, in an exclusive sense; while the divines at
Cincinnati earnestly repudiate such exclusive pretensions for their
church, and hold to a plurality of sectarian churches on the same
territory, each one of which is divinely invested with the prerogatives
and duties of "the church of Christ." A _usus loquendi_ which seems to
be hopelessly imbedded in the English language applies the word "church"
to each one of the several sects into which the church is divided. It is
this corruption of language which leads to the canonization of schism as
a divine ordinance.

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