While the Ordinances stripped the Swedish Church of a large amount of its property and made it subject to the [pg 424] king, they did not destroy its episcopal organisation, nor entirely impoverish it. Most of the monasteries were deserted when their property was taken away. The king knew that the peasantry scarcely understood the Reformed doctrines, and had no wish to press them unduly on his people. For the same reason the old ceremonies and usages which did not flagrantly contradict the new doctrines were suffered to remain, and given an evangelical meaning. The first evangelical Hymn-book was published in 1530, and the Swedish “Mass” in 1531, both drafted on Lutheran models. Laurentius Andreæ was made Archbishop of Upsala (1527), and a National Synod was held under his presidency at Orebro (1528), which guided the Reformation according to strictly conservative Lutheran ideals. Thus before the death of Gustaf Vasa, Sweden had joined the circle of Lutheran Churches, and its people were slowly coming to understand the principles of the Reformation. The Reformation was a very peaceful one. No one suffered death for his religious opinions.
The fortunes of the Swedish Church were somewhat varied under the immediate successors of Gustavus. His ill-fated son showed signs of preferring Calvinism, and insisted on the suppression of some of the ecclesiastical festivals and some of the old rites which had been retained; but these attempts ended with his reign. His brother and successor, Johan iii., took the opposite extreme, and coquetted long with Rome, and with proposals for reunion,—proposals which had no serious result. When Johan died in 1592, his son and successor, who had been elected King of Poland, and had become a Roman Catholic, aroused the fears of his Swedish subjects that he might go much further than his father. The people resolved to make sure of their Protestantism before their new sovereign arrived in the country. A Synod was convened at which both lay and ecclesiastical deputies were present. The members first laid down the general rule that the Holy Scriptures were their supreme doctrinal standard, and then selected the Augsburg Confession as the Confession of the Swedish [pg 425] Church. Luther's Small Catechism, which had been removed from the schools by King Johan iii., was restored. This meeting at Upsala settled for the future the ecclesiastical polity of Sweden. The country showed its attachment to the stricter Lutheranism by adopting the Formula of Concord in 1664.
Chapter VIII. The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.[386]
§ 1. The Reformation did not take its rise from a Criticism of Doctrines.
The whole of Luther's religious history, from his entrance into the convent at Erfurt to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows that the movement of which he was the soul and centre did not arise from any merely intellectual criticism of the doctrines of the mediæval church, and that it resulted in a great deal more than a revision or reconstruction of a system of doctrinal conceptions.[387] There is no trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of doctrines in Luther's mind during the supreme crisis of his history. He was driven out of the world of human life and hope, where he was well fitted to do a man's work, by the overwhelming pressure of a great practical religious need—anxiety to save his soul. He has himself said that the proverb that doubt makes a monk was true in his case. He doubted [pg 427] whether he could save his soul in the world, and was therefore forced to leave it and enter the convent.
He had lost whatever evangelical teaching he had learnt in childhood or in Frau Cotta's household at Eisenach. He had surrendered himself to the popular belief, fostered by the whole penitential system of the mediæval Church, that man could and must make himself fit to receive the grace of God which procures salvation. The self-torturing cry, “Oh, when wilt thou become holy and fit to obtain the grace of God?” (O wenn will tu einmal fromm werden und genug thun du einen gnädigen Gott kriegest?), drove him into the convent. He believed, and the almost unanimous opinion of his age agreed with him, that there, if anywhere, he could find the peace he was seeking with such desperation.
Inside the convent he applied himself with all the force of a strong nature, using every means that the complicated penitential system of the Church had provided to help him, to make himself pious and fit to be the receptacle of the grace of God. He submitted to the orders of his superiors with the blind obedience which the most rigorous ecclesiastical statutes demanded; he sought the comforting consolations which confession was declared to give; he underwent every part of the complex system of expiations which the mediæval Church recommended; he made full use of the sacraments, and waited in vain for the mysterious, inexplicable experience of the grace which was said to accompany and flow from them. He persevered in spite of the feeling of continuous failure. “If a monk ever reached heaven by monkery,” he has said, “I would have found my way there also; all my convent comrades will bear witness to that.”[388] He gave a still stronger proof of his loyalty to the mediæval Church and its advice to men in his mood of mind; he persevered in spite of the knowledge that his comrades and his religious superiors believed him to be a young saint, while he knew that he was far otherwise, [pg 428] and that he was no nearer God than he had been before he entered the monastery, or had begun his quest after the sense of pardon of sin. The contrast between what his brethren thought he must be and what his own experience told him that he was, must have added bitterness to the cup he had to drink during these terrible months in the Erfurt convent. He says himself: