n verse and later published under
the title of _Roskilde Rhymes_, was first read at a diocesan convention
in Roskilde Cathedral, the Westminster Abbey of Denmark. Although the
poem contained many urgent calls to the assembled pastors to awake and
return to the way of the fathers, whose bones rested within the walls of
the historic sanctuary, its reading caused no immediate resentment. Most
of the reverend listeners are reported, in fact, to have been peacefully
asleep when late in the evening Grundtvig finished the reading of his
lengthy manuscript. But a paper on "Polemics and Tolerance" which he read
at another convention two years later kept his listeners wide awake.

"Our day has inherited two shibboleths from the eighteenth century:
enlightenment and tolerance. By the last of these words most people
understand an attitude of superior neutrality toward the opinions of
others, even when these opinions concern the highest spiritual welfare of
man. Such an attitude has for its premise that good and evil, truth and
falsehood are not separate and irreconcilable realities but only
different phases of the same question. But every Christian, thoroughly
convinced of the antagonism and irreconcilability of truth with
falsehood, must inevitably hate and reject such a supposition. If
Christianity be true, tolerance toward opinions and teachings denying its
truth is nothing but a craven betrayal of both God and man. It is
written, 'Judge and condemn no one' but not 'Judge and condemn nothing.'
For every Christian must surely both judge and condemn evil.

"There are times when to fight for Christianity may not be an urgent
necessity; but that cannot be so in our days when every one of its divine
truths is mocked and assailed.

"You call me a self-seeking fanatic, but if I be that, why are you
yourself silent? If I be misleading those who follow me, why are you, the
true watchmen of Zion, not exerting yourself to lead them aright? I stand
here the humblest of Danish pastors, a minister without a pulpit, a man
reviled by the world, shorn of my reputation as a writer, and held to be
devoid of all intelligence and truth. Even so I solemnly declare that the
religion now preached in our Danish church is not Christianity, is
nothing but a tissue of deception and falsehood, and that unless Danish
pastors bestir themselves and fight for the restoration of God's word and
the Christian faith there will soon be no Christian church in Denmar