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382 VIIL THE MODERN PERIOD (A.D. 18121910).
Both Denmark and England felt the responsibility of
their foreign possessions as a call to mission work among
the heathen in a way that Sweden, which had few such
possessions, could not be expected to do. Work among
the Lapps did, indeed, as we have seen, begin early, and
produced much fruit. The good work of Fjellstedt and
Hogstrom in the eighteenth century was continued by
Petrus Lsestadius, a younger brother of Lars Levi, who
was active in Pitea from 1826 to 1832 and later. The result
of his and others work was an attempt by the government
to concentrate the education of the Lapps into four schools,
but the nomadic spirit of the people was too strong, and the
clergy who minister to them still have to follow their
wanderings.
After Kjernander, of whom I have already spoken, who
stands almost alone in the eighteenth century, the first im
portant Swedish missionary and promoter of missions to
distant lands was Peter Fjellstedt (1802 1881), son of a
peasant in Vermland. In 1829 he entered the service of
the English Church Missionary Society, and served for
four years in the Tinnevelly Mission in Southern India.
After that he was employed in Asia Minor at Magnesia,
near Smyrna, for another five years, especially in distribut
ing the Bible in Turkish. The rest of his long life he
spent for the most part in his own country, zealously serv
ing the same cause in other ways, especially as editor of
the Lunds Missionstidning, and as a preacher for the
Basel Missionary Society.
13
He was a great linguist, and
kept up a correspondence with missionaries in many parts
of the world. A school was founded in his honour, which
bears his name. It is now in Upsala, and most of the
pupils become clergy in Sweden or America, while some go
out as missionaries to India and Africa.
Fjellstedt worked hard, but it was some time before the
13
The latter part of Fjellstedt s life is described in Peter
Fjellstedt : hans verksamhet i
fosterlandet mellan ftren 1843-81,
af Emilia Ahnfelt-Laurin, Stockholm, 1881.
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