Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/12

 The two predominant political parties in Denmark at that time, under whose influence he fell, were the "National-Liberal" party and the "Friends of the Peasants." The former had grown out of the Constitutional disputes with the dependent Duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, which culminated in the war of 1848, when the Danes were victorious. It was patriotic, anti-German, Scandinavian; and taught with unmeasured enthusiasm that no personal sacrifice was too great in the cause of Denmark.

The "Friends of the Peasants" were also Patriotic, but more democratically so, and declared that the welfare of their country depended mainly on the Peasant, whom they courted and exalted in every possible way.

Both of these movements also more or less directly influenced a man who was then one of the most remarkable figures in Denmark, Bishop Nicholai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the Saga-Priest; and through him reacted back on the Peasant. Born in 1783, he had spent his early life and manhood in combating the hide-bound orthodoxy and formal pietism of the State Church; and by the time the Constitution was granted he had gathered a great following in the Church, and had aroused the same sort of personal enthusiasm as John Wesley in England.

He saw that the peasant, though nominally free, was still bound in ignorance, an ignorance which he bent all his mind to dispel. He had