The Reformation fires kindled by Luther and his contemporaries in Wittenberg spread with amazing rapidity to all parts of Europe. In the year that Luther nailed his famous theses on the chapel door at Wittenberg, two brothers—Olavus and Laurentius Petri—arrived from Sweden to study at the university made famous by Luther and Melanchthon. They were sons of a village blacksmith at Örebro, Sweden.
In 1519 they returned to their native land, full of reforming zeal. Olavus was the more fiery of the two brothers, and he lost no time entering into the political and spiritual storm that was threatening to break over their country. In the Stockholm massacre the following year Olavus almost lost his life when he cried out in protest at the cruel beheading of his friend, the bishop of Strengnäs. Only the intervention of a Wittenberg acquaintance, who asserted that Olavus was a German citizen, saved the young man from a similar fate. The massacre had been instigated by Roman intrigue.
Olavus preached boldly against the sale of indulgences and other abuses of the papal church, and, when the Swedish revolution placed Gustavus Vasa on the throne in 1523, the young reformer found a powerful ally in the new monarch. Despite protests of the ecclesiastical authorities, the king ordered a pulpit placed in the cathedral church of Stockholm and gave Olavus permission to preach to the populace in the native tongue.
The following year the two brothers were summoned to appear before the papal authorities at Upsala, but, when neither threats nor bribes could induce them to desist from their high-minded purpose, they were placed under the ban. This, however, made them only the more determined to carry out their Reformation plans.
Laurentius Andreae, archdeacon of Strengnäs, also had been converted to the principles of the Reformation and powerfully espoused the cause championed by the Petri brothers. In 1523 he was appointed by Gustavus Vasa as chancellor to the king, and it was largely through his influence that the Lutheran teachings were approved by the Diet af Vesterås in 1527. The younger of the Petri brothers, Laurentius, was named Archbishop of Upsala, Primate of Sweden, in 1531.
The Swedish reformers were apt pupils of Luther and quickly made use of the same spiritual weapons in their own country that he had found so effective in Germany. It is significant that the Word of God and a hymn-book in the vernacular were given to the Swedish people in the same year. It was in 1526 that Laurentius Andreae published his translation of the New Testament in Swedish, and simultaneously Olavus Petri issued a little hymn-book entitled, “Swedish Hymns or Songs.”
This marked the beginning of evangelical hymnody in Sweden. The little book contained only ten hymns, five of which are believed to have been original productions of Olavus Petri himself, and the other five translations from Luther’s first hymn-book of 1524. Although no copy of the first Swedish hymn-book is now known to exist, it is believed that Petri’s beautiful hymn, “Our Father, merciful and good,” appeared in this historic collection. It occurs in a second edition, called “A Few Godly Songs Derived from Holy Writ,” published by the Swedish reformer in 1530. A few fragmentary pages of this hymn-book were discovered in 1871.
How far Olavus Petri had imbibed the spirit of Luther is reflected not only by the fiery zeal with which he proclaimed the doctrines of the Reformation in Sweden, but also in the character of his hymns. “Our Father, merciful and good” is so strongly suggestive of Luther’s style that it was regarded for a long time as a translation of one of Luther’s hymns. It is now known that there is no such hymn of German origin.
Most of Petri’s hymns, however, are translations of German or Latin originals. One of these is the beautiful Advent hymn:
Now hail we our Redeemer,