“Towards the close of the last century,” says Hamilton, “the progress of stupor was complete, and vital Christianity seemed to have departed from the land; formalism was at its height, and, oddly enough, bigotry appeared to accompany it. An attempt at revival has been made during the present century, by Dr. Mynster, now Bishop of Copenhagen, and by Grundtvig, who may to a certain extent be considered as the leaders of the high and low Church parties; Mynster taking his stand on the doctrines connected with the Atonement; Grundtvig, on the faith once delivered to the saints. There does not appear to be any opposition between them, any more than there is opposition in the doctrines upon which they take their respective stand against Indifferentism and Rationalism; but this is the bent of their minds and the direction of their teaching.”
Mynster says, in a letter to Oechlenschlager, “I design, God willing, to open my mouth, and that in divers ways, certainly first to try what echo will answer my voice; but it shall not be quite in vain, for I know that I am among the called, and I muse day and night in watching and praying that I may be also among the chosen.”
“This object,” says Hamilton (Sixteen Months in the Danish Isles), “he speedily obtained; and from that time till the present, there has been no cessation of that gentle, but loud and solemn voice, persuading men everywhere to repent. In speaking and writing, Christ crucified has been the beginning and end, the first and the last.”
Grundtvig, who, like our Keble, was a poet before he was a preacher, and who has taught by his poems, no less than by his sermons ever since he brought the great powers of his mind to bear against Rationalism, some few years after Dr. Mynster began to be celebrated. “It seemed to him a sin,” he said, “that he should be taken up with Mythology, while the pastors of God’s flock were neglecting their duty;” so he stepped forward, asserting the Faith against human might and reason. His leading text, upon which all his preaching hinges, is the Faith once delivered to the saints,—pure and complete from the beginning, and incapable of change. “Every change,” he argues, “is a corruption, and the office of the Church is simply to restore, either by supplying or by lopping off what has been superadded to the original Revelation, and to preserve the faith in its purity.” His style of teaching, therefore, is necessarily traditional. Grundtvig, himself a most powerful preacher, has naturally a somewhat exaggerated idea of the importance of preaching, as opposed to reading. Preaching, he calls the living word. There is a curious mixture of truth and fallacy in his idea of never putting the Bible into the hands of an unconverted person, because there is no hope that such a person can understand it. “It was written for the Church,” he says truly; and he infers from this, that it must be expounded orally by a Churchman, because “faith cometh by hearing:” and from this text he argues, that the Spirit of God does not instruct in the reading of the Word. Grundtvig, from the first, has been the most uncompromising opponent of Rationalism, and his line of argument much more telling and difficult to withstand than that of his fellow-worker, Mynster; and, accordingly, though now popular, he has not passed through his course without getting into difficulties of a personal nature, from the opposition of the Rationalist party. He resigned his living at one time, and for many years was not a pastor of the Danish National Church at all.
These great leaders have their followers and their respective schools; but it is much to be feared that the revival which they have produced is merely the effect of their own personal influence and talent, for there is nothing in the system of the Danish Church which can perpetuate it,—that this Church, itself severed from the universal Church of Christ, has no inherent vitality,—and that, as the influence and name of even Calvin could not prevent even his own Geneva from becoming Unitarian when other teachers had arisen and his memory had faded from the recollections of his people, so the teaching of Grundtvig and Mynster is but a temporary revival of Evangelical teaching,—the produce of the individual, not of the Church.
The Swedish Church, as distinguished from the Danish and Norwegian, has far more pretensions to Churchmanship than either of these, though it may have lost more of the externals and ceremonial. Its Apostolic Succession has been doubted, and certainly the question is not entirely clear. At the time of the Reformation, Matthias, Bishop of Strengnäs, and Vincent, Bishop of Skara, had been beheaded by Christiern; and on the other side, Canute, the Archbishop, and Peter, Bishop of Westeras, had been beheaded by his rival, Gustavus,—so that, at the final Diet of Westeras, at which the Reformation was determined upon, Sweden could muster but four bishops, of whom it is said that Bishop Brask only had been duly consecrated; two others, Haraldsen and Sommar, were only bishops elect. The results of that Diet caused Brask to go into voluntary exile, and as all communion with Rome was thereby broken off, the question of the Succession hinges on the fact, that Gustavus had previously sent the fourth Bishop, Magnussen, elect of Skara, to be consecrated at Rome. This fact, which is distinctly affirmed by Gejer, has been questioned, though on no very good grounds.
The weakness of the Swedish Church, however, does not lie here, but in its peculiar connection with the State, which is perpetually involving it in secular politics, and as perpetually taking from its spiritual character. This defect existed before the Reformation just as it does now, and then, as now, formed its element of weakness: then, the bishops were treated with by contending sovereigns as the most influential barons—now, they are tampered with as the most influential politicians. Sweden is governed by a king and four houses of parliament—the Nobles, the Clergy, the Burghers, and the Peasants; and a bill passing any three of these houses becomes the law of the land. But, though the houses are of equal authority, the value of individual votes must vary inversely as the numbers of which those houses are composed: for instance, the house of the Nobles contains about 1500 members, and the house of the Clergy 80; the value of any single ecclesiastic’s vote is, therefore, eighteen times greater than that of any nobleman’s vote. The effect of this has been precisely the same as the more arbitrary nature of the Norwegian Reformation: the Church of Sweden has become—first political, then worldly, then Erastian; and, at the same time, the enormous size of the parishes operates precisely as it does in Norway,—the majority of the people are estranged from their Church through sheer ignorance of its doctrines,—the prescribed forms of Confirmation, Communion, and so forth, being gone through as essentials rather of civil promotion than of eternal Salvation.
It is not a matter of surprise, therefore, that, year after year, the Swedish Church is losing some portion of her Churchmanship, and degenerating more and more every day into a mere establishment. At this point it would have arrived long ago, had it not been for Archbishop Wallin, who, not only a sound divine, which most of the educated clergy are, but by far the greatest poet modern Sweden has produced, has embodied the doctrines of the Church in a series of hymns, which now form part of the Church service, under the name of “Bede Psalmer.”