In 1739, a royal directorate was appointed to guide and supervise the Church and school system of Swedish Lapland. It designated Per Holmbom and Per Högström, as missionaries to that district. Högström, who died in 1784, is the best known of Per Fjellström’s associates. He gained great renown among the Lapps. He has described his mission labors among them, and his Question Book in the Lapp language, is a catechetical work of merit.
To the west of the Scandinavian countries lies Iceland, which needed no missionaries. Visiting Europe in the Sixteenth Century, Icelanders carried back to their country the story of the Reformation. They introduced at once the Danish Lutheran liturgy and translated and printed the Bible. After some opposition, the work of the Reformation became complete.
|A Zealous Soul.| Beyond Iceland lies Greenland with its snowy fields, its great glaciers, its long dark night and its bitter cold. In the Ninth Century a colony of Norwegians settled there, but in the course of time perished from cold or starvation or by the hand of enemies. Their fate was unknown and they were forgotten when Hans Egede, a Lutheran pastor at Vaagen in Norway, read of their settlement and became possessed of a desire to preach to them that Gospel which had proved so great a blessing to his own land. In 1710 he wrote to the King and to several bishops urging that he be allowed to go as a missionary to these distant folk.
The King was in sympathy with his desire, but not so his people. The plan was thought to be impractical, if not insane. Egede’s own family bitterly opposed him.
But Egede was at once gentle and persistent. Supported by the devotion of his wife he continued to urge his cause. He visited the King, but the interview had a contrary result from that which he hoped. The King asked those who opposed the project to send in the reasons for their objection to the court, and so promptly and fully did they respond that Egede became an object of even greater derision.
|The Ship “Hope”.| Finally Egede persuaded a few men to subscribe two hundred dollars apiece; he gave from his scanty store six hundred, and all together ten thousand dollars was gathered. In a vessel which he called “The Hope” he set out May, 1721, accompanied by his wife and little children and some colonists, in all about forty souls. After a perilous voyage partly among masses of ice floating in a stormy sea they landed in Greenland in July. The situation which they met was uncomfortable and depressing. “As many as twenty natives occupied one tent, their bodies unwashed, their hair uncombed and both their persons and their clothing dripping with rancid oil. The tents were filled and surrounded with seal flesh in all stages of decomposition and the only scavengers were the dogs. Few had any thought beyond the routine of their daily life. No article that could be carried off was safe within their reach, and lying was open and shameless. Skillful in derision and mimicry, and despising men, who, so they said, spent their time in looking at a paper or scratching it with a feather, they did not study gentle modes of giving expression to their feelings. They wanted nothing but plenty of seals, and as for the fire of hell, that would be a pleasant contrast to their terrible cold. When the missionary asked them to deal truly with God, they asked when he had seen Him last.
“The cold as winter drew near was terrific. The eiderdown pillows stiffened with frost, the hoarfrost extended to the mouth of the stove and alcohol froze upon the table. The sun was invisible for two months. There was no change in the dreary night.”[[2]]
[2]. Hans Egede: the Rev. Thomas Laurie, Missionary Review of the World, December, 1889.
|The Reward of Faith.| The devotion of Egede to these degraded people was not shared by the colonists and traders who had come with him. When the expected ship failed to appear in the spring they announced that they would return. They had already begun to tear down the buildings preparatory to their departure when the faith of Egede was rewarded. A ship arrived and with it the welcome news that the mission would be supported.
During the summer, Egede, in his exploration of the various bays which indent the coast, discovered the ruins of one of the settlements which he had read about and which had seemed to beckon him to Greenland. There were only ruins remaining, but it seemed to this devoted soul that he could hear the echoes of Norwegian hymns and Norwegian prayers. The next year in a journey along the coast he found many other ruins, among them those of a church fifty by twenty feet with walls six feet thick. Nearby in the churchyard rested the bones of pastor and people.