APPROACHING ABJECTION
No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity, No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.
—Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles
Neither Subject Nor Object
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name
or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain “ego” that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that “I” puts up with, sublime and devastated, for “I” deposits it to the father’s account [verse au père—père-version]: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
The Improper/Unclean
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage,
and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them.
Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase he artbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that “I” am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects.
The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive,
from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you. . . .
In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children’s shoes, or something like that,
something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.
The Abjection of Self
If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded. One always passes too quickly over this word, “want,” and today psychoanalysts are finally taking into account only its more or less fetishized product, the “object of want.” But if one imagines (and imagine one must, for it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here) the experience of want itself as logically preliminary to being and object—to the being of the object—then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none but literature. Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness Elizabeth of Hungary who “though a great princess, delighted in nothing so much as in abasing herself.”1
The question remains as to the ordeal, a secular one this time, that abjection can constitute for someone who, in what is termed knowledge of castration, turning away from perverse dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non-objects;
they are no longer seen in their own right but forfeited, abject. The termination of analysis can lead us there, as we shall see. Such are the pangs and delights of masochism.
Essentially different from “uncanniness,” more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, “all by himself,” and, to save himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him—all gifts, all objects. He has, he could have, a sense of the abject. Even before things for him are hence before they are signifiable—he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject. A sacred configuration. Fear cements his compound, conjoined to another world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly. What solace does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy brat would probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject, he would remain, discomfited, at the dump for non-objects that are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he through whom the abject exists. Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up—fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear”—a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.
The “Chora,” Receptacle of Narcissism
Let us enter, for a moment, into that Freudian aporia called primal repression. Curious primacy, where what is repressed cannot really be held down, and where what represses always already borrows its strength and authority from what is apparently very secondary: language. Let us therefore not speak of primacy but of the instability of the symbolic function in its most significant aspect—the prohibition placed on the maternal body (as a defense against autoeroticism and incest taboo). Here, drives hold sway and constitute a strange space that I shall name, after Plato (Timeus, 48–53), a chora, a receptacle.
For the benefit of the ego or its detriment, drives, whether life drives or death drives, serve to correlate that “not yet” ego with an “object” in order to establish both of them. Such a process, while dichotomous (inside/outside, ego/not ego) and repetitive, has nevertheless something centripetal about it: it aims to settle the ego as center of a solar system of objects. If, by dint of coming back towards the center, the drive’s motion should eventually become centrifugal, hence fasten on the Other and come into being as sign so as to produce meaning—that is, literally speaking, exorbitant.
But from that moment on, while I recognize my image as sign and change in order to signify, another economy is instituted. The sign represses the chora and its eternal return. Desire alone will henceforth be witness to that “primal” pulsation. But desire ex-patriates the ego toward an other subject and accepts the exactness of the ego only as narcissistic. Narcissism then appears as a regression to a position set back from the other, a return to a self-contemplative, conservative, self-sufficient haven. Actually, such narcissism never is the wrinkleless image of the Greek youth in a quiet fountain. The conflicts of drives muddle its bed, cloud its water, and bring forth everything that, by not becoming integrated with a given system of signs, is abjection for it.
Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis: it is witness to the ephemeral aspect of the state called “narcissism” with reproachful
jealousy, heaven knows why; what is more, abjection gives narcissism (the thing and the concept) its classification as “seeming.”
Nevertheless, it is enough that a prohibition, which can be a superego, block the desire craving an other—or that this other, as its role demands, not fulfill it—for desire and its signifiers to turn back toward the “same,” thus clouding the waters of Narcissus. It is precisely at the moment of narcissistic perturbation (all things considered, the permanent state of the speaking being, if he would only hear himself speak) that secondary repression, with its reserve of symbolic means, attempts to transfer to its own account, which has thus been overdrawn, the resources of primal repression. The archaic economy is brought into full light of day, signified, verbalized. Its strategies (rejecting, separating, repeating/abjecting) hence find a symbolic existence, and the very logic of the symbolic—arguments, demonstrations, proofs, etc.—must conform to it. It is then that the object ceases to be circumscribed, reasoned with, thrust aside: it appears as abject.
Two seemingly contradictory causes bring about the narcissistic crisis that provides, along with its truth, a view of the abject. Too much strictness on the part of the Other, confused with the One and the Law. The lapse of the Other, which shows through the breakdown of objects of desire. In both instances, the abject appears in order to uphold “I” within the Other. The abject is the violence of mourning for an “object” that has always already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away—it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, and death. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new signifiance.
Perverse or Artistic
The abject is related to perversion. The sense of abjection that I experience is anchored in the superego. The abject is perverse
because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them. It kills in the name of life— a progressive despot; it lives at the behest of death—an operator in genetic experimentations; it curbs the other’s suffering for its own profit—a cynic (and a psychoanalyst); it establishes narcissistic power while pretending to reveal the abyss—an artist who practices his art as a “business.” Corruption is its most common, most obvious appearance. That is the socialized appearance of the abject.
An unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law is necessary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside. Religion, Morality, Law. Obviously always arbitrary, more or less; unfailingly oppressive, rather more than less; laboriously prevailing, more and more so.
Contemporary literature does not take their place. Rather, it seems to be written out of the untenable aspects of perverse or superego positions. It acknowledges the impossibility of Religion, Morality, and Law—their power play, their necessary and absurd seeming. Like perversion, it takes advantage of them, gets round them, and makes sport of them. Nevertheless, it maintains a distance where the abject is concerned. The writer, fascinated by the abject, imagines its logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and as a consequence perverts language—style and content. But on the other hand, as the sense of abjection is both the abject’s judge and accomplice, this is also true of the literature that confronts it. One might thus say that with such a literature there takes place a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and Immorality.
For the subject firmly settled in its superego, a writing of this sort is necessarily implicated in the interspace that characterizes perversion; and for that reason, it gives rises in turn to abjection. And yet, such texts call for a softening of the superego. Writing them implies an ability to imagine the abject, that is, to see oneself in its place and to thrust it aside only by means of the displacements of verbal play. It is only after his death, eventually, that the writer of abjection will escape his condition of waste, reject, abject. Then, he will either
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Copy of a paper, endorsed C R , taken from the original in Mr. Whitefield’s hand-writing, 1770.
MORNING prayer to begin constantly, every day in the year, at half after five. The first bell to ring exactly at 5 o’clock. The form as follows: A psalm or hymn; the general confession, introduced with “Let us pray.” If any scholar of the house, or any other person not in priest’s orders, doth officiate, then that collect, “O G , whose nature and property, &c.” or that out of the commination-office, “O L , we beseech thee mercifully hear our prayers, &c.” Then must follow the Lord’s prayer, Gloria Patri, “O come let us sing unto the L , &c.” or the Te Deum, or Song of the Three Children, or Benedictus; then the second lesson for the day, with a few short practical remarks; then a suitable prayer, with singing a short doxology; and thus to conclude, “The grace of our L J C , and the love of G , and fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us, the Founder of this institution, the Master, Wardens, and all its benefactors, and all mankind, now, henceforth, and for evermore.” If no one is capable of using free prayer, then shall follow the apostles creed, the collect for the week, the third collect for grace; the three prayers for the king, royal family, and clergy, turned into one; “O G , the creator;” the general thanksgiving, the prayer of St. Chrysostom, and “Grace of our L J C ,” as before.
The same order in the evening, only to repeat the Magnificat, &c. before the reading of the second lesson.
On Wednesday and Friday morning, the hymn, the litany, the general thanksgiving, prayer of St. Chrysostom, and concluding prayer.
On Sunday morning, a short prayer with a psalm or hymn early in the morning. Full prayers and sermon at ten: the same at three in the afternoon. A short prayer, and a hymn, at half after six in the evening. The first lesson to be read at dinner; the same at supper: a short hymn at each meal. One of the orphans to read and give out
the hymn, or any other substituted by the master; and also to read the second lesson in chapel.
Great care to be taken, that all read, write, speak, and behave properly.
All the statutes to be in English, and read to every scholar or student at admission, and thrice a year, at Easter, Whitsuntide, and Christmas, publicly.
No cards, dice, or gaming of any kind to be allowed, on pain of expulsion, or dismission, by masters, tutors, professors, students or any officer or member of the college whatsoever. No music but divine psalmody; such as Butt’s Harmonia sacra, Knibb’s and Madan’s collection of tunes.
All are to be taught Bland’s Manual Exercise, by some deputed officer, but not bound to attend on musters or other exercises, unless on account of an alarm.
Nobody shall be suffered to run in arrears above half a year: some caution money to be paid down.
All students to furnish their own rooms, but to lie on mattresses, and the successors to pay thirds.
No one suffered to go to town without express leave from the master, or persons deputed by him.
Breakfast at seven o’clock, dinner at twelve, supper at six, through all the year; the utmost neatness to be observed and maintained in every room.
All orphans and students shall be obliged to learn and repeat, and, if capable, to translate into Latin all the thirty-nine articles, or those specified in the act of toleration. The homilies to be read publicly, distinctly, frequently and carefully, every year, by the students, deputed in rotation. All to be first thoroughly instructed in
the history of Georgia, and constitution of England, before they are taught the history of Greece and Rome. Kimber’s history of England is a good one for beginners, then may follow Rapin’s. The young negro boys to be baptized and taught to read. The young negro girls to be taught to work with the needle. The following divinity books to be read, Henry’s Comment,—Doddridge and Guise,— ♦ Burkitt,— Clark’s Bible,—Wilson’s Dictionary,—Professor Franck’s Manuductio, especially the preface de Impedimentis Studii Theologici,—Doddridge’s Rise and Progress,—Boston’s fourfold State,—ditto, on the Covenant,—Jenks, on the righteousness of Christ, and his Meditations,—Hervey’s Meditations, and Theron and Aspasio,—Bishop Hall’s Contemplations, and other works,— Edwards’s Preacher,—Trapp on the old and new Testament,— Poole’s Annotations,—Warner’s Tracts,—Bishop Leighton’s Comment on St. Peter’s 1st Epistle,—Bishop Pearson on the Creed, Edwards’s Veritas redux,—Owen and Bunyan’s works.
♦ “Burkit” replaced with “Burkitt” for consistency
Copy of a paper, intitled, “Subjects for Annual Prizes at the Orphanhouse, Bethesda College,” in the hand-writing of Mr. Whitefield, inclosed with and referred to in his Will¹ ¹ “Whatever profits may arise from the sale of my books, or any manuscripts, that I may leave behind, I give and bequeath ―― towards paying off my arrears that may be due on the account of the Orphan-house academy, or for Annual Prizes, as a reward for the best three Orations that shall be made in English, on the subjects mentioned in a paper annexed to this Will.”
Subjects for Annual Prizes at the Orphan-house, Bethesda College.
ON every 27th of December, the Founder’s birth-day,—an Oration on the Mercy of G , in preparing Habitations and
Places of Education for poor Orphans, “In thee the fatherless find mercy,” by an Orphan.
Another on our L ’s Nativity,—by an Orphan.
On the Anniversary, March 25,—Orations on the benefit of erecting, founding, and contributing towards Seminaries of sound Learning, and religious Education.—On the Benefit of an Union between Great Britain and her Colonies.—The Rise and Progress of the Colony of Georgia.—The Rise and Progress of Commerce and Religion in the other American Colonies,—by Orphans or Students.
On the 5th of November,—an Oration on the glorious Revolution, and the infinite Mercy of G , in delivering Great Britain from Popish Tyranny and arbitrary Power, by Orphan or Student.
On Easter Monday,—an Oration on the Resurrection,—by Orphan or Student.
On Whitsunday,—an Oration on the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles,—by Orphan or Student.
All the Exercises to be closed with an Application, Exhortation, and Prayer, by the Master of the College.
The following Speech was also found in Mr. W ’s own Writing, delivered by an Orphan after Mr. W ’s Sermon preached before the Governor, &c. &c. January 28, 1770¹ .
¹ For the Sermon, the Reader is referred to the last volume of this work
WHEN I consider where I stand, and before whom I am about to speak, no wonder that previous to my rising, a trembling seized my limbs; and now, when risen, a throbbing seizes my heart, and as a consequence of both, shame and confusion cover my face. For what am I? (a poor unlettered orphan, unlearned almost in the
very rudiments of my mother tongue, and totally unskilled in the persuasive arts of speaking) that I should be called to speak before such a venerable, august assembly, as is this day convened under Bethesda’s roof. But when I reflect, that I stand up at your command, Reverend Sir, to whom, under G , I owe my little all, and when I further reflect on the well-known candour of those that compose this venerable, august assembly, my trembling begins to abate, my throbbing ceases, and a gleam of hope breaks in, that the tongue of the stammerer will in some degree be able to speak plain. But where shall I begin, and how shall I express the various emotions, that within the space of the last hour have alternately agitated and affected my soul? If the eye, as I have been taught to think, is the looking-glass of the soul; and if the outward gestures, and earnest attention, are indications and expressive of the inward commotions and dispositions of the human heart, then a heart-felt complacency and joy hath possessed the souls of many in this assembly, whilst the reverend Founder hath been giving from the pulpit such a clear, succinct, and yet withal affecting account of the rise and progress of this Orphan-house academy, and of the low estate of this now flourishing colony, when the first brick of this edifice was laid. All hail that happy day! which we now commemorate, when about thirty-two years ago, in faith and fervent prayer, the first brick of this edifice was laid. Many destitute orphans were soon taken in, and without any visible fund, in the dearest part of his Majesty’s dominions, more than fifty labourers were employed, and honourably paid, and a large orphan-family, for these many years, hath been supported, cloathed, and brought up in the nurture and admonition of the L . O could these walls speak! could every chamber, every corner of this fabric speak! what agonizing supplications, what inwrought energetic prayers would they tell us they had been witness to, and also of the blessed fruits, of which we are now partakers. Behold! a once infant, deserted, despised colony, not only lifting up its drooping head, and in some degree over-topping, at least for trade, and increase and extent of commerce, vying with some of its neighbouring provinces. Behold the once despised institution! (the very existence of which was for many years denied) through the indefatigable industry, unparalleled disinterestedness, and unwearied perseverance of its
reverend Founder, expanding and stretching its wings, not only to receive a larger number of helpless orphans like myself, but to nurse and cherish many of the present rising generation, training them up to be ornaments both in church and state. For ever adored be that Providence, that power and goodness, which hath brought matters to such a desirable and long expected issue! Thanks, thanks be rendered to your Excellency, for the countenance you have always given to this beneficial plan, for laying the first brick of yonder wings this time twelvemonth, and for the favour of your company on this our anniversary Thanks to you, Mr President¹ , who have long been a fellow-helper in this important work, and have now the pleasure of seeing the fruit of all your labours. Thanks to the Gentlemen of his Majesty’s Honourable Council, and to the Members of the General Assembly, who so warmly recommended the utility of this institution. Thanks to you, Sir, who first opened it by preaching. Thanks to you, who left your native country, and without fee and reward have for many years laboured and watched over us in the L . Thanks to all who have this day honoured us with your presence. And above all, thanks, more than an orphan tongue can utter, or orphan hearts conceive, be, under G , rendered unto you, most honoured Sir, who have been so happily instrumental, in the hands of a neverfailing G , in spreading his ever-lasting gospel.
¹ The Honourable James Habersham, President of his Majesty’s council, and Mr. Whitefield’s Executor in Georgia.
MS , March 27, 1771.
ONDAY last being the anniversary of laying the foundation of the Orphan-house, the new and very decent chapel lately erected there was opened. On this solemnity his Excellency the Governor, many of the Gentlemen of the Council, and a very great number of the principal inhabitants of the province, were present. The company being seated in the chapel, and the orphan children
having sung a short hymn, the following address, with great propriety, and to the universal satisfaction of the audience, was delivered by Peter Edwards, one of the orphans:
“May it please your Excellency, Reverend Gentlemen, Gentlemen and Ladies,
In obedience to the commands of my superiors, and relying also on the candour and benevolence of your Excellency and this polite and respectable company, I beg leave, with all humility, to make this public address. It may not be improper to mention, that on this day, thirty-two years ago, the foundation of this house was laid by the reverend Founder, whose death we orphans in particular cannot sufficiently lament; that also on this day, two years past, your Excellency honoured this place with your presence, and condescended to lay the foundation of the two wings, superadded to the Orphan-house, for the accommodation of young gentlemen intended to be educated in academical learning, to enable them to move in a superior sphere of life; and we are now met to open and solemnly dedicate this new and convenient chapel to the service of our God and Saviour J C . The many and great advantages accruing from the establishment of public schools in every government, is obvious, and in a young province, as this is, it must be of the highest importance to its future prosperity and welfare, which is the professed design of this charitable institution; an institution evidently calculated to promote the happiness of society, by providing for, and instructing such poor children, as would otherwise, in all appearance, be brought up in ignorance, and become of little use and value to mankind. They are here early taught their duty to G , and their country, and the respect they owe to those in authority over them. G has various, and to us unthought-of ways, which we poor short-sighted beings cannot fathom, to effect his purposes; but I hope I may be allowed to say, that, in all human probability, great might have been the blessing to this noble undertaking, had it pleased divine Providence to have prolonged the valuable life of the deceased Founder: but he is now
no more. We have, however, no doubt of the great Father of the fatherless supplying his loss; and that your Excellency, and all welldisposed persons, especially the good people of this province, will espouse our cause, and promote our welfare. Agreeable to the plan of our deceased Benefactor, an Academy is now begun to be superadded to the Orphan-house, and gentlemen of this province will have an opportunity of educating their sons under their immediate inspection, and will not be under the necessity of sending them at a great distance for that purpose, or be constantly labouring under the painful anxiety of knowing of their health and welfare, besides being probably at a greater and more uncertain expence.
The utility of this, it is humbly presumed, wants no recommendation: it is natural to love the place where we received our education, and passed our first years. If parents would therefore have the pleasure of seeing the daily progress their children make in knowledge; if they desire they should love and revere them, and have a peculiar regard for the place of their nativity; if they would preserve them from the improper liberties they may take, when removed from their authority; it surely must be most eligible to let them spend their early years under the shadow of their wings, and within the reach of their parental admonitions.
May it please your Excellency,
I have now in charge to return your Excellency, with all deference and humility, our most grateful acknowledgments for your kind patronage and countenance; and to assure your Excellency, that we do and will constantly pray for your happiness, wherever Providence may please to place you, unfeignedly wishing, that your Excellency may continually experience that heart-felt satisfaction which can only dwell in the breast of the humane and benevolent; and we are persuaded, when you return to your native country, our cause will not be forgotten by your Excellency.
Honourable Sir, ¹
We should be highly wanting in gratitude, if, on this occasion, we omitted to acknowledge your unwearied and unabating attention to serve this institution from its first foundation; and we are happy that G has been pleased to preserve your life to succeed our kind Founder, and carry into execution his truly generous intentions. Your disinterested regard to promote our real welfare is well known, and therefore I shall forbear to add, only that for your happiness, and long continuance amongst us, we daily pray.
¹ The Honourable James Habersham.
Reverend Gentlemen, Gentlemen and Ladies,
Permit me to return you our best thanks for the very kind regard you have shewn us, and to assure you, that we will endeavour to deserve the continuance of your friendship and favour.
Sir, and Gentlemen, ¹
We cannot, we must not, Sir, omit to give our public testimony of your unwearied diligence and attention to cultivate and improve our minds in solid learning and useful knowledge; and, Gentlemen, it would be unjust, if we did not make the same acknowledgment for your constant care to make our situation, in regard to our bodies, easy, comfortable, and every way convenient, and as we have nothing to repay you, but our prayers for your welfare, both in time and eternity, and our best thanks, we hope you will kindly accept this tribute of our grateful hearts.
¹ The Tutor and the Managers
Young Gentlemen, (the Boarders.)
You are happy in having parents, who have both inclination and means to pay for your education. I have none. But to you, Gentlemen, I must own my obligation for having the opportunity of an education I could not, from my situation, have expected, had not your parents enabled our worthy Executor to employ so able a Tutor, as we now have, to instruct us, and I hope we shall shew, that his assiduity, care and pains, will have the desired effect.
My fellow Orphans,
What shall I say to excite your gratitude? I hope the memory of our late Benefactor, who has laboured incessantly for me, for you, and many others, who have partaken of the benefit of this institution, since its first foundation, will be deeply engraven in our hearts, and remembered with the greatest reverence and gratitude. This is all we have in our power, in return for such unmerited favours, and if this, our small tribute, should be wanting, we must, we shall be justly deemed the most ungrateful to our deceased Benefactor, who encountered innumerable, uncommon, and unknown difficulties, in carrying on this institution, notwithstanding he was maligned, traduced, and persecuted, with unrelenting virulence, as a cheat, an impostor, a public robber, and as one, who, under the specious pretence of promoting a charitable design, was amassing great wealth to himself; all which he bore with an uncommon degree of patience. Let me add, that G has been graciously pleased to provide for you, and for me, beyond many, very many in our circumstances. We are here daily taught the great and fundamental truths of the gospel of the Son of G , have plenty of the necessaries of life, and are carefully educated to qualify us to get a comfortable subsistence, and make us useful members of society. Let us therefore make a proper improvement of these mercies, and let us, my dear fellow Orphans, be thankful to G , the Father of all, for them, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to his service, and by walking before him in holiness and righteousness all our days, through J C our L .
May it please your Excellency, Reverend Gentlemen, Gentlemen and Ladies,
I fear I have trespassed on your patience, and humbly entreat you to pardon the poor attempt of a youth unaccustomed to speak before so respectable an audience.”
After this the Rev. Mr. Edward Ellington, minister of the parish of St. Bartholomew, in South Carolina, read prayers, and preached a sermon very suitable to the occasion, from Matthew xviii. 20. Divine service being ended, the young gentlemen of the academy repeated several passages taken from some of the most approved English authors, in such a manner as appeared agreeably to engage the attention and to meet with the entire approbation of the company. Then Mr Edward Langworthy, their Tutor, addressed the company as follows:
“May it please your Excellency, Gentlemen and Ladies,
Having observed the attention of your Excellency to the exercises of this morning, and the marks of pleasure and approbation so visible in all the Gentlemen and Ladies now present, I think it my duty, with the warmest gratitude, to acknowledge the honour your Excellency and this respectable audience have conferred on this institution. The young gentlemen that just now spoke before your Excellency, have not been long under my tuition; they are indeed young, and scarce initiated in the first principles of literature; however, I flatter myself that these feeble attempts will be favourably received, and that hereafter they will be enabled to exhibit something more worthy of your attention and approbation.
It affords me the highest satisfaction, when I reflect, that divine providence hath honoured me with the care and direction of them, and I cannot but make a tender of my sincere and best respects to you, our worthy Executor, and to their worthy parents and friends, for the great confidence reposed in me. Duly sensible of the important
trust committed to every preceptor, I shall, in the fear of G , do my utmost to form their tender minds, and to impress on them such principles as may tend to advance their happiness in private, as well as in public life: and I hope, from their proficiency, the Gentlemen of this province will be induced to promote with all their influence the growth and prosperity of our present undertaking.
The strict and virtuous education of youth is a point of great consequence in every country, and those that are employed therein do certainly merit the attention and encouragement of the public in proportion to their faithfulness; for my part, I do most chearfully dedicate my whole time to this laborious work, and am determined to pursue it with the greatest assiduity and diligence, being convinced that I can in no other way do more good to the true interest of my fellow beings, or do more service to the province.
It is undoubtedly the indispensible obligation of every one entrusted with the business of education, to satisfy the public with respect to their abilities and intentions, and therefore I hope to convince you that no pains will be spared, and no time lost, and that whatever is useful in the sciences, or ornamental in life, will here be inculcated both by precept and example. Authors in the several branches of knowledge will be regularly read, and the sacred scriptures constantly explained: these can bestow understanding upon all men; they are the universal logic, since none can read them without either acquiring a greater exactness of thought, or being invited to contract a greater rectitude of manners.
Our time being so far elapsed, permit me, in the behalf of these poor Orphans, and in the name of every member concerned in this Seminary, most heartily to thank your Excellency, and all the Gentlemen and Ladies now before me, for their kind attendance on this solemnity. With sentiments of the most unfeigned gratitude we would express our sense of it, and hope for the continuance of your esteem and friendship.
And I should be greatly wanting in respect and duty to you, Reverend Sir, and indeed justly incur the displeasure of all
concerned in the management of this institution, if I did not now embrace the opportunity of returning you their and my humblest thanks for your kind and friendly assistance.
May what you and others have done on this Anniversary, terminate in the glory of the great Head of the church, who is G over all, blessed for evermore.”
Between the exercises of the day, the Orphan children sung several short hymns adapted to the occasion, with one of which the solemnity was closed. The company were afterward entertained with a plain and plentiful dinner in the Great Hall, and unanimously expressed their satisfaction of the proceedings of the day, and especially of the decency and order with which the whole was conducted.
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