CHAPTER XIII.THE CHURCH.

“Mighty stands the cross of God,Smiling homeward to the soul.”Almquist.

“Mighty stands the cross of God,Smiling homeward to the soul.”

“Mighty stands the cross of God,

Smiling homeward to the soul.”

Almquist.

One reason why the fishermen were so anxious to reach Soberud was, that the next day was Sunday, and they wanted a day of rest, and a church to go to; and that was not to be met with, on the Torjedahl, nearer than Christiansand itself. Hitherto their church had been a remarkably tall fir-tree, which had, somehow or other, been overlooked by the wood-cutters, and stood some little way within the forest. It had been chosen on account of its fancied resemblance to a church spire, as it towered above the rest of the foliage; and the lower branches having been cut away, and the space round its trunk enclosed and decorated with green boughs—as all Swedish churches used to be decorated on high days before a royal ordinance was passed which forbade it,—and the ground strewed with fresh juniper and marsh-marigolds—as church floors are to this day,—it did make a very fair forest church for fine weather; and as all the party could sing, more or less, the service was performed a good deal more ecclesiastically than it is in some of our English cathedrals.

Norway is not in communion with England; indeed, strictly speaking, neither Norway nor Denmark are churches at all,—they are merely establishments. Sweden may, by some stretch of imagination and a little implicit faith in its history, be considered a church, and is so considered by the Bishop of London, who has authorised the Bishop of Gothenborg to confirm for him. But though neither the Englishmen, nor even the Swedes, considered themselves at libertyto communicate in the church of Soberud, there was no reason whatever against their joining in either the ottesång or the aftensång (morning or evening service), or even against their being present at the högmässe, or communion itself. The men, who had no very accurate ideas of theology, had joined in the English service very readily, and, indeed, had taken a good deal of pains in decorating the forest church, for both Tom and Torkel could read English as well as they could speak it; and Jacob pretended to do so. They were, however, all of them, extremely pleased at having the opportunity of going to a consecrated church.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable features of the country is the respect and reverence which all classes pay to their churches, combined with the very little effect which religion has on their conduct. Norwegians will face all sorts of weather, in order to be present at the högmässe of Sunday. Large sums of money—that is to say, large in comparison with the wealth of the parishes—are spent upon their churches, which are always in perfect repair, and always most carefully swept, and trimmed with rushes or green sprigs. A man would lose his character at once, and would be shunned by his acquaintance as a hopeless reprobate, if he neglected confirmation, or the Lord’s supper. Nothing, indeed, is more common than to see, as an advertisement—“Wanted, a confirmed cook or housemaid;” which advertisement in no ways relates to the capacities of the servant, but simply to her age, it being taken for granted that a person of a certain age must have been confirmed. Indeed, the legislature interferes with this: few offices can be held by unconfirmed people, or by those who are not communicants; and the legislature is only the interpreter of public opinion. No man is at present molested for any religious opinions he may please to hold; he simply loses his civil rights by seceding from the national religion. In fact, Norway is the most complete illustration of the establishment principle which exists in the world.

At the same time, education, as it is popularly called—that is to say, secular instruction—is almost universal. No one ever meets with a Norwegian unable to read and write.It may fairly be said that there is no country in the world in which the standard of popular education is so high, and the standard of popular morality so low,—where the respect for religion is so very great, and the ignorance of religion so very profound,—as it is in Norway. Sweden may be second in this paradox, but Norway is by far the first.

It is not difficult to account for both these phenomena. Few countries suffered more extensive church spoliation in the good old Reformation times than Norway and Sweden; and when, after that convulsion, men began to gather up the fragments, they had to choose between an ill-paid clergy whose social position would be inferior to that of almost all their parishioners, and a sufficiently paid clergy with enormous and unmanageable parishes. They chose the latter, perhaps wisely, as more likely to preserve the character and influence of the church till better times should come. They, therefore, grouped the parishes into districts, few of which were under ten or twelve miles long, and wide in proportion, some very much larger, and one more than a hundred miles in length. These districts are a collected group of parishes, whose churches are still kept up under the name of Annexkyrker, and service is occasionally performed in them, as a sort of protest of their right.

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 muchthat 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 religioushabits—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 terracewhich 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 nondescriptanimal, 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 asmight 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.

In no place does the Norwegian appear to so great advantage as when busied about the graves of his family; these are cared for by all who cherish the memory of the dead, as their occupants would be were they still on earth. Appointments are often made among distant members of a family, and little parties are arranged to meet at the grave of a common relative; the first object of all these is invariably to trim its flowers. These are not sad or solemn meetings; they are rather joyful reunions, much as if the families were visiting the house of their relation, instead of his grave. They are not even dressed in mourning, for their meetings are continued long after the time of mourning is passed: it is a sort of sober festivity. Much of the good that exists in the Norwegian character—their family affection, their patriotism, their attachment to their native country throughout all their wanderings,—may be traced to their graves.

Suddenly, the bells struck up, and every man removed his hat, bowing to the church as if returning its salutation. Other people, besides the funeral parties, now began to collect from different quarters; here and there a stray cariole rattled up to the churchyard gate, and an old grandmother or two was brought along in one of the queer-looking little carts of the country; but the people of Norway are anything but vehicular in their habits; indeed, except the main roads—and these are very few indeed—the country is in no ways calculated for wheeled carriages.

Boats were a much more fashionable mode of progression; several of these were already seen approaching from differentquarters of the lake, pulled by two or four oars, and containing a cargo of many-coloured petticoats, which looked, in the distance, like bunches of variegated tulips. Every Norwegian, man or woman, learns to row almost as soon as he learns to walk, and every Norwegian knows something of the principles of boat-building; and very elegant little craft, of the whale-boat build, they frequently turn out.

“Hallo!” said Birger; “we are in luck. I knew it was Communion Sunday, but we are to have a lot of christenings besides. Look at the little white bundles in their chrism-cloths, and the elegant white satin bows. I do believe they would none of them consider their children baptized without those white bows.”

“Have you Christening Sundays, then?” said the Parson.

“Not always: in many places the clergy set their faces against them. But the Norwegian is a gregarious animal: he dearly loves a set feast, and hospitably considers the more the merrier. In these country-places you will often find not only Communion Sundays, but Christening Sundays, and Wedding Sundays, and—”

“And funeral Sundays?” suggested the Captain.

“And funeral Sundays—you need not laugh, I mean what I say; in the winter we have a little frost here, hot as it is now,—and frost, compared to which your English frost is but a summer’s day. They cannot very well bury their dead in the winter, so they very frequently freeze them, and keep them till the frost breaks up. Whenever that happens it is of course necessary to bury immediately all that have died since the beginning of the winter, and thus—though I suspect you asked that question in pure joke—it really does happen, that besides gregarious communions, christenings, and weddings, they have gregarious funerals also.”

The bells now began to “ring in,” and that portion of the congregation who were not related to any of the little white bundles in satin bows, or were not destined to be godfathers or godmothers to them, came stumbling into the church, and arranging themselves as best they could on the benches.

To those coming in from the blaze of day outside, the interior appeared perfectly dark, so that the people wereactually feeling for their places. The little square windows looked like dots of light against the black walls, but as the eye accustomed itself to the darkness, the scene came out by degrees: the tracery of the chancel screen—the great crucifix seen over it—the altar beyond, heavy with carving and gilding—the font just within the screen—the pulpit just without it—then the congregation themselves became visible—the men on one side of the nave, the women on the other. It was high mass; for though the Scandinavian Church be reformed, she still retains the ancient expressions.

The short hymn which begins the service had closed, and the priest in his wide-sleeved surplice—mäss skjorta—was standing by the altar, while the Candidatus marshalled in the porch a little procession of the christening parties. When all was ready they entered the church, the congregation singing, as they advanced towards the chancel, one of the numerous hymns from the Bede Psalmer—to which little book, unpretending as it is, the people owe nearly all the very small acquaintance with the doctrines of their Church, which they possess.

In our service we recognise but two parties, the priest and the people—the English choir being, theoretically, at all events, merely the leaders of the people’s responses; whereas, in Scandinavia there are three distinct divisions of the service—the prayers of the priest, the responses of the choir, and the hymns of the people; which last are collected and arranged for seasons and occasions, in their Bede Psalmer, a book which, as they all sing more or less, most of them have at their fingers’ ends.

While this was proceeding, the Candidatus threw open the richly-carved doors of the chancel screen and admitted the christening party into the choir, arranging them round the font which stood at its entrance. The whole service was very like our own, except that, after the exhortation, the priest proclaimed his own commission to baptize, in the words of the three last verses in St. Matthew’s gospel, before reading the gospel from St. Mark which is used in the English Church; and afterwards announced the value of the Sacrament itself in the words of St. John—(chap. 3. v. 5, 6).Before the act of baptism, the priest laid his hand on the head of each child, severally, and blessed it; then, after sprinkling it three several times as he pronounced the name of each of the three Persons in the Trinity, he stepped forward to the doors of the choir, and presented the new Christian to the congregation, saying, “In the name of the Holy Trinity, this child is now, through holy baptism, received as a member of the Christian Church, and hath right given him to all the privileges joined therewith: God give His grace, that he, all the days of his life, may fulfil this his baptismal covenant.”

After a general thanksgiving for the new birth of the children, and a general exhortation to the sponsors on the subject of their duties, the congregation struck up another hymn from the Bede Psalmer, while the children were carried round the altar, which does not stand, as in our churches, close to the well, but has a passage left behind it, possibly for this purpose, the sponsors depositing on it their offerings as they passed.

In the meanwhile the priest, kneeling on the altar steps, was invested by the Candidatus and Kyrke Sånger (precentor) with the mässe hacke, a crimson velvet chasuble, embroidered in front with a gold glory surrounding the Holy Name, and behind with a gold floriated cross. He remained kneeling, while the Candidatus, paper in hand, went down the nave, noting those who intended to present themselves at the communion, in order to be certain that none should partake of it who had not previously given their names to the priest for approbation, and attended the early service of confession—called communions-skrift. This was not so very difficult to do, though none of the congregation had left the church; for each intended communicant wore something black or grey about him, in memory of the Lord’s death. When this survey had been completed, the priest rose, and facing the people, intoned the general thanksgiving, and then turning again to the altar, made his confession alone, in the name of his flock, the congregation itself being silent, though the choir, at the occasional pauses, chanted the Kyrie Eleeson. He then placed on the altar the “Oblaten Schalten,” or wafer basket, the silver flagon, and lastly the chalice andpatin, which were brought to him with great ceremony, the Candidatus and Kyrke Sånger, who carried them, being attended by the whole choir.

The outer doors of the church were then shut, and the Candidatus in his black gown and cassock having taken his place on the lower step, the priest chanted the Gloria in Excelsis, the choir taking it up after the first sentence.

After the consecration, the communicants were arranged in four divisions; the married men, and the married women, the single men and the single women; these knelt in the centre, while the non-communicants stood round them chanting softly the Agnus Dei, and bowing their heads as the elements were administered to each communicant, which was done individually, as with us.

There was then a general thanksgiving and a Hallelujah by the choir; after which the priest dismissed the congregation with his benediction, making the sign of the cross towards them in the air. This form, which was universal throughout three kingdoms scarcely more than a hundred years ago, has almost entirely disappeared from the Swedish Church, disused rather than forbidden; but many of the old customs which in Sweden have become obsolete, in Norway are religiously kept up. And besides this, politics have something to do with the matter; there is always a great affectation of Danish peculiarities, such as dressing the church with green boughs on Whitsuntide, among those who are not over well affected to Sweden. These and many similar ceremonials retained in Norwegian churches are punishable by fine or deprivation; but the people will have it so, and the priests are very willing to indulge them,—members of Storthing and law-makers as many of them are.

As for theology, the people are profoundly ignorant of that, while the priests themselves, who, nine out of ten, are learned divines,—thanks to the severe examination at Christiania which generally weeds out one half of the candidates every year,—are almost always politicians enough to borrow their churchmanship from Denmark, are just as much Grundtvigites, or Mynsterites, according as their bias is high or low, as if they lived in Copenhagen itself.

After the conclusion of the service the fishermen were lounging homewards, taking their time, and enjoying the weather, and the views, and the sunshine, and the Sunday quiet, and upon the whole, though all of then ardent sportsmen, by no means sorry for a day of regular rest, when the Pfarrherr himself, accompanied by his Candidatus overtook them. The Candidatus was a long, tall youth, fresh from college, conceited and shy at the same time, who looked, as Birger afterwards observed, as if he smelt of the midnight oil; but the Pfarrherr was a gentleman-like man, with a broad, good-humoured, fresh-coloured face, looking more like an English old-fashioned squire than anything else. He had been priest of Soberud for many years, and being a regular anti-Swede, was very popular. He had represented the district in several Storthings, and was likely to do so in many more, though he did belong to the commercial party, which in Norway, as in America, is aristocratic and tory, in opposition to the country party, who in those nations are the radicals.

In addition to this, he was the probst, or rural dean, which was a fortunate circumstance for him—for being an enthusiastic admirer of Grundtvig, he was a great deal too much of a ritualist and antiquarian for the continually receding Swedish Church, and, under other circumstances, could hardly have failed in being brought up before the Church Committee at Christiania, for his little peculiarities; though it is a fact that most of the ecclesiastical members of Storthing, who composed it, thought, felt, and, if they dared, would act, precisely as he did.

He spoke English readily enough—indeed, English is to the educated Norwegians what French is to us,—and, as a matter of course, invited the fishermen to share the hospitalities of the præstgaard. This, however, would have been a mortal offence to poor Torgenson, who, though he could not speak to his guests one single word except through an interpreter, would have been deeply scandalized, and, indeed, would have felt lowered in the eyes of his countrymen, had they deserted him. The Parson, however, being a professional man, was an exception, and Pfarrherr Nordlingencarried him off in triumph, Torkel promising to bring over his knapsack to the præstgaard.

The præstgaard was not so large and rambling a building as the hall, but was infinitely more comfortable; highly-polished birchen furniture, and well-stored bookcases, gave it an air of habitableness. The room into which they entered was the summer parlour, whose French windows, shaded by gauze curtains, were wide open, looking on a broad lawn and a sparkling little stream beyond it; a good sprinkling of juniper twigs took off, in a great measure, from the bare look of the carpetless floors which always strikes an English eye. It is a great absurdity, in a country which is not favourable for sheep, and whose woollen manufactures seldom go higher than the wadmaal, that the duty upon English woollens should be so absurdly high. But the fact is, the Storthing is so entirely in the hands of the democratic, or country party, that anything beyond a class legislation is hopeless. The idea is not that all the people should have warm blankets, but that the democratic and agricultural majorities should work up inferior wool. Weaving by hand is an agriculturist’s winter work.

The Priestess Nordlingen, as she was called, a smiling, pretty-looking woman, much younger than her husband, was occupied in laying the cloth for aftonsmad, assisted by the dowager priestess, who lived now on the other side of the little stream, but being on excellent terms with her late husband’s successor, spent a good deal more of her time in her old home than she did in her new one.[32]Servants they had, both of them, in plenty, for the præster are among the richest in the land; but no Norwegian wife is above acting as butler and housekeeper, and no Norwegian damsel, fröken though she be, is above waiting at table. It does not seem quite the thing to an English gentleman, to have the ladies waiting upon him; but certainly in the Norwegian grammar, if they have one, the masculine is more worthy than the feminine.

Forest life is pleasant, but a contrast is pleasant also, and the Parson, as he lay back in a peculiarly easy chair, sipping leisurely the dram which invariably precedes a Norwegian meal, and which, in the present case, was true cognac of unquestionable genuineness and undeniable antiquity, considered himself in very great luck indeed; in fact, much as he admired the rude abundance of the hall, he infinitely preferred the quiet elegances of the præstgaard. He made some such observation to Nordlingen.

“Yes,” replied he, “the Reformation has injured the Church cruelly, as an endowment, and has cut off five-sixths of its clergy; but we individual præster have not much to complain of as regards ourselves.”

“You must have pretty severe duties, though.”

“Well, they are not severe, because they cannot be done. My parish was originally six; these have been thrown together under one. If I had half-a-dozen curates, the parish could not be visited, nor the annex kyrker properly served; for in former times it supported six priests and six deacons; so what one cannot do at all, one soon ceases to distress one’s self about. The work is not done, cannot be done, and no one expects it to be done. We have work enough—especially those who, like me, are elevated to the Storthing,—but it is not ecclesiastical work.”

“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 separatedfrom 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 youlike, 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.“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 whatecho 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.”Sweden is a musical nation, and these hymns are extremely popular. So far as the author can find out, they are the only means by which ninety-nine Swedes out of every hundred have any knowledge whatever of the Christian doctrine, or in any way differ from their Heathen ancestors—the worshippers of Odin and the mythology of Asgard.As a specimen of Wallin’s poetry, we will take his hymn on the Creation—a paraphrase of the 104th Psalm,—perhaps as fine a specimen of rhythmic illustration as any that exists. We give it from Howitt’s translation:—“Sing, my soul,The Eternal’s praise,—Infinite!Omnipotent!God of all worlds!In glorious light, all star-bestrewed,Thou dost Thy majesty invest,—The Heaven of heavens is Thine abode,And worlds revolve at Thy behest.Infinite!Omnipotent!God of all worlds!Thy chariot on the winds doth go;The thunder follows Thy career;Flowers are Thy ministers below,And storms Thy messengers of fear.Infinite!Omnipotent!O Thou, our God!“The earth sang not Thy peerless mightAmid the heavenly hosts of old,—Thou spakest, and from empty nightShe issued forth, and on her flightOf countless ages proudly rolled,—Darkness wrapped her, and the oceanWildly weltering on her lay;Thou spakest, and, with glad devotion,Up she rose with queenly motion,And pursued her radiant way.“High soared the mountains,Glittering and steep,—Forth burst the fountains,And through the air flashing—From rock to rock dashing—’Mid the wild tempest crashing—Took their dread leap.“Then opened out the quiet dale,With all its grass and flowers;Then gushed the spring, so clear and pale,Beneath the forest bowers;Then ran the brooks from moorlands brown,Along the verdant lea,And the fleet fowls of heaven shot downInto a leafy sea;—’Mid the wild herd’s rejoicing throng,The nightingales accord—All nature raised its matin song,And praised Thee—Nature’s Lord:O Thou, who wast, and art, and e’er shall be!Eternal One! all earth adoring stands,And through the works of Thy Almighty HandsFeels grace and wisdom infinite in Thee!“And answer gives the sea,—The fathomless ocean—The waste without end—Where, in ceaseless commotion,Winds and billows contend;—Where myriads that live without count, without name—Crawling or swimming in strange meander—Fill the deep as it were with a quivering flame;Where the heavy whale doth wanderThrough the dumb night’s hidden reign,And man unwearied with earth’s wide strifeStill hunts around death’s grim domain—The over-flood of life.“To Thee! to Thee! Thou Sire of all,Our prayers in faith ascend,—All things that breathe, both great and small,On Thee alone depend.Thy bounteous hand Thou dost unclose,And happiness unstinted flowsIn streams that know no end.”

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.

“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 whatecho 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.”

Sweden is a musical nation, and these hymns are extremely popular. So far as the author can find out, they are the only means by which ninety-nine Swedes out of every hundred have any knowledge whatever of the Christian doctrine, or in any way differ from their Heathen ancestors—the worshippers of Odin and the mythology of Asgard.

As a specimen of Wallin’s poetry, we will take his hymn on the Creation—a paraphrase of the 104th Psalm,—perhaps as fine a specimen of rhythmic illustration as any that exists. We give it from Howitt’s translation:—

“Sing, my soul,The Eternal’s praise,—Infinite!Omnipotent!God of all worlds!In glorious light, all star-bestrewed,Thou dost Thy majesty invest,—The Heaven of heavens is Thine abode,And worlds revolve at Thy behest.Infinite!Omnipotent!God of all worlds!Thy chariot on the winds doth go;The thunder follows Thy career;Flowers are Thy ministers below,And storms Thy messengers of fear.Infinite!Omnipotent!O Thou, our God!“The earth sang not Thy peerless mightAmid the heavenly hosts of old,—Thou spakest, and from empty nightShe issued forth, and on her flightOf countless ages proudly rolled,—Darkness wrapped her, and the oceanWildly weltering on her lay;Thou spakest, and, with glad devotion,Up she rose with queenly motion,And pursued her radiant way.“High soared the mountains,Glittering and steep,—Forth burst the fountains,And through the air flashing—From rock to rock dashing—’Mid the wild tempest crashing—Took their dread leap.“Then opened out the quiet dale,With all its grass and flowers;Then gushed the spring, so clear and pale,Beneath the forest bowers;Then ran the brooks from moorlands brown,Along the verdant lea,And the fleet fowls of heaven shot downInto a leafy sea;—’Mid the wild herd’s rejoicing throng,The nightingales accord—All nature raised its matin song,And praised Thee—Nature’s Lord:O Thou, who wast, and art, and e’er shall be!Eternal One! all earth adoring stands,And through the works of Thy Almighty HandsFeels grace and wisdom infinite in Thee!“And answer gives the sea,—The fathomless ocean—The waste without end—Where, in ceaseless commotion,Winds and billows contend;—Where myriads that live without count, without name—Crawling or swimming in strange meander—Fill the deep as it were with a quivering flame;Where the heavy whale doth wanderThrough the dumb night’s hidden reign,And man unwearied with earth’s wide strifeStill hunts around death’s grim domain—The over-flood of life.“To Thee! to Thee! Thou Sire of all,Our prayers in faith ascend,—All things that breathe, both great and small,On Thee alone depend.Thy bounteous hand Thou dost unclose,And happiness unstinted flowsIn streams that know no end.”

“Sing, my soul,

The Eternal’s praise,—

Infinite!

Omnipotent!

God of all worlds!

In glorious light, all star-bestrewed,

Thou dost Thy majesty invest,—

The Heaven of heavens is Thine abode,

And worlds revolve at Thy behest.

Infinite!

Omnipotent!

God of all worlds!

Thy chariot on the winds doth go;

The thunder follows Thy career;

Flowers are Thy ministers below,

And storms Thy messengers of fear.

Infinite!

Omnipotent!

O Thou, our God!

“The earth sang not Thy peerless mightAmid the heavenly hosts of old,—Thou spakest, and from empty nightShe issued forth, and on her flightOf countless ages proudly rolled,—Darkness wrapped her, and the oceanWildly weltering on her lay;Thou spakest, and, with glad devotion,Up she rose with queenly motion,And pursued her radiant way.

“The earth sang not Thy peerless might

Amid the heavenly hosts of old,—

Thou spakest, and from empty night

She issued forth, and on her flight

Of countless ages proudly rolled,—

Darkness wrapped her, and the ocean

Wildly weltering on her lay;

Thou spakest, and, with glad devotion,

Up she rose with queenly motion,

And pursued her radiant way.

“High soared the mountains,Glittering and steep,—Forth burst the fountains,And through the air flashing—From rock to rock dashing—’Mid the wild tempest crashing—Took their dread leap.

“High soared the mountains,

Glittering and steep,—

Forth burst the fountains,

And through the air flashing—

From rock to rock dashing—

’Mid the wild tempest crashing—

Took their dread leap.

“Then opened out the quiet dale,With all its grass and flowers;Then gushed the spring, so clear and pale,Beneath the forest bowers;Then ran the brooks from moorlands brown,Along the verdant lea,And the fleet fowls of heaven shot downInto a leafy sea;—’Mid the wild herd’s rejoicing throng,The nightingales accord—All nature raised its matin song,And praised Thee—Nature’s Lord:O Thou, who wast, and art, and e’er shall be!Eternal One! all earth adoring stands,And through the works of Thy Almighty HandsFeels grace and wisdom infinite in Thee!

“Then opened out the quiet dale,

With all its grass and flowers;

Then gushed the spring, so clear and pale,

Beneath the forest bowers;

Then ran the brooks from moorlands brown,

Along the verdant lea,

And the fleet fowls of heaven shot down

Into a leafy sea;—

’Mid the wild herd’s rejoicing throng,

The nightingales accord—

All nature raised its matin song,

And praised Thee—Nature’s Lord:

O Thou, who wast, and art, and e’er shall be!

Eternal One! all earth adoring stands,

And through the works of Thy Almighty Hands

Feels grace and wisdom infinite in Thee!

“And answer gives the sea,—The fathomless ocean—The waste without end—Where, in ceaseless commotion,Winds and billows contend;—Where myriads that live without count, without name—Crawling or swimming in strange meander—Fill the deep as it were with a quivering flame;Where the heavy whale doth wanderThrough the dumb night’s hidden reign,And man unwearied with earth’s wide strifeStill hunts around death’s grim domain—The over-flood of life.

“And answer gives the sea,—

The fathomless ocean—

The waste without end—

Where, in ceaseless commotion,

Winds and billows contend;—

Where myriads that live without count, without name—

Crawling or swimming in strange meander—

Fill the deep as it were with a quivering flame;

Where the heavy whale doth wander

Through the dumb night’s hidden reign,

And man unwearied with earth’s wide strife

Still hunts around death’s grim domain—

The over-flood of life.

“To Thee! to Thee! Thou Sire of all,Our prayers in faith ascend,—All things that breathe, both great and small,On Thee alone depend.Thy bounteous hand Thou dost unclose,And happiness unstinted flowsIn streams that know no end.”

“To Thee! to Thee! Thou Sire of all,

Our prayers in faith ascend,—

All things that breathe, both great and small,

On Thee alone depend.

Thy bounteous hand Thou dost unclose,

And happiness unstinted flows

In streams that know no end.”

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