Robert Bloomfield - "The Farmer's Boy"

Maria Monk - "Awful Disclosures"

John Evelyn - "Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2)"

AEschylus - "The House of Atreus"

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




The solitude of the little starving hamlet by the sea was favorable to
the springing and fructifying of this seed in the good and honest hearts
into which it had been cast. Before the great fleet of colonists, with
its three unconformable Church of England clergymen, had reached the
port of Salem the good seed had been planted anew in other hearts not
less honest and good. It fell on this wise. The pioneer party at Salem
who came with Endicott, "arriving there in an uncultivated desert, many
of them, for want of wholesome diet and convenient lodgings, were seized
with the scurvy and other distempers, which shortened many of their
days, and prevented many of the rest from performing any great matter of
labor that year for advancing the work of the plantation." Whereupon the
governor, hearing that at Plymouth lived a physician "that had some
skill that way," wrote thither for help, and at once the beloved
physician and deacon of the Plymouth church, Dr. Samuel Fuller,
hastened to their relief. On what themes the discourse revolved between
the Puritan governor just from England and the Separatist deacon already
for so many years an exile, and whither it tended, is manifested in a
letter written soon after by Governor Endicott, of Salem, to Governor
Bradford, of Plymouth, under date May 11 (= 21), 1629. The letter marks
an epoch in the history of American Christianity:

"_To the worshipful and my right worthy friend, William
Bradford, Esq., Governor of New Plymouth, these:_

"RIGHT WORTHY SIR: It is a thing not usual that servants to
one Master and of the same household should be strangers. I
assure you I desire it not; nay, to speak more plainly, I
cannot be so to you. God's people are marked with one and the
same mark, and sealed with one and the same seal, and have,
for the main, one and the same heart, guided by one and the
same Spirit of truth; and where this is there can be no
discord--nay, here must needs be sweet harmony. The same
request with you I make unto the Lord, that we may as
Christian brethren be united by a heavenly and unfeigned love,
bending all our hearts and forces in furthering a work beyond
our strength, with reverence and fear fastening our eyes
always on him that only is able to direct and prosper all our
ways.

"I acknowledge myself much bound to you for your kind love and
care in sending Mr. Fuller among us, and I rejoice much that I
am by him satisfied touching your judgments of the outward
form of God's worship.[94:1] It is, as far as I can yet
gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth,
and the same which I have professed and maintained ever since
the Lord in mercy revealed himself to me, being very far
different from the common report that hath been spread of you
touching that particular. But God's children must not look for
less here below, and it is the great mercy of God that he
strengthens them to go through with it.

"I shall not need at this time to be tedious unto you, for,
God willing, I purpose to see your face shortly. In the
meantime I humbly take my leave of you, committing you to the
Lord's blessed protection, and rest

"Your assured loving friend and servant,

"JOHN ENDICOTT."

"The positive part of church reformation," which Higginson and his
companions had come into the wilderness to practice, appeared in a new
light when studied under the new conditions. The question of separation
from the general fellowship of English Christians, which had lain
heavily on their consciences, was no longer a question; instead of it
arose the question of separation from their beloved and honored
fellow-Christians at Plymouth. The Act of Uniformity and the tyrannous
processes by which it was enforced no longer existed for them. They were
free to build the house of God simply according to the teaching of the
divine Word. What form will the structure take?

One of the first practical questions to emerge was the question by what
authority their ministry was to be exercised. On one point they seem to
have been quite clear. The episcopal ordination, which each of them had
received in England, whatever validity it may have had in English law,
gave them no authority in the church of God in Salem. Further, their
appointment from the Company in London, although it was a regular
commission from the constituted civil government of the colony, could
confer no office in the spiritual house. A day of solemn fasting was
held, by the governor's appointment, for the choice of pastor and
teacher, and after prayer the two recognized candidates for the two
offices, Skelton and Higginson, were called upon to give their views as
to a divine call to the ministry. "They acknowledged there was a twofold
calling: the one, an inward calling, when the Lord moved the heart of a
man to take that calling upon him, and fitted him with gifts for the
same; the second (the outward calling) was from the people, when a
company of believers are joined together in covenant to walk together in
all the ways of God." Thereupon the assembly proceeded to a written
ballot, and its choice fell upon Mr. Skelton and Mr. Higginson. It
remained for the ministers elect to be solemnly inducted into office,
which was done with prayer and the laying on of hands in benediction.

But presently there were searchings of heart over the anterior question
as to the constituency of the church. Were all the population of Salem
to be reckoned as of the church of Salem? and if not, who should
"discern between the righteous and the wicked"? The result of study of
this question, in the light of the New Testament, was this--that it was
"necessary for those who intended to be of the church solemnly to enter
into a covenant engagement one with another, in the presence of God, to
walk together before him according to his Word." Thirty persons were
chosen to be the first members of the church, who in a set form of words
made public vows of faithfulness to each other and to Christ. By the
church thus constituted the pastor and teacher, already installed in
office in the parish, were instituted as ministers of the church.[96:1]

Before the solemnities of that notable day were concluded, a belated
vessel that had been eagerly awaited landed on the beach at Salem the
"messengers of the church at Plymouth." They came into the assembly,
Governor Bradford at the head, and in the name of the Pilgrim church
declared their "approbation and concurrence," and greeted the new
church, the first-born in America, with "the right hand of fellowship."
A thoughtful and devoted student declares this day's proceedings to be
"the beginning of a distinctively American church history."[97:1]

The immediate sequel of this transaction is characteristic and
instructive. Two brothers, John and Samuel Browne, members of the
council of the colony, took grave offense at this departure from the
ways of the Church of England, and, joining to themselves others
like-minded, set up separate worship according to the Book of Common
Prayer. Being called to account before the governor for their schismatic
procedure, they took an aggressive tone and declared that the ministers,
"were Separatists, and would be Anabaptists." The two brothers were
illogical. The ministers had not departed from the Nationalist and
anti-Separatist principles enunciated by Higginson from the quarter-deck
of the "Talbot." What they had just done was to lay the foundations of a
national church for the commonwealth that was in building. And the two
brothers, trying to draw off a part of the people into their
schism-shop, were Separatists, although they were doubtless surprised to
discover it. There was not the slightest hesitation on the governor's
part as to the proper course to be pursued. "Finding those two brothers
to be of high spirits, and their speeches and practices tending to
mutiny and faction, the governor told them that New England was no place
for such as they, and therefore he sent them both back for England at
the return of the ships the same year."[98:1] Neither then nor
afterward was there any trace of doubt in the minds of the New England
settlers, in going three thousand miles away into the seclusion of the
wilderness, of their indefeasible moral right to pick their own company.
There was abundant opportunity for mistake and temptation to wrong-doing
in the exercise of this right, but the right itself is so nearly
self-evident as to need no argument.

While the civil and ecclesiastical foundations of the Salem community
are thus being laid, there is preparing on the other side of the sea
that great _coup d'etat_ which is to create, almost in a day, a
practically independent American republic. Until this is accomplished
the colonial organization is according to a common pattern, a settlement
on a distant shore, equipped, sustained, and governed with authority all
but sovereign by a commercial company at the metropolis, within the
reach, and thus under the control, of the supreme power. Suppose, now,
that the shareholders in the commercial company take their charter
conferring all but sovereign authority, and transport themselves and it
across the sea to the heart of the settlement, there to admit other
planters, at their discretion, to the franchise of the Company, what
then? This was the question pondered and decided in those dark days of
English liberty, when the triumph of despotism, civil and spiritual,
over the rights of Englishmen seemed almost achieved. The old officers
of the Company resigned; their places were filled by Winthrop and Dudley
and others, who had undertaken to emigrate; and that memorable season of
1630 not less than seventeen ships, carrying about one thousand
passengers, sailed from English ports for Massachusetts Bay. It was the
beginning of the great Puritan exodus. Attempts were made by the king
and the archbishop to stay the flow of emigration, but with only
transient success. "At the end of ten years from Winthrop's arrival
about twenty-one thousand Englishmen, or four thousand families,
including the few hundreds who were here before him, had come over in
three hundred vessels, at a cost of two hundred thousand pounds
sterling."[99:1] What could not be done by despotism was accomplished by
the triumph of the people over the court. The meeting of the Long
Parliament in 1640 made it safe for Puritans to stay in England; and the
Puritans stayed. The current of migration was not only checked, but
turned backward. It is reckoned that within four generations from that
time more persons went to old England than originally came thence. The
beginnings of this return were of high importance. Among the home-going
companies were men who were destined to render eminent service in the
reconstruction of English society, both in the state and in the army,
and especially in the church. The example of the New England churches,
voluminously set forth in response to written inquiries from England,
had great influence in saving the mother country from suffering the
imposition of a Presbyterian hierarchy that threatened to be as
intolerant and as intolerable as the tyranny of Laud.

For the order of the New England churches crystallized rapidly into a
systematic and definite church polity, far removed from mere Separatism
even in the temperate form in which this had been illustrated by
Robinson and the Pilgrim church. The successive companies of emigrants
as they arrived, ship-load after ship-load, each with its minister or
college of ministers, followed with almost monotonous exactness the
method adopted in the organization of the church in Salem. A small
company of the best Christians entered into mutual covenant as a church
of Christ, and this number, growing by well-considered accessions, added
to itself from time to time other believers on the evidence and
confession of their faith in Christ. The ministers, all or nearly all of
whom had been clergymen in the orders of the Church of England, were of
one mind in declining to consider their episcopal ordination in England
as conferring on them any spiritual authority in a church newly gathered
in America. They found rather in the free choice of the brotherhood the
sign of a divine call to spiritual functions in the church, and were
inducted into office by the primitive form of the laying on of hands.

In many ways, but especially in the systematized relations of the
churches with one another and in their common relations with the civil
government, the settled Nationalism of the great Puritan migration was
illustrated. With the least possible constraint on the individual or on
the church, they were clear in their purpose that their young state
should have its established church.

Through what rude experiences the system and the men were tested has
been abundantly told and retold.[100:1] Roger Williams, learned,
eloquent, sincere, generous, a man after their own heart, was a very
malignant among Separatists, separating himself not only from the
English church, but from all who would not separate from it, and from
all who would not separate from these, and so on, until he could no
longer, for conscience' sake, hold fellowship with his wife in family
prayers. After long patience the colonial government deemed it necessary
to signify to him that if his conscience would not suffer him to keep
quiet, and refrain from stirring up sedition, and embroiling the colony
with the English government, he would have to seek freedom for that
sort of conscience outside of their jurisdiction; and they put him out
accordingly, to the great advantage of both parties and without loss of
mutual respect and love. A little later, a clever woman, Mrs. Ann
Hutchinson, with a vast conceit of her superior holiness and with the
ugly censoriousness which is a usual accompaniment of that grace,
demonstrated her genius for mixing a theological controversy with
personal jealousies and public anxieties, and involved the whole colony
of the Bay in an acrimonious quarrel, such as to give an unpleasant tone
of partisanship and ill temper to the proceedings in her case, whether
ecclesiastical or civil. She seems clearly to have been a willful and
persistent nuisance in the little community, and there were good reasons
for wanting to be rid of her, and right ways to that end. They took the
wrong way and tried her for heresy. In like manner, when the Quakers
came among them,--not of the mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to
which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early
type,--instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses
against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of
court, sedition, they proceeded against them distinctly as Quakers, thus
putting themselves in the wrong and conceding to their adversaries that
crown of martyrdom for which their souls were hankering and to which
they were not fully entitled.

Of course, in maintaining the principle of Nationalism, the New England
Puritans did not decline the implications and corollaries of that
principle. It was only to a prophetic genius like the Separatist Roger
Williams that it was revealed that civil government had no concern to
enforce "the laws of the first table." But the historical student might
be puzzled to name any other church establishment under which less of
molestation was suffered by dissenters, or more of actual encouragement
given to rival sects, than under the New England theocracies. The
Nationalist principle was exclusive; the men who held it in New England
(subject though they were to the temptations of sectarian emulation and
fanatic zeal) were large-minded and generous men.

The general uniformity of church organization among the Puritan
plantations is the more remarkable in view of the notable independence
and originality of the leading men, who represented tendencies of
opinion as widely diverging as the quasi-Presbyterianism of John Eliot
and the doctrinaire democracy of John Wise. These variations of
ecclesiastico-political theory had much to do with the speedy diffusion
of the immigrant population. For larger freedom in building his ideal
New Jerusalem, the statesmanlike pastor, Thomas Hooker, led forth his
flock a second time into the great and terrible wilderness, and with his
associates devised what has been declared to be "the first example in
history of a written constitution--a distinct organic law constituting a
government and defining its powers."[102:1] The like motive determined
the choice company under John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton to refuse
all inducements and importunities to remain in Massachusetts, choosing
rather to build on no other man's foundations at New Haven.[102:2] At
the end of a hundred years from the settlement of Boston the shores and
river valleys of Massachusetts and Connecticut were planted with towns,
each self-governing as a pure democracy, each with its church and
educated minister and its system of common schools. The two colleges at
Cambridge and New Haven were busy with their appointed work of training
young men to the service of God "in church or civil state." And this
great and prosperous and intelligent population was, with inconsiderable
exceptions, the unmingled progeny of the four thousand English families
who, under stress of the tyranny of Charles Stuart and the persecution
of William Laud, had crossed the sea in the twelve years from 1628 to
1640.

The traditions of the fathers of New England had been piously cherished
down to this third and fourth generation. The model of an ideal state
that had been set up had, meanwhile, been more or less deformed,
especially in Massachusetts, by the interference of England; the
dominance of the established churches had been slightly infringed by the
growth here and there of dissenting churches, Baptist, Episcopalian, and
Quaker; but the framework both of church and of state was wonderfully
little decayed or impaired. The same simplicity in the outward order of
worship was maintained; the same form of high Calvinistic theology
continued to be cherished as a norm of sound preaching and as a vehicle
of instruction to children. All things continued as they had been; and
yet it would have been a most superficial observer who had failed to
detect signs of approaching change. The disproportions of the
Calvinistic system, exaggerated in the popular acceptation, as in the
favorite "Day of Doom" of Michael Wigglesworth, forced the effort after
practical readjustments. The magnifying of divine sovereignty in the
saving of men, to the obscuring of human responsibility, inevitably
mitigated the church's reprobation of respectable people who could
testify of no experience of conversion, and yet did not wish to
relinquish for themselves or their families their relation to the
church. Out of the conflict between two aspects of theological truth,
and the conflict between the Nationalist and the Separatist conceptions
of the church, and especially out of the mistaken policy of restricting
the civil franchise to church-members, came forth that device of the
"Half-way Covenant" which provided for a hereditary quasi-membership in
the church for worthy people whose lives were without scandal, and who,
not having been subjects of an experience of conscious conversion, were
felt to be not altogether to blame for the fact. From the same causes
came forth, and widely prevailed, the tenet of "Stoddardeanism," so
called as originating in the pastoral work, and, it is said, in the
personal experience, of Solomon Stoddard, the saintly minister of
Northampton from 1669 till 1729, when he was succeeded by his colleague
and grandson, Jonathan Edwards. It is the view that the Lord's Supper is
instituted as a means of regeneration as well as of sanctification, and
that those who are consciously "in a natural condition" ought not to be
repelled, but rather encouraged to come to it. From the same causes, by
natural sequence, came that so-called Arminianism[104:1] which, instead
of urging the immediate necessity and duty of conversion, was content
with commending a "diligent use of means," which might be the hopeful
antecedent of that divine grace.

These divergences from the straight lines of the primeval New England
Calvinism had already begun to be manifest during the lifetime of some
of the founders. Of not less grave import was the deflection from the
lofty moral standard of the fathers. A great New Englander, Horace
Bushnell, maintaining his thesis that great migrations are followed by a
tendency to barbarism, has cited in proof this part of New England
history.[105:1] As early as the second generation, the evil tendency
seemed so formidable as to lead to the calling, by the General Court of
Massachusetts, of the "Reforming Synod" of 1679. No one can say that the
heroic age of New England was past. History has no nobler record to
show, of courage and fortitude in both men and women, than that of New
England in the Indian wars. But the terrors of those days of
tribulation, the breaking up of communities, the decimation of the
population, the long absences of the young men on the bloody business of
the soldier, were not favorable for maturing the fruits of the Spirit.
Withal, the intrigues of British politicians, the threatened or actual
molestations of the civil governments of the colonies, and the
corrupting influences proceeding from every center of viceregal
authority, abetted the tendency to demoralization. By the end of the
first third of the eighteenth century, New England, politically,
ecclesiastically, theologically, and morally, had come into a state of
unstable equilibrium. An overturn is impending.

* * * * *

The set and sturdy resolution of the founders of the four colonies of
the New England confederacy that the first planting of their territory
should be on rigorously exclusive principles, with a homogeneous and
mutually congenial population, under a firm discipline both civil and
ecclesiastical, finds an experimental justification in the history of
the neighbor colony of Rhode Island. No commonwealth can boast a nobler
and purer name for its founder than the name of Roger Williams. Rhode
Island, founded in generous reaction from the exclusiveness of
Massachusetts, embodied the principle of "soul-liberty" in its earliest
acts. The announcement that under its jurisdiction no man was to be
molested by the civil power for his religious belief was a broad
invitation to all who were uncomfortable under the neighboring
theocracies.[106:1] And the invitation was freely accepted. The
companions of Williams were reinforced by the friends of Mrs.
Hutchinson, some of them men of substance and weight of character. The
increasing number of persons inclined to Baptist views found in Rhode
Island a free and congenial atmosphere. Williams himself was not long in
coming to the Baptist position and passing beyond it. The Quakers found
Rhode Island a safe asylum from persecution, whether Puritan or Dutch.
More disorderly and mischievous characters, withal, quartered
themselves, unwelcome guests, on the young commonwealth, a thorn in its
side and a reproach to its principles. It became clear to Williams
before his death that the declaration of individual rights and
independence is not of itself a sufficient foundation for a state. The
heterogeneous population failed to settle into any stable polity. After
two generations the tyranny of Andros, so odious elsewhere in New
England, was actually welcome as putting an end to the liberty that had
been hardly better than anarchy.

The results of the manner of the first planting on the growth of the
church in Rhode Island were of a like sort. There is no room for
question that the material of a true church was there, in the person of
faithful and consecrated disciples of Christ, and therefore there must
have been gathering together in common worship and mutual edification.
But the sense of individual rights and responsibilities seems to have
overshadowed the love for the whole brotherhood of disciples. The
condition of the church illustrated the Separatism of Williams reduced
to the absurd. There was feeble organization of Christians in knots and
coteries. But sixty years passed before the building of the first house
of worship in Providence, and at the end of almost a century "there had
not existed in the whole colony more than eight or ten churches of any
denomination, and these were mostly in a very feeble and precarious
state."[107:1]

Meanwhile the inadequate compensations of a state of schism began to
show themselves. In the absence of any organized fellowship of the whole
there grew up, more than elsewhere, a mutual tolerance and even love
among the petty sects, the lesson of which was learned where it was most
needed. The churches of "the standing order" in Massachusetts not only
admired but imitated "the peace and love which societies of different
modes of worship entertained toward each other in Rhode Island." In
1718, not forty years from the time when Baptist churches ceased to be
_religio illicita_ in Massachusetts, three foremost pastors of Boston
assisted in the ordination of a minister to the Baptist church, at which
Cotton Mather preached the sermon, entitled "Good Men United." It
contained a frank confession of repentance for the persecutions of which
the Boston churches had been guilty.[107:2]

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