“Do you know,” said the Parson, “I wonder that, under such circumstances, you have no dissenters in Norway; our Wesleyans arose from precisely the same cause. The spoliation of our Church having diminished our number of priests, and very seriously impaired the discipline which might, in some measure, have kept the remainder to their work, the people in many districts became heathens, much like your own people, in fact; and when teachers rose up among them, men followed them not because they were orthodox, but because they were the only teachers to be had. But you have some sort of dissenters, too, have you not?”
“O, the Haugerites. Yes—they are not dissenters, either. Hauger held a good many doctrines of that arch-heretic, Calvin: New Birth, as distinct from Baptism; Predestination, Election, and so forth; but neither he nor his followers separated from the Church. In truth, religion is at too low an ebb among us for dissent; we have no more strength to throw up dissenters, than an exhausted field has to throw up weeds. Hauger succeeded, because he was not only a pious, but a practical man; he was rich, too; he set up saw-mills and iron-works, and advanced the money;—it is no wonder he set up a religious party. But they are going down now.”
“Ah, I understand—what we call in Ireland, soup Christians; and now Hauger is dead, the spring has run dry?”
“No not at all—I do not mean to say that the practical turn of his mind was not a recommendation to his theology; but though he preached and did good, his good offices were not confined to his own followers; his sect is subsiding because it has no distinctive tenets, any more than that of your Wesleyans. You made a great blunder; by turning Wesley out of the Church, you forced him to set up a Church government of his own; it is that government, and not his doctrines, which keeps his followers in a state of antagonism to a Church with which they have no real doctrinal difference. We were not such fools with Hauger; he met with a little persecution himself—for we Norwegians are not tolerant,—but we were wise enough to leave his people alone, so they did not think it worth while to differ, and in fact never did.”
“I think there may be another reason,” said the Parson: “with you a sectarian loses his rights of citizenship, by the fact of his being a sectarian.”
“Well, and why should he not? by leaving the national Church he makes himself a foreigner; we do not persecute him any more than we persecute any other foreigners, but we do not allow foreigners to legislate for us, neither will we let him, or any man choose which of our national institutions he will adhere to and which he will not—and our Church is one of our national institutions;—we say to him, and to you alike—you are strangers, both of you, you are both very welcome to stay here, and to live under the protection of our laws; moreover, we are very ready to naturalize either of you, and to receive you as citizens of our country if you like, but choose for yourselves; you cannot be Norwegians and not Norwegians at the same time. These are the laws, religious and political, of Norway, take them or leave them, just as you like, but we cannot let you divide them. Now where is the injustice of this?”
“I am sure I will not take upon myself to say,” said the Parson, laughing; “supposing always, the State meddles with Church affairs at all; and I, as an Englishman, have no right to find fault with you for that. But what does your Church itself say to all this; you called Calvin, just now, an arch-heretic, what do you say about his followers? Besides, it strikes me that there is a little difference of opinion between your friend Hauger and St. Paul, on the subject of female preachers, to say nothing of his unordained preachers, which all of his people were; but that I suppose does not greatly disturb you, as you attach so little value to Apostolical Succession.”
This was a hard hit upon poor Nordlingen, who was a most patriotic Norwegian, but yet, as a Grundtvigite, was painfully aware of the want of divine commission in his Church. It was, however, a random shot of the Parson’s, who, speaking of the Norwegian Church as it then was, certainly was not aware that the reforms which Grundtvig and Mynster had effected in Denmark, had already penetrated to a Church politically divided from them. He took the opportunity of the bustle, caused by the servants bringing in the aftonsmad, to turn the conversation to less dangerous subjects, and occupied the rest of the evening, if not more profitably, at least more to the amusement of the ladies of the family, in drawing out the solemn Candidatus, who, fresh from his examinations, was brimful of theology, which, when once cheated out of his shyness, he was spilling over on every opportunity, and mixing, most absurdly, with the ordinary subjects of conversation.
The Church of Norway—if Church it can be called—is in a very anomalous state. Intensely Erastian, it is dominated over by the Storthing, and swayed by the political feelings of the country. These, which are called Norwegian and patriotic, are really Danish. Norway has never been strong enough, or rich enough, since the times of barbarism, to form an independent nation of itself: feeling its weakness, it acquiesced readily in the dominant position assumed by Denmark, during the Union of Kalmar, which grated so much against the feeling of the Swedes only because Sweden was conscious of its own innate strength and real superiority. When that union was dissolved, it left very bitter animosities between the two principal nations, which was participated in by Norway, whose feeling was with Denmark. These the lapse of time has mitigated, so far as the Danes and Swedes are concerned. They have been renewed, however, in Norway, by the forcible annexation of that country to Sweden, by the Congress of Vienna, in compensation for the loss of Finland; and thus the Norwegian Church, politically allied to that of Sweden, is affected by that of Denmark.
The original Reformation in Denmark, which involved that of Norway also, was exclusively a political movement; that of Sweden was political also, but grander interests were connected with it. Sweden was a country shaking off a foreign yoke, and the Reformation succeeded because the Reformers were patriots also. If reformation in religion is to be mixed with earthly motives at all, it could not have had a grander alliance; but the Reformation of Norway was a mere change of politics. It was forced on by the Court against the will of both clergy and people—the king, at that time, being nearly despotic. It was not resisted; there was too little religion—Romanist, or anything else—in the country for the people to feel any sort of excitement in the matter. After the fall of Christiern, a new religion was thought to be the most effectual mode of depressing the remains of his party. A certain German, of the name of Buggenhausen, was constituted the leading reformer; and, in fact, the Church of Denmark was not reformed, but destroyed, and Lutheranism imported in its place, and forced upon the nation by an arbitrary sovereign. The consequences were precisely similar to those which followed upon many of the Reformations in Germany. The Church remained in form, but the vital energy had gone from it. Many godly persons it had from time to time in its communion, but fewer and fewer as the time went on, and the traces it has still left of its vitality are few in number.