tion of feeling under a yoke, but the uniform, sweet, unprovoked temper which implies absence of opposition or censure.

This state of the Swedish Church has been felt and acknowledged by an able writer, himself an enthusiastic admirer of its founder; and has called forth all his skill, to account for what militates against his most cherished convictions. He treats the question in connexion with the subject of the demoralized state of Sweden-an incontrovertible fact, which private sources confirm. We will give some of his preliminary statements, not only as information, but as in some sort exculpating our authoress, who, in the intimations of a bad state of society which we find in her works, at least did not go out of her way to invent what does not actually exist. Taste and instinctive propriety, indeed, commonly preserve her from enlarging on scenes of wicked passion, though certain unfortunate exceptions to this prevailing rule rise to our memory, and forbid our trusting too much to what seems a naturally pure and healthy imagination. However, whether a corrupt social state is portrayed or only inferred, its evil influence is taken for granted in characters scarcely less favourites with her on that account, and excused as something inevitable.

It is a singular and embarrassing fact, that the Swedish nation, isolated from the mass of the European people, and almost entirely agricultural or pastoral; having in about 3,000,000 of individuals only 14,925 employed in manufactories, and these not congregated in one or two places, but scattered among 2,037 factories; having no great standing army or navy; no extended commerce; no afflux of strangers; no considerable city but one; and having schools and universities in a fair proportion, and a powerful and complete Church Establishment undisturbed in its labours by sect or schism; is notwithstanding in a more demoralized state than any nation in Europe, -more demoralized even than any equal portion of the dense manufacturing population of Great Britain. This is a very curious fact in moral statistics. It is so directly opposed to all received opinions and long established theories of the superior moral condition, greater innocence, purity of manners, and exemption from vice or crime, of the pastoral and agricultural state of society, compared to the commercial and manufacturing, that if it rested merely upon the traveller's own impressions, observations, or experience, it would not be entitled to any credit. The traveller in a foreign country swims on the surface of society-in contact, perhaps, with its worthless scum, as well as with its cream; and is not justified in drawing sweeping conclusions upon the moral character and condition of a whole people from what he may meet with in his own little circle of observation. I would not venture to state this fact upon any grounds less conclusive than the following.'-Laing's Observations on Sweden.

Then follows a statement from the official returns, giving the number of prosecutions and convictions for criminal offences: all, offences he explains-involving some moral delinquency greater than the simple breach of a regulation or conventional law of the state; with a comparison between these returns and those of Norway, Denmark, Scotland, England, London, and Ireland, immea

surably to the disadvantage of Sweden. The rural population are bad, but Stockholm is worse.1 But we will not overwhelm our readers with pages of figures, from which the majority of mankind can gather so little. Mr. Laing proceeds to give his views of the causes of this astonishing state of things, and enumerates various reasons-as, for instance, the preponderance of privileged classes, and the influence and example of a dissolute court. The cause, however, which most concerns our argument, and which appears to us most remarkable, he leaves to the last; we give it with his remarks, reminding our readers that Mr. Laing himself is a zealous Presbyterian, and therefore not likely to be biassed on the side of his argument;-his acknowledged character for candour and impartiality may at any rate justify us in assigning some weight to it :

Another cause I conceive to be, that although Luther's reformation found the minds of men in part of Germany, Switzerland, Holland, England, and Scotland, prepared for it, and demanding a form of Christianity more intellectual, more addressed to the understanding, and less to the senses, than that of the Roman Catholic Church, the public mind in Sweden was in no such advanced state. The change was the act of government, connected apparently with the policy of the new dynasty, and supported by an enlightened few, and by the inferior resident clergy, not averse to be relieved from celibacy and other restraints; but the public mind appears to have been in a state of apathy, in that age, on religious concerns, No sects, schisms, preachings, meetings, publications, indicate such a ferment in the public mind here at the time of the Reformation as in England, Scotland, and other countries. The resident Catholic clergy became, with few exceptions, Lutheran; and a few ceremonies less, a little difference in church forms, were all the changes which the mass of people saw; for the public mind was not advanced so far as to appreciate the difference of doctrine, Gustavus I. always denied that he had introduced a new doctrine; and at the beginning of John III.'s reign, says Geyer, the people did not know but that they were still Catholics singing Swedish mass. The country is too extensive and too thinly peopled, even at the present day, for the effectual diffusion of religious knowledge, or the spread of zeal, by preachings, or the press. As far as regards the influence of religion on morals and conduct in private life, I conceive the Reformation has not worked beneficially in Sweden. It found the public mind dormant, and sensible to nothing in

1 'Figures do not bring home to our imagination the moral condition of a popu lation so depraved as that of Stockholm.... Suppose a traveller standing in the streets of Edinburgh (as he might in Stockholm) and able to say from undeniable public returns, "One out of every three persons passing me is, on an average, the offspring of illicit intercourse; and one out of every forty-nine has been convicted within these twelve months of some criminal offence !" There are two minor

causes, both however showing a degraded moral feeling, which were stated to me as contributing much to this low state of female morals. One is, that no woman in the middle or higher ranks, or who can afford to do otherwise, ever nurses her own child. A girl who has got a child is therefore not in a worse, but a better situation, as she is pretty sure of getting a place for two years, which is the ordinary time of nursing. The illegitimacy of the child is in this community rather in recommendation of the mother, as the family is not troubled with the father or friends; as to the girl's own child, there is a foundling hospital-the second minor cause.'-Laing's Tour in Sweden, p. 116.

religion but the external observances of a ceremonial church; and was superinduced on it in that state, and in that state it remains. In no country are the exterior forms and decencies of public worship better attended to. The churches are substantial, and not merely well kept up, but even decorated inside and outside; and there is a kind of competition between parishes for erecting elegant structures for public worship. The clergy are fairly endowed, well lodged, and in general on good terms with their flocks; they are all well educated men, and form a body of great power in the state, the chamber of clergy being one of the constituent parts of the diet. Yet, with all these exterior signs of a religious state of the public mind, and with all the means of a powerful church establishment unopposed by sect or schism to make it religious, it is evident, from the official returns of crime, that in no Christian community has religion less influence on the state of public morals. The just inference is, that no spirit truly religious has ever been generally kindled in this country; that the Reformation, as far as regards the moral condition of the Swedish people, has done harm rather than good, for it has merely substituted one ceremonial church for another; and that which it supplanted, if considered apart from religious doctrine or sentiment, and merely as an establishment for the check of immorality in private conduct, by its observances and rules was, of the two, the more effective system of rural police over a rude and ignorant people. Rude and ignorant as the Irish Catholic population are, their priesthood keeps them free from such a list of heavy crimes as Lutheran Sweden presents from her rural population alone, in numbers little exceeding 2,735,000 souls.'

So incompetent does Mr. Laing deem the Lutheran Church of Sweden to stem the torrent of evil that threatens to overwhelm it, that his hopes, after all, rest exclusively in the lower orders :

'The regeneration of Sweden, her restoration to the rank of a moral nation, will probably be effected by means directly opposite to those which are working on society in England. There, it is the influence of a virtuous middle and higher class, penetrating through a mass of ignorance, poverty, and vice, in the vast population called into existence by our manufacturing prosperity. Here the impulse will come from below. It will be a virtuous, labouring population, influencing a priesthood and upper class; the former, too far removed by corporate and political rights from the condition of the class they should instruct; the latter, dissolute, idle, dependent on court favour, and independent of moral character or public opinion.' - Laing's Observations on Sweden.

In the eyes, then, of an impartial inquirer, Swedish Lutheranism is to its children merely a religion of forms; one that exacts only an external obedience, or perhaps we should say acquiescence, and is content to leave their thoughts free and uncontrolled. Nor are its rules very burdensome or stringent. Though the lower orders are described as excellent church-goers, the higher classes, if we may trust our authoress, appear to suit their convenience in this respect, and to wish to make up by excited devotion when they do go to Church, for the absence of a punctual, even weekly attendance. Daily Service, and that a mere shadow, is only kept up in one or two Cathedrals; but the chief festivals are splendidly and universally observed. As a fact,

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persons seem able to conform to their national Church, and yet retain with it a certain opposing worship after their own heart, according to their individual fancy and intellectual development. No one can become acquainted with Scandinavian literature without being struck by the evident hold which the old heathen worship maintains over all minds, ignorant or refined. The land is full of superstitions, which the poor blindly believe, and join with their Christianity; and which the intellectual refine, philosophize, poetize upon. Their hearts are, as it were, yet set upon, still cling to, their old gods. It is a sort of patriotism and national pride to talk to one another of Thor, and Odin, Valkyria, and the good Balder;' to repeat the heathen legends, to quote the Sagas and the Edda,that love for the great and strong may awake therefrom.' These names are still household words among them they haunt them in their solitary musings, amid the beautiful scenes of nature, and in their dreams. The old gods of the land have still a half-unconscious worship; they fall in strangely with the new lights of the age, and are in a kind of grotesque harmony with the spirit of the nineteenth century; and men who would think it unphilosophical implicitly to believe their Bible, will seek for deep meanings and hidden truths in the fierce, wild legends of their barbarous forefathers. We are reminded of the inhabitants of the Samaritan cities, who feared the Lord, and at the same time served their own gods. This may be felt a harsh judgment, but the fact, at least, of a continued reference to heathenism, and that in an affectionate tone, cannot be denied. We, too, have had ancestors who worshipped Thor and Odin; but who ever talks about them? who regards them with more reverence than if they were so many six-armed Hindoo idols? It may be one of the many boasted advantages of our mixed race, that such temptations have been driven out of us. They are, however, as we have said, very tractable deities, and follow the triumphal car of modern enlightenment with a somewhat crest-fallen submission. Though these gods of the land have a certain precedence and permanence, yet all claims to divinity are listened to; and our authoress sometimes shows herself very strikingly impressed with a fine statue of Minerva or Hebe-not merely with the sculptor's skill, but as if he had infused a certain spirit and presence into his work.

All this being granted when the occasion allows such displays, our authoress, in the ordinary progress of her narratives, shows frequently a devotional spirit and a pious fervour inconsistent enough with the propensity we have dwelt upon : but there is one attribute in the God of Christians which does not enter into her creed, which forms no part of her idea of the

Supreme Being;-she does not see in Him a jealous God!'the awful announcement must be a stumbling-block to her, as to many others, which recalls the thunders of Sinai in our dispensation of mercy,-Our God is a jealous God, and a consuming fire. There is in her writings, and doubtless in her heart, much piety and warm devotion, reverence for holiness of life,―longings after the invisible,-high aspirations,-good thoughts; but no fear; no jealous, exclusive worship. The Christian faith, with her, is one of many systems,-the crowning system, and as such to be preferred;—but it is not the one truth as opposed to all error; it is not a creed stern, dogmatic, uncompromising; but a blending of all that in her mind is good and fair, and a rejection of all that her heart shrinks from; and it is her own reason, or, as she thinks it, the heart of man, that is the standard and guide, not an external inexorable rule, to which man's reason must submit itself. The aim, rather, is to fit Christianity to the size and stature of each mind, and to persuade people to be religious by assuring them they already are so; by telling them that the thoughts which spring naturally in them are in fact Christianity, if they did but know it; not calling on them to renounce their own imaginations, and embrace a creed in some sort, perhaps, repugnant to their undisciplined reason. With this state of mind, a Church of externals to affect and excite the imagination, and yet making no stern exclusive demands on the faith and reason, exactly harmonizes. There seems no need for them ever to come into collision, nor does it appear that they ever do. Novelists must not, we know, be regarded as authority in such a question as the efficiency of a Church, except so far as what we read in their works tallies with what we learn from other sources, when, as a sort of indirect evidence, their testimony may be received. In our country, we feel convinced that any writer advancing such opinions as we find in Miss Bremer, would be in direct antagonism with his Church, not in apparent harmony with it. The particular individual theories advanced are of course, as in all fictions, those of the Authoress herself, for which no one else need be accountable.

However, Miss Bremer's do not aim to be what in any strict sense may be called religious novels. She takes her own course, developing her own views, apparently not conscious of infringing any rule, or opposing any man's prejudices. She has one enigma which she seeks to solve, and one panacea for all evils moral and physical. The enigma-the question of questions, is, 'What is Life?'-the universal panacea is 'Love;' and these two watchwords pervade all her works.

And first, of Life.' Authors have, by prescriptive right, the privilege of representing the whole world, the entire human family,