The Mankato free press. [volume] (Mankato, Blue Earth County, Minn.) 1879-1924, 1912-11-08
Address By c. E. Bredeson

brilliant man in the courts of Eur
ope of his day, and that Ibsen and
Strindberg stand in the van of Euro
pean letters today. 1t is enough to
know that Oxenstiern and the great
est king of Scandinavia had plans
laid out whereby they should expand
their coming colonies and make them
more prepossessing than they at
last became in their frail boun-
daries on this side OF the
waters. But the king was need
ed elsewhere in a calling that
he himself saw to be more import
ant. In that duty he lost his price
less life, wherein lay, for the time
being, lull of disaster in the Swed-
ish possession.
ALLOW me to say, my Lutheran lis
teners, that We have a glorious his
tory-we DScandinavians and Ger
mans. Three hundred years before
Christ was born our Teutonic fathers
were padding along the Baltic. In
the year ia B. c., they scaled the
Alps, and about the same time they
were thrifty colonists in the lower
Danube. Thus when Christ was born
these wandering Teutons were thrift
ty colonists in the three strategic
centerS of Europe. 1t was these Hun
seattle Germans and Viking Scandi-
navians who coloniZed and made
England. The Roman soldiers i'll
England were then Teutonic in blood.
at was also these two Teuton ma
tons who discovered and settled Am
erica, the New Englanders being
Scandinavians who tarried a few
centuries, or less, in old England
en- route westward. And in a word,
therefore, the Germans and Scandi.
navians laid the foundation of Our
modern civilization, and in doing this
there was no more powerful agency
than the literary labors of the great
prophet raised in their midst-a man
who was not child of Jews, nor
of the Romans, nor of the Greeks,
but a German by the name of Mar
tin Luther.
Great characters are the great
epoch makers. A nation cannot be
greater than its greatest man. There
are men who typify the whole COM
posite personality of the nation. Mar
tin Luther was such a one. He was
She bright star whose bright CLEANS
pierced through to the very bottom
of the dark medieval closters. He
welded such a power with his pen that
Erasmus, the undisputed monarch in
the realm of letters, complained to the
king that "the people would buy and
read no other books than Luther's'
He made the little town of Witten-
berg as powerful in Europe as Rome
was powerful in the Latin world,
and Constantinople was in the Greek
world. So rare were complete Bibles
that they were chained in order to
secure them against theft. But Luth-
er made Germany the fatherland of
printing and he in turn shaped the
German language. Five thousand
copies of his new testament were
sold by December, 1922, for a price
OF over Sc per copy, and Hans Luft
printed 100000 copies at Wittenburg.
ut is due to that epoch making
man that religious liberty-the free
dom of conscience-was saved 1t is
due to the great military leadership
of Gustavus Adolphus that this
liberty was preserved. .....- 49,.
But it is not only to these two
men that we owe great victories. 1t
is more than anything due to the
strength of the Teutons, and above
all their unfaltering trust in God,
that has done all of this. And this
shall ever be the paramount issue
with the true Ger and the Scan
dinavian-God. This is the great
Summun Bonum which we shall
quietly go on perpetuating so that
men can believe what they cannot
see.
"And, in marked degree, this
must be the great issue with the
Scandinavians. We have behind Us
the grand mythology of the Vikings
Odin and Thor. We have the memory
of. the historic tenacity and north
wind insignation which character
lied our forefathers barbarous before
they would accept that white Christ
and cast their helmets into the sea.
And we are the representatives still
of that pure and northern discipline
which first, last and all the time,
has cared for the head and not for
gotten the heart. We are still III
representatives of those men WHO
carried with them upon the battle
field their Bible with their KNAPP
sacks, and sang Psalms on German
soil in the face of new Thermopo-
lies, and in the name of God sprang
the bolted doors of awakened reli-
glous tyranny, and opened the way
to the new order of things in the
free institutions of men.
| Little, even at this day, do we
realize the meaning of the overthrow
OF the Catholic house of Austria by
the SCATTERING defeat inflicted upol
it at Breitenfeld. We do this becaus.
we live in the sunlight of unprece-
denied prosperity, and we do not give
enough attention to our own origin
We are satisfied that the battle on
our own soil from Trenton on through
Sumpter to Appomattox are the
greatest battles in history But these
later battles were fought for civil
liberty while the battles for religious
liberty had previously been enacted
And, indeed, these battles in Ger
many were not battles merely for re-
llgious liberty, but for the overthrow
OF the old system of things. Had it
not been for the helping hand from
the north, the history and maps of
continents would have been entirely
changed, and it positively could not
have come to pass that the church
and state would be forever separat-
ed. And on the basis of first hav-
ing had the Saviour and preserver
Of religions liberty hrooI oman 70