# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1858_S265
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Church of Norway. 265

has given expression, may increasingly come to prevail — a spirit which in particular warns against one aberration: that of regarding, from the outset with suspicion, every sermon that does not bear a certain definite stamp as spiritually dead, and the preaching of those "priests" who hold office as such, as still happens here and there among the overwrought.

3. The Inner Mission. The question of how Christian feeling might be awakened and spread among the people was, back and forth, a subject of discussion at Christian assemblies. The beginning of the organization of a proper inner mission society was made by Skia, a town which, through the extent of the spiritual awakening it has gained, occupies a not inconsiderable place. The society constituted itself on August 8, 1853. The members of the society bound themselves to a fixed annual contribution, which was to be used to spread among the people the Holy Scripture and other smaller religious writings — which, however, were to contain nothing sectarian, but only the clear truths of salvation — and also to employ colporteurs for this purpose, wherever suitable, devout men could be found for it.

In Christiania the matter was likewise raised, and it was especially Lector Johnson who emphasized the right and the duty of love to intervene helpfully in the sorrowful conditions found even in the capital — only that this should happen in agreement with the church government and in accordance with the pure evangelical-Lutheran doctrinal system. The drafted statutes were communicated by Johnson, as provisional chairman (he later became president of the elected board), to the clergy for their assessment; they received the matter favorably, though, considering themselves "already obligated by virtue of office to the very activity that the inner mission intends," they declined any outward affiliation (which the society itself had not had in view either). The society constituted itself on January 22, 1855, under a board of 14 members, to which also belonged 3 clergy and the two university teachers Johnson and Caspari. Its activity was to extend not only to the distribution of the Bible and other writings, but also to Bible expositions and other addresses serving awakening and instruction. Since then, similar societies exist in various places in the country.

4. The Press. A "theological journal" had existed since 1846, and provided, besides news from home and abroad, treatises on important subjects. This ceased in 1857 with its 7th volume in its previous form, and in its place there now appears a "theological journal for the evangelical-Lutheran church in Norway," edited by Caspari, Johnson, and Nissen, whose first issue begins with the opening of a deeply learned historical treatise by Caspari on the origin and development of the Apostles' Creed (with a polemical tendency against Grundtvigianism). It intends to work toward the strengthening and edification of the Lutheran church through