Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/161

Rh greatest charm. Nor does he on the whole assume the uncompromising attitude of his fellow-protestants, and unlike the latter, he did not wholly break with the past. On the contrary, he protected all of the old that seemed to him useful or worthy of preservation, and at the same time he availed himself chiefly of the new elements of culture. In this respect Luther's work was of the greatest importance to him. In the first place the powerful words of the German reformer helped him to become clear in reference to those very ideas with which he had long been struggling without any satisfactory result, and they freed him from many prejudices which still clung to the times, and which prevented his independent intellectual development. Already the works he had published before he became a Lutheran contain distinct reformatory elements, and they clearly reveal the leading thought in his whole literary career, which was, that no one can be saved without the gospel and the holy faith. This was not only in direct opposition to the axiom of the Catholic church concerning the saving power of good works, but it also with equal emphasis urged that the word of God must be made accessible to the common man. In the "Jertegnpostille," mentioned above, he asserts that "no one must believe the gospels to be more sacred in one tongue than in another, but everybody should be able to read them in his own language."

By emphasizing the importance of faith and the right of the layman to read the Scriptures he had grasped Luther's fundamental idea before Luther had yet expressed it. To this idea he clung to the last, and all his numerous religious writings are full of it. He was not gifted with Luther's gigantic spirit, but he worked with fidelity and untiring zeal, and the influence of his literary activity for the advancement, spreading and final establishment of the work of the Reformation can hardly be overestimated. His Danish works, which have recently appeared in a complete edition, will forever retain their value, for he was a prominent and very