# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

146 Grundtvig.

without partly adapting them to his own sense, partly reshaping them. And it
was here precisely that he not only did not disdain the support of the
irreligious party, but in his endeavors almost entirely identified himself
with it. With it he claimed the most unrestrained freedom for laity and
clergy alike. The clergy were to have the right to interpret Scripture and to
preach entirely according to their own judgment; there could be no talk of
compulsion to the liturgy, and the exercise of church discipline — without
any participation of the congregation or accountability to superior
authorities — was regarded as an inalienable right of the pastorate. All
legal binding of preachers to external norms in doctrine and the
administration of the sacraments, he held, only hindered the honesty and
sincerity, as well as the joyfulness, of subjective conviction in the
proclamation of the Gospel, and produced only a false semblance of unity.

Now, as we have seen, the freedom of the laity has been amply provided for by
the most recent legislation. The Grundtvigians have also achieved this: that
first the compulsory baptism of Baptist children fell away, and then, in
consistent progression, the civil compulsion to baptism for members of the
church was likewise abolished. Instead of the external disciplinary measures
that had hitherto been applied against despisers of the sacrament, it is the
government's intention that henceforth only spiritual censures shall be
proceeded with against them, up to the definitive exclusion of the parents
from the national church. The complete unrestraint of the clergy, however,
the party has not yet been able to win; whether on this point the
churchly consciousness still reacts too powerfully, or whether the radical
faction has not thought it worth the trouble to support its allies with full
resolve on this point, we must leave undecided. What, then, is the national
church really to the Grundtvigians? It is to them nothing more than a vast,
empty building with bare walls, under whose sheltering roof all sorts of
people may settle themselves as they please, just as the believers too may
pitch their pilgrim's lodging within it. "The national church is no communion
of faith, but can only be used as a maternal womb for actual communions of
faith; and in all likelihood especially for the Christian communion of faith
with Lutheran enlightenment, which has evidently, for several centuries,
pleased most Danes best (!)." —

Of the clergy and congregations in which the Grundtvigian principles have
gained the upper hand, men report Christian zeal and great vitality: the
sacraments are held in high honor, the services of worship in church and
home are celebrated with delight, preaching and song ring out in a fresh,
joyful tone, often blurring the boundary between the secular and the sacred.
Alongside this, however, great one-sidedness is said to be found; everything
turns on baptism and baptismal grace, on the joyfulness and blessedness of
faith, the chastening element of repentance recedes, men claim life
exclusively for themselves and deny it to their opponents.