Over these districts they placed rectors (Pfarrherrer), whose revenue, though not what we should call large in our country, is, nevertheless, greater than that of most of their parishioners; they gave them good parsonage houses (præstgaards), and, in almost every case, provided a dowager house and farm for their widows. And, while they rendered their position an object of competition, they provided that it should be adequately filled, by establishing the most searching examinations and the most careful provisions. The consequence of this is, that the Norwegian clergy are almost invariably very superior people, and, in a country where the election is absolutely free, they are very generally chosen members of the Storthing; while, in Sweden, they form an integral estate of the realm, and possess their own independent house of parliament.
In a country where there is so much ceremonial, so much that speaks to the understanding of the uneducated by speaking to their eye, it is impossible but that the externals of religion should be respected—the position of its ministers being such as is calculated to add to that respect, and not, as is too frequently the case in Roman Catholic countries, such as to diminish from it.
But, from the enormous size of the parishes, the externals are all that can possibly come to the majority of the people. The Scandinavian Church, learned as its individual ministers may be, is not the teacher of the people, nor can it be—no man can teach over fifty miles of country. Education, on the other hand, there is plenty of, such as it is; for, not only do the frost-bound winters give plenty of opportunity, but the Church is the establishment, and the laws of the land are such as to make reading and writing necessary to all. At the same time, this education is absolutely secular, it has nothing to do with the doctrines of religion, and, consequently, nothing with the morals of the people, except to increase their power of doing anything. Knowledge with them, as with all others, is power: but, disjoined from religion, this is generally the power of doing wrong. Whether this be, or be not, a correct solution of the paradox, at all events, the fact remains, and it has never been accounted for: Norway is pre-eminent in the education of its people, and is also pre-eminent in the statistics of crime.
But this is not the external view of the case: the mere visitor in Norway would speak of the very religious habits of the people. They certainly are a people of religious habits, and will continue to be so as long as the externals of religion are preserved with a magnificence and ceremonial sufficient to keep up their reverence. But they are, merely, a people of religious habits—they are not a people of religious feelings. The marriage between faith and works with them has been “dissolved by Act of Parliament, and neither their faith nor their works are the better for it.”
Nothing of this, however, was visible on that Sunday morning, as the Parson, when the hospitable and substantial breakfast of the farm-house had at last come to an end, walked quietly and musingly along the broad natural terrace which led to the church, and commanded a beautiful view over the wide valley and its quiet lake.
The church was a good-sized building, with nave, and aisles, and transepts, and chancel. It was handsome and striking, but very quaint and singular; every part of it was of wood—not planks, but great solid beams of absolute timber; centuries had passed over them, and there was no perceptible decay,—they were merely weather-stained, and harmonised in their colouring; and the whole edifice looked as if the day of judgment would find it as firm and as eternal as the Church it was built to represent. The whole was a confused collection of acute gables and high-pointed roofs, covered with diamond-shaped pine shingles. The windows were small, square-headed, and few in number, barely enough, indeed, to give light to the interior, and in no way contributing to the architectural beauty of the church. No Norwegian ever breathes more fresh air than he can help, or thinks of opening his church windows; it is not very often that he opens even the windows of his house.[31]
The sharp roofs, which are almost universal in the Norwegian churches, though extremely ornamental, especially where, as in the present case, they are shingled, are erected not for ornament but for use. It is absolutely necessary, in a land where snow falls so abundantly, to have such a slope that will not permit it to lodge in any quantities in a building which is not inhabited and constantly cleared. Were the roof no steeper than those of most of our English churches, the weight of lodged snow would soon become sufficient to bear down any strength of timbers they could put into it.
Although there was but little of ornament about the windows and doors—those more ordinary objects of ecclesiastical decoration—this evidently did not arise from want of respect or care for their church; for every gable—and there were thirty or forty of them, great and small—was decorated with elaborately-carved barge-boards, the ridge timber of every one of them projected three or four feet beyond the face of the building, and terminated in the head of some nondescript animal, particularly ugly, but still the record and evidence of infinite pains and labour. The chancel, the nave, and the belfry, constituted three separate pyramids, rising one above the other, consisting of from three to five stages each, and terminating in round towers, roofed with short shingled spires, like so many extinguishers. Each of these carried its huge cross, for neither Norwegian nor Swede is afraid of that holy emblem; and high on the top of all was the typical cock—and if it did not warn all sinners to repent, it certainly was not for want of being seen, for its size was colossal, and in its new gilding it glittered in the air for miles on every side. At the entrance of the churchyard, on the side facing the lake, was a lych-gate, also of solid timber, with a roof broad enough to shelter a whole funeral. The gate itself, which, when shut, formed a stile, was shod with iron spikes, to prevent the pigs from burrowing under. By the side of it was that satire upon Norway, the evidence of Karl Johann’s fruitless attempts to stem the tide of national habits—the stocks—of course unemployed—at least, so far as their legal purpose went;—they formed, however, a very comfortable seat, upon which Birger was balancing himself backwards and forwards, and trying to cross one foot over the other. The other fishermen, as decent as they could make themselves up for Sunday—which was rather dingy, after all, compared with the bright colours of the peasants’ dresses—lounged about, watching the assembling congregation.
It wanted some time to service, but there were scattered here and there about the churchyard several parties, who had already been for some time on the ground. Sunday as it was, they had brought with them their garden tools, and their waterpots, and their baskets of plants, or papers of seeds, and had tucked up their smart embroidered petticoats, or turned back their shirt-sleeves, according to their sex, and were busily employed about the graves.
These were not oblong mounds of turf, like the graves in our English churchyards, but raised borders with iron edging, and were, for the most part, pictures of neat and tidy gardening; wild flowers very often were all that grew there, little blue gentianellas, or lilies of the valley, such as might be met with anywhere in the open fjeld; more often than all, that innocent little white trailer, the anthemis cotula, which they call Balder’s eyebrow, and to which they attach a peculiar sanctity; but, even if they were wild, they always bore the traces of care and cultivation. Now and then a rose would be woven into the semblance of a cradle, or an edging of convolvolus major, twining round its supports, would form a pyramid or a canopy, with its fragile blue flowers already fading, though so early in the day, perhaps an apt type of those who lay below them.