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3- EVANGELICAL MOVEMENTS. JANSSON. ROSENIUS. 373
I shall, therefore, extract some pages from an excellent
essay by the Danish Bishop Nielsen on the modern history
of Protestantism in the Northern Lands, from which I
have already drawn some material.
Karl Olof Rosenius was son of a clergyman in Pitea [in the
diocese of Hernosand]. The father was a friend of the
"
Readers," and the young Rosenius was early introduced into
the circle of the "awakened" or converted laity. Already, as
a student in Hernosand, he gathered into his room a circle of
such comrades. During a visit to his home, he made the acquaint
ance of Maja Soderlund, a remarkable woman, who had gained
a great name by her Bible classes in the neighbouring country.
She became, as it were, his priest and the confidant of his soul.
In 1836, at the age of twenty, he began, with Bishop Fran-
zen s dispensation, to preach in his native town, but his course
of study in Upsala went on slowly. The worldly life of the
students did not please him, and poverty, as well as illness,
hindered his work. In 1839 ne accepted a place as tutor in
the house of a nobleman, but there he fell into doubt and
temptation. He was ashamed to open his heart to his friends,
but rather sought for comfort and help in the Methodist
preacher, Georg Scott, in Stockholm. With the assistance of
this man he overcame his doubts, and soon began to preach
again, filled with depressing experiences of his own misery
and his own littleness, but also supported by a strong faith in
the unmerited grace of God. Scott saw the young man s
ability; but instead of advising him to complete his studies, and
become a preacher in the established Church of Sweden, he drew
him into a situation as a free-preacher in the Church which
had been formed by his own numerous friends Rosenius
confessed to Maja Soderlund that the reason why he had given
up all thoughts of taking Holy Orders was that it only seemed to
be good for those who wished to be
"
dumb dogs."
From 1840 he worked in Stockholm as a lay-preacher, with
out being ordained. He gathered many round the pulpit in the
new Methodist Church, and in 1842, he began, together with
Scott, to publish the periodical called The Pietist, which
soon found 5,000 subscribers. The name of the periodical was,
properly speaking, an erroneous one, for Rosenius was no
Pietist. The powerful sermons, which were preached by him
and by Scott, excited great commotion in the town, and on
Palm Sunday, 1842, a crowd of people pressed into the church
and drove Scott down from the pulpit by throwing stones; in
particular they accused him of speaking contemptuously about
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