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About the Book
"After Its Kind" is a novel that follows the story of a young man named Jeremy, who is torn between his loyalty to his strict religious family and his desire to break free from their oppressive beliefs. Throughout the novel, Jeremy struggles to find his own identity and navigate the tumultuous relationships within his family. As he embarks on a journey of self-discovery, he must confront his past and come to terms with who he truly is. The novel delves into themes of family, faith, and personal growth in the face of adversity.
Hannah More
Beyond any doubt, Hannah More was the most influential female member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. She was educated at Bristol, an important slave-trading town, and began to publish her writing in the 1760s, while she was still a teenager. Her first play, The Inflexible Captive, was staged at Bath in 1775. Later in the 1770s, and for much of the 1780s, she spent time in London and made the acquaintance of many important political and society figures, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Elizabeth Montagu. Her play Percy was produced by David Garrick in 1777, and Fatal Falsehood was staged in 1779, but she came to regard the theatre as morally wrong, especially after the death of her mentors; Garrick and Johnson. She turned to religious writing, beginning with her Sacred Dramas in 1782. In 1784-5, she 'discovered' Ann Yearsley, the so-called 'poetical milkmaid of Bristol', whose poems More helped to publish, although the two later fell out.
In the 1780s, More widened her circle to include religious and philanthropic figures, including John Newton, Beilby Porteus and William Wilberforce. In the summer of 1786, she spent time with Sir Charles and Lady Margaret Middleton at the their home in Teston in Kent. Among their guests were the local vicar James Ramsay and a young Thomas Clarkson, both of whom were central to the early abolition campaign. More and Clarkson met again in Bristol in 1787, while he was on his fact-finding mission to the city, but they did not become close. However, in the same year More met Wilberforce, and their friendship was to become a deep and lasting one. More contributed much to the running of the newly-founded Abolition Society including, in February 1788, her publication of Slavery, a Poem which has been recognised as one of the more important slavery poems of the abolition period. Her relationship with members of the society, especially Wilberforce, was close. For example, she spent the summer of 1789 holidaying with Wilberforce in the Peak District - planning for the abolition campaign, at that time at its height, formed a great deal of their conversation.
By the mid-1790s, More had become closely involved with the 'Clapham Sect' of evangelical Christians, many of whom were involved in the abolition campaign. The group centred on Henry Thornton's home in Clapham and included Wilberforce, James Stephen, and Zachary Macaulay, among others. Throughout the 1790s, she wrote a number of religious tracts, known as the Cheap Repository Tracts, that eventually led to the formation of the Religious Tracts Society. Several of the Tracts oppose slavery and the slave trade, in particular, the poem The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman's Lamentation, which appeared in November 1795 and which was co-authored with Eaglesfield Smith. However, the tracts have also been noted for their encouragement of social quietism in an age of revolution. She continued to oppose slavery throughout her life, but at the time of the Abolition Bill of 1807, her health did not permit her to take as active a role in the movement as she had done in the late 1780s, although she maintained a correspondence with Wilberforce and others. In her later life, she dedicated much time to religious writing. Nevertheless, her most popular work was a novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, which appeared in two volumes in 1809 (and which ran to nine editions in 1809 alone). In the 1820s she grew gradually less well, and decreased - but did not entirely halt - the amount of writing she produced. On her death in 1833, she left more than ĆĀ£30,000 to charities and religious societies (equivalent to about ĆĀ£2,000,000 or $3,000,000 in 2004).
Ā© Brycchan Carey 2004
the majesty of god mastered him: john calvin
In 1538, the Italian Cardinal Sadolet wrote to the leaders of Geneva trying to win them back to the Roman Catholic Church after they had turned to the Reformed teachings. John Calvinās response to Sadolet uncovers the root of Calvinās quarrel with Rome that would determine his whole life. Hereās what Calvin wrote to the cardinal: ā[Your] zeal for heavenly life [is] a zeal which keeps a man entirely devoted to himself, and does not, even by one expression, arouse him toĀ sanctify the name of God ā ( John Calvin: Selections from His Writings , 89). The issue for Calvin was not, ļ¬rst, the well-known sticking points of the Reformation: justiļ¬cation, priestly abuses, transubstantiation, prayers to saints, and papal authority. All those would come in for discussion. But beneath all of them, the fundamental issue for Calvin, from the beginning to the end of his life, was the issue of the centrality and supremacy and majesty of the glory of God. Calvin goes on and says to Sadolet that what he should do ā and what Calvin aims to do with all his life ā is āset before [man], as the prime motive of his existence,Ā zeal to illustrate the glory of God ā ( Selections , 89). This would be a ļ¬tting banner over all of John Calvinās life and work āĀ zeal to illustrate the glory of God . The essential meaning of Calvinās life and preaching is that he recovered and embodied a passion for the absolute reality and majesty of God. Captive to Glory What happened to John Calvin to make him a man so mastered by the majesty of God? And what kind of ministry did this produce in his life? He was born July 10, 1509, in Noyon, France, when Martin Luther was 25 years old and had just begun to teach the Bible in Wittenberg. When he was 14, his father sent him to study theology at the University of Paris, which at that time was untouched by the Reformation and steeped in Medieval theology. But ļ¬ve years later (when Calvin was 19), his father ran afoul of the church and told his son to leave theology and study law, which he did for the next three years at Orleans and Bourges. His father died in May of 1531, when Calvin was 21. Calvin felt free then to turn from law to his ļ¬rst love, which had become the classics. He published his first book, a commentary on Seneca, in 1532, at the age of 23. But sometime during these years he was coming into contact with the message and the spirit of the Reformation, and by 1533 something dramatic had happened in his life. Calvin recounts, seven years later, how his conversion came about. He describes how he had been struggling to live out the Catholic faith with zeal when I at length perceived, as if light had broken in upon me, in what a sty of error I had wallowed, and how much pollution and impurity I had thereby contracted. Being exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen . . . as in duty bound, [I] made it my ļ¬rst business to betake myself to thy way [O God], condemning my past life, not without groans and tears. God, by a sudden conversion, subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame. . . . Having thus received some taste and knowledge of true godliness, I was immediately inļ¬amed with [an] intense desire to make progress. ( Selections , 26) What was the foundation of Calvinās faith that yielded a life devoted utterly to displaying the glory and majesty of God? The answer seems to be that Calvin suddenly, as he says, saw and tasted in Scripture the majesty of God. And in that moment, both God and the word of God were so powerfully and unquestionably authenticated to his soul that he became the loving servant of God and his word the rest of his life. Henceforth he would be a man utterly devoted to displaying the majesty of God by the exposition of the word of God. Compelled to Geneva What form would that ministry take? Calvin knew what he wanted. He wanted the enjoyment of literary ease so he could promote the Reformed faith as a literary scholar. That is what he thought he was cut out for by nature. But God had radically different plans. In 1536, Calvin left France, taking his brother Antoine and sister Marie with him. He intended to go to Strasbourg and devote himself to a life of peaceful literary production. But one night, as Calvin stayed in Geneva, William Farel, the ļ¬ery leader of the Reformation in that city, found out he was there and sought him out. It was a meeting that changed the course of history, not just for Geneva, but for the world. Calvin tells us what happened in his preface to his commentary on Psalms: Farel, who burned with an extraordinary zeal to advance the gospel, immediately learned that my heart was set upon devoting myself to private studies, for which I wished to keep myself free from other pursuits, and ļ¬nding that he gained nothing by entreaties, he proceeded to utter an imprecation that God would curse my retirement, and the tranquillity of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to give assistance, when the necessity was so urgent. By this imprecation I was so stricken with terror, that I desisted from the journey which I had undertaken. ( Selections , 28) The course of his life was irrevocably changed. Not just geographically, but vocationally. Never again would Calvin work in what he called the ātranquillity of . . . studies.ā From now on, every page of the 48 volumes of books and tracts and sermons and commentaries and letters that he wrote would be hammered out on the anvil of pastoral responsibility. Unrelenting Exposition Once in Geneva, what kind of ministry did his commitment to the majesty of God produce? Part of the answer is that it produced a ministry of incredible steadfastness ā a ministry, to use Calvinās own description of faithful ministers of the word, of āinvincible constancyā ( Sermons from Job , 245). But that is only half the answer. The constancy had a focus: the unrelenting exposition of the word of God. Calvin had seen the majesty of God in the Scriptures. This persuaded him that the Scriptures were the very word of God. He said, āWe owe to the Scripture the same reverence which we owe to God, because it has proceeded from Him alone, and has nothing of man mixed with itā ( John Calvin: A Collection of Distinguished Essays , 162). His own experience had taught him that āthe highest proof of Scripture derives in general from the fact that God in person speaks in itā ( Institutes of the Christian Religion , 1.7.4). These truths led to an inevitable conclusion for Calvin. Since the Scriptures are the very voice of God, and since they are therefore self-authenticating in revealing the majesty of God, and since the majesty and glory of God are the reason for all existence, it follows that Calvinās life would be marked by āinvincible constancyā in the exposition of Scripture. He wrote tracts, he wrote the greatĀ Institutes , he wrote commentaries (on all the New Testament books except Revelation, plus the Pentateuch, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Joshua), he gave biblical lectures (many of which were published as virtual commentaries), and he preached ten sermons every two weeks. ButĀ all Ā of it was exposition of Scripture. In his last will and testament, he said, āI have endeavored, both in my sermons and also in my writings and commentaries, to preach the Word purely and chastely, and faithfully to interpret His sacred Scripturesā ( Selections , 35). This was the ministry unleashed by seeing the majesty of God in Scripture. The Scriptures were absolutely central because they were absolutely the word of God and had as their self-authenticating theme the majesty and glory of God. But out of all these labors of exposition, preaching was supreme. Godās Voice in Every Verse Calvinās preaching was of one kind from beginning to end: he preached steadily through book after book of the Bible. He never wavered from this approach to preaching for almost 25 years of ministry in St. Peterās church of Geneva ā with the exception of a few high festivals and special occasions. āOn Sunday he took always the New Testament, except for a few Psalms on Sunday afternoons. During the week . . . it was always the Old Testament.ā To give you some idea of the scope of Calvinās pulpit, he began his series on the book of Acts on August 25, 1549, and ended it in March 1554. After Acts he went on to the Epistles to the Thessalonians (46 sermons), Corinthians (186 sermons), the Pastoral Epistles (86 sermons), Galatians (43 sermons), Ephesians (48 sermons) ā until May 1558. Then there is a gap when he was ill. In the spring of 1559, he began the Harmony of the Gospels and was not ļ¬nished when he died in May 1564. On the weekdays during that season he preached 159 sermons on Job, 200 on Deuteronomy, 353 on Isaiah, 123 on Genesis, and so on. One of the clearest illustrations that this was a self-conscious choice on Calvinās part was the fact that on Easter Day, 1538, after preaching, he left the pulpit of St. Peterās, banished by the City Council. He returned in September 1541, over three years later, and picked up the exposition in the next verse. Divine Majesty of the Word Why this remarkable commitment to the centrality of sequential expository preaching? Three reasons are just as valid today as they were in the sixteenth century. First, Calvin believed that the word of God was a lamp that had been taken away from the churches. He said in his own personal testimony, āThy word, which ought to have shone on all thy people like a lamp, was taken away, or at least suppressed as to us.ā Calvin reckoned that the continuous exposition of books of the Bible was the best way to overcome the āfearful abandonment of [Godās] Wordā ( Selections , 115). Second, biographer T.H.L. Parker says that Calvin had a horror of those who preached their own ideas in the pulpit. He said, āWhen we enter the pulpit, it is not so that we may bring our own dreams and fancies with usā ( Portrait of Calvin , 83). He believed that by expounding the Scriptures as a whole, he would be forced to deal with all that God wanted to say, not just whatĀ he Ā might want to say. Third, he believed with all his heart that the word of God was indeed the word ofĀ God , and that all of it was inspired and proļ¬table and radiant with the light of the glory of God. In Sermon number 61 on Deuteronomy, he challenged pastors of his day and ours: Let the pastors boldly dare all thingsĀ by the word of God . . . . Let them constrain all the power, glory, and excellence of the world to give place to and to obey the divineĀ majesty of this word . Let them enjoin everyone by it, from the highest to the lowest. Let them edify the body of Christ. Let them devastate Satanās reign. Let them pasture the sheep, kill the wolves, instruct and exhort the rebellious. Let them bind and loose thunder and lightning, if necessary,Ā but let them do all according to the word of God . ( Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians , xii) The key phrase here is āthe divine majesty of this word.ā This was always the root issue for Calvin. How might he best show forth for all of Geneva and all of Europe and all of history the majesty of God? He answered with a life of continuous expository preaching. This is why preaching remains a central event in the life of the church five hundred years after Calvin. If God is the great, absolute, sovereign, mysterious, all-glorious God of majesty whom Calvin saw in Scripture, there will always be preaching, because the more this God is known and the more this God is central, the more we will feel that he must not just be analyzed and explained ā he must be acclaimed and heralded and magniļ¬ed with expository exultation.
