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This is Christ-like, only in the manner that the thoughts of a disciple might have been if one of them had watched with him on the night of his betrayal. It is striking how Bonhoeffer insists always on the role of disciple, of one among a company of equals, from which no one must be excluded. Though he was an aristocrat and aloof in his manner, he seems to have had no imagination of beatitude which is not a humanly understandable moment with a beloved friend. To Bethge, he wrote of his imprisonment, “One thing is that I do miss sitting down to table with others. The presents you send me acquire here a sacramental value; they remind me of the times we have sat down to table together. Perhaps the reason why we attach so much importance to sitting down to table together is that table fellowship is one of the realities of the Kingdom of God.”

Neither has he any interest in himself as solitary martyr. He generalizes from his circumstance to the human condition with a consistency that leads commentators to forget how extreme his isolation really was, and how available the idea of martyrdom or abandonment would have been to him, if he had not always transformed his suffering into compassion for humankind, or for God. It is not hard to imagine what dark night might have preceded words like these: “The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets the divine self be pushed out of the world onto the cross.”

Bonhoeffer’s family arranged to help him escape from prison, but he chose to remain because his brother Klaus, also in prison, might bear repercussions. He was executed in April of 1945, after nineteen months of imprisonment. His brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi died the next day, his brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rudiger Schleicher within the month. A British prisoner wrote of Bonhoeffer in his last days that he “always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and a deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive.” This same prisoner wrote that when he was taken away to his execution, Bonhoeffer said, “This is the end — for me, the beginning of life.”

MCGUFFEY AND THE ABOLITIONISTS

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE should provide us with a way of distinguishing among the very different things we call “history” — the temporal past, the past inherited as culture, the recorded past, the past interpreted. The true past is veiled in mystery, to the extent that it can be said to exist at all. Insofar as we receive it, it is liable to record itself in us culturally as assumption too fundamental to be reached by inquiry, or as memory so painful it must be rationalized, falsified, or suppressed. It is liable to being reconstrued to bear the blame for present vice or failure, or simplified and brutalized to allow a sense of relative progress. Records, of course, are biased toward the literate and the official and must always be assumed to be flawed by the methods and circumstances of record keeping, and the accidents of preservation and accessibility. The interpreted past incorporates all these difficulties and adds new distortions having to do with the motives, enthusiasms, sensibilities, talents, and scruples of interpreters. In dealing with a group like the abolitionists, who were profoundly self-aware and intent not only on making history but also on molding it, one finds all problems compounded.

The interested observer notes certain anomalies in the American use of American history. Here is an example. The New England Primer is fairly inevitably referred to as the great characteristic and formative expression of the New England mind. No one, in my experience, pauses over the fact that it was put together entirely from British materials by an English printer briefly resident in Boston, or that it was sold and used in England and Scotland into the nineteenth century. In other words, the Primer is offered as an instance of the cultural peculiarity and isolation of New England, when in fact it proves that New England was culturally and religiously very intimately connected with Britain. The Primer includes the Westminster Catechism, a finely honed document full of a long history of conflict and debate. The convention is to place the Primer as if at the beginning of our history, never alluding to the history with which it is so consciously burdened, and of which the New England settlers were so powerfully aware. I do not wish to say every historian has done this, simply that my own reading has not found an exception. Here again, the interested nonspecialist must linger over the great difference between information that is accessible but somehow inert and information or its like that actually affects thinking and writing. To say that certain work has been done is about equivalent to saying the South Pole has been visited. Another tribute to human diligence. On to other business.

I am the first to concede that much more work is produced in every field than anyone could hope to take in, but I suspect the real problem lies elsewhere, and is both stranger and more easily remedied. Where I have found the New England Primer mentioned, I have never found evidence that the writer has read it, no quotes or allusions except the inevitable “In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all.” It is a volume that can be read twice and pondered thoroughly in the space of ninety minutes, and since it is widely assumed to be the spirit in embryo of perhaps the most influential strain of American culture, one might expect simple curiosity to be motive enough to lead the occasional scholar to look into it. I am bold enough to suggest that somehow, as a culture, we disable simple curiosity, and that the history we write, allude to, repeat, and assume is profoundly conditioned by omissions of just this kind. To say that a certain text is essential to the development of American culture or consciousness is as if to say: Do not bother reading it. You know all you need to know. The book is crude or vexatious and in any case it is faithfully summarized in cliché and canard.

Generations of New Englanders read these lines in their Primers:

Defraud not him who hired is,

Your labour to sustain;

And pay him still without delay,

His wages for his pain,

And as you would another man

Against you should proceed,

Do you the same to them again,

If they should stand in need.

Impart your portion to the Poor

In money and in Meat

And send the feeble fainting Soul

Of that which you do eat.

This is a paraphrase of scriptural passages, for example Deuteronomy 24:14–15, “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates. At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it, for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it, lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee.” Or Job 31:17, in which Job declares that he has never “eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless has not eaten thereof.” The bit of doggerel from the Primer is written in the language of social consciousness one finds in William Blake a hundred years later. Those familiar with English social history will recognize it as the language of the early left.

Modern assumptions about the Old Testament, now an unread classic, make it seem an improbable source for economic and social idealism. In fact, it is more insistent than Marx ever was in championing the poor and the oppressed. Its influence is thought to have made New Englanders severe, yet Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), who is taken to personify their severity, preached an absolute obligation to assist the needy — before their need became urgent, before they were compelled to seek help, despite any question of their own worthiness or of the responsibility of relatives or others to assist them. Such assistance was to be given to them in addition to the support they received from the towns, since “it is too obvious to be denied, that there are in fact persons so in want, that it would be a charitable act in us to help them, notwithstanding all that is done by the town.” Taking as text the passage in Deuteronomy 15 that says, among other things, “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thy hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land,” Edwards says, “God gives us direction how we are to give in such a case, viz. bountifully, and willingly … We may also observe how peremptorily this duty is here enjoined, and how much it is insisted on. It is repeated over and over again, and enjoined in the strongest terms … The warning is very strict. God doth not only say, Beware that thou do not actually refuse to give him, but, Beware that thou have not one objecting thought against it, arising from a backwardness to liberality. God warns against the beginnings of uncharitableness in the heart, and against whatever tends to a forbearance to give … We are particularly required to be kind to the unthankful and to the evil; and therein to follow the example of our heavenly Father, who causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” No doubt Edwards would take a very fiery view indeed of present attitudes to the poor, of our “backwardness to liberality,” so ignorantly based on a supposed reclaiming of traditional values. But his hearers would have known the words of Isaiah: “the liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand” (32:8).