The established Church of Sweden is Lutheran, all
SWEDEN
52
SWEDEN BORG
sects of Christians, however, being tolerated. The king nominates the arehhishop and the bishops from a list of names presented to liim by the ecclesiastical author- ities. The archbishop of Upsala is the head of the Swedish Church, having under him eleven bishops. All ecclesiastical matters of importance are subject to the decision of the king. A revohition in religious matters is now going on in Sweden which cannot fail, in time, to make itself felt in its inrtuence on the future destiny of the national Church. Especially prosperous have been the missionary operations of the Baptists under the labors of the Kev. Andreas Wibcrg and his fellow-laborers. Thousands of converts have been gath- ered into Baptist churches, and the work of evangeliza- tion seems to be but in its infancy.
In 185-4 the Rev. O. P. Petersen was commissioned by the Missionary- Society of tlie Methodist Episcopal Church to open missions in the Scandinavian mission- ary; he had, <as an assistant missionary, Peter Larssen, w^ho went to Sweden and visiteil several families at Calmar. A mission was begrtn in 18(54: at Wish}', in the island of Gothland, and from that time the work has been very prosperous. The tieneral Conference of 187(i ordered the Swedish mission to be organized into an Annual Conference, which was effected under the presidency of bishop Andrews at Upsala, Aug. 7, 1876. The following is a smninary of the statistics of the mis- sion for 1879 : Number of ministers, 54; local preachers, 69; Sunday-schools, 138; teachers and officers, 505; Sunday-school scholars, 5500 ; members and probation- ers, 6800 ; churches, 38 ; probable value of churches, $396,825.
III. Education. — To the credit of Sweden it is to be said that she has provided most liberally for the educa- tion of the young. There is a common-school system, instruction being gratuitous, and children not attending the regular government schools are obliged to furnish certilicates that they are under the tuition of private teachers. The result of all this careful and systematic attention to education is that seldom is a Swede found who cannot read and write. The higher seats of learn- ing are well jjatronized. The University of Upsala takes high rank among the literary institutions of Northern Europe. Its home is in the town from which it takes its name — Upsala, forty-five miles north-west of Stockholm, a place of some 12,000 inhabitants. The attendance of students is large, as high sometimes as 1500, who gather here not only to pursue the regular course of coUegiate study, but to listen to lectures from the professors of theology, law, medicine, and philoso- phy. The university has a valuable lilirarj' of over 100,000 volumes, several museums and collections, a bo- tanical garden, and an observatory. Both the army and the navy are well represented hy schools, the for- mer having two well-conducted institutions, one at Carlberg and another at IMarieberg, designed especially for the training of officers of the engineering and artil- lery departments, and the latter having a school for naval cadets at Stockholm. There are to be found in Sweden — as there arc in all countries where the people are well educated — in all towns and villages, libraries, museums of art, etc., societies for the promotion of sci- ence and literature, publications in the form of news- papers and periodicals of many kinds, so that the diffu- sion of knowledge is wide-spread and healthy.
IV. Literature. — See Adlerfeldt, Histoire xMilitaire de Charles XII (Paris, 1741,3 vols. 12mo); Brown, il/emotVs of the Sovereiffn of Sweden and Denmark (Lond. 1804, 3 vols. 8vo) ; Arndt, Erinnerungen aus Schweden (Ber- lin, 1818, 8vo) ; Dunham, Hvstory of I)enma)-A; Sweden, ami Norway (Lond. 1833-34, 3 vols. 12mo) ; Gall, Reise durch Schweden in 1836 (Bremen, 1838, 2 vols. 12mo) ; Laing, Tour in Siaeden in 1838 (Lond. 1839, 8vo); Syl- vanus, RanMes in Sweden and Gothland, rcith Etchings by the Way-side (ibid. 1847, 8vo); Tham, Beskrifung ifver Sveriges Rike (Stockh. 1849-56, 7 vols. 8vo) ; Marryatt, Year in Sweden and Gothland (Lond. 1862, 8vo).
I Swedenborg, Emanuel, the founder of the New .lerusaleni Ciuirch (q. v.), was born in Stockholm, Swe- den, Jan. 211, lO.S.S. His ancestry were not noble, but of high respectability among the miners of the great
i Stora-Kopparberg, in the province of Dalecarlia. His father, .Jesper Swedberg (q. v.) or Svedberg, married Sarah, daugliter of Albrecht Behm, assessor of the Royal Board of Mines. Emanuel was their second son and third child. After the elevation of the father to the prelacy as bishop of Skara, the name was changed and the
: fainily ennobled by ipieen Ulrica Eleonora in 1719. Reared amid pious influences, the accounts we have
; of his earliest years seem to indicate a childhood of un- usual thoughtfulness and susceptibility to religious im- pressions. He says of himself, " From my fourth to my tenth year my thoughts were constanth^ engrossed by reflecting on God, on salvation, and on the spiritual af- fections of man. I often revealed tilings in my discourse
j which filled my parents with astonishment, and made them declare, at times, that certainly the angels spake through my mouth." Great care was bestowed on his education, which was acquired principally at the Uni- versity of Upsala, where he took his degree of Ph.D. in 1709, in his twenty-second year. He then visited Eng- land, spending a j-ear at Oxford and three more on the continent of Europe. At this time he was already a member of the Royal Society of Sciences of LTpsala, cor- responding with it while abroad. He sought ever\-- where the society of the learned, and commenced pub- lishing works almost immediately on his return, some of them poetical, others mathematical. His mind took an industrious and practical turn, and for many years he was almost wholly employed in scientific pursuits, in mining, engineering, and physiological studies. His family connections were influential — one sister inarried Eric Benzelius, afterwards archbishop of Upsala ; an- other was the wife of Lars Benzelstierna, governor of a province, whose son became a bishop; wliile other mem- bers of the family rose to ecclesiastical and civil digni- ties. He had a large circle of friends among the nobility and higher classes, and enjoyed abundant patronage at court. His rank entitled him to a seat in the Swedisli Parliament, and about 1721 he was appointed by Charles XII assessor of the Board of Mines,which made him also a member of the Cabinet. In 1724 he was solicited to ac- cept the professorship of mathematics in the University of LTpsala, but preferred the position he already occupied. Twelve years later we find him beginning to publish his philosophical works : first. Opera Philosophica et Mineirdia (Leipsic and Dresden, 3 vols, fol.), under the patronage of the duke of Brunswick; afterwards, his Principia: The Principles of Natural Things, or New Attempts at a Philosophical Explanation of the Phenom- ena of the Elementary World: — then came Outlines of a Philosophical A rgument on the Infinite and the Final Cause of Creation, and on the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body : — followed, a few years later, by the Economy of the Animal Kingdom (Amsterdam, 2 vols, 4to) ; and the A nimal Kingdom (vol. i, at the Hague ; vol. ii, Lond. 1745). There were many other tracts, essays, and volumes of minor importance, his last work of this nature being the Woiship and Love of God. These works are generally acknowledged as belonging to the highest order of philosophical thought. His declared object in all his investigations was to behold the wisdom and goodness of the Creator in all his works; giving his life to the discovery of truths, determined to rise through their different degrees to those of the highest order, for the sake of doing something useful to mankind and ad- vancing the best interests of society. The accounts show him to have been at this period a man of soliil virtue, piety, and decorum. These are the " rules of life" which he wrote down and preserved for his own guidance :