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a- EVANGELICAL MOVEMENTS. NEW READERS. 371
man and an eminent botanist,
7
skilled above all other men
of his age in the power of distinguishing certain forms of
northern vegetation, such as those of the
"
salices
"
or
willow-tribe. He was sent as pastor to the northernmost
corner of Sweden, beyond Haparanda, where he found the
people sunk in vice, especially that of drunkenness. He
preached the law, therefore, rather than the Gospel. He
strongly inculcated public confession of sin, and he used
largely the methods of absolution and excommunication.
He strove also to make sin loathsome by his cynical
descriptions of its effects. But his realistic language while
it touched the common people was very distasteful to the
educated. His preaching proved for a time very effective ;
but his revival was connected with the strange outward
manifestations in which fanaticism has so often expressed
itself convulsive movements of the body, loud cries and
groans, ecstatic embracings, dances, fainting fits and the
like.
Excesses arose into which it was necessary to inquire,
and the visitation of the good Bishop of Hernosand, Israel
Bergman, the successor of Franze"n, did justice to all that
was healthy in the movement and its much-loved chief.
Laestadius died in 1861, and his followers than turned
round from the legal view of religion to a kind of hyper-
evangelical belief, and to a close sectarianism, according
to which salvation was limited to their own body. The
cries, which at first were occasional, became a regular
accompaniment of public worship, and took the form of
wolf-like howls
"
hih ! huh!" from which the popular
name "
Hihuliter
"
has been derived. Nevertheless, as
the La3Stadians are not officially registered as a sect, there
is some hope of their restoration to the National Church.
7
The Biographist Lexicon and the Nordisk Familjebok
practically only recognize him as a botanist. The Church his
tories, of course, describe his religious work, and there is a full
account in Cornelius: Hist., 226-32. There is also a larger
life by J. A. Englund : Lars Levi Lcestadius : en Kyrklig tidsbild
(extracted from the Teologisk Tidskrift), Upsala, 1876.
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