It is now about a thousand years since Christianity was first introduced in Sweden and Norway. Finland received the Christian religion later. After some resistance on the part of the people, Christianity became, in time and by the aid of acts of violence, the common religion of the three countries named. The Catholic Church held sway over the minds of the people until the time of the Reformation. Since the closing years of the sixteenth century the Lutheran has been the established Church of Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
So far as these three countries are concerned the Lutheran Church is, generally speaking, characterized by an unconverted membership. This accords also with the records of history. It cannot be otherwise. The Lutheran Church in the countries named is recruited, not by persons who through the preaching of the gospel have become converted unto God, but by the newborn children, legitimate and illegitimate, of its members.
Religion, generally speaking, with the members of this church consists in attendance upon the public services appointed. The hope of salvation, generally speaking, with the membership of this church is, at the best, based upon the pardoning and redeeming mercy of God through Jesus Christ, communicated, as it is said, through faith by the confession of sin and the participation of the sacrament of the holy supper.
The preaching of this church is, at its best, mainly the holding forth of the religious sentiments which are to be read in the printed sermons of the clergy of the Lutheran Church of Germany, this not as a matter of plagiarism, but as the result of the theological training given the candidates for the ministry at the Lutheran theological seminaries in the countries of which I am speaking. This preaching is addressed to hearers who are supposed to belong to the spiritual kingdom of Christ, and of being the objects of redeeming grace.
The morality of the membership of the Lutheran Church in the three countries named, and consequently of the people of Sweden, Norway, and Finland, is that of the nominally Christian world at large, and abounds. Religion is not allowed to interfere with business or with pleasure or with the gratification of the lusts and appetites of the flesh.