.
Norway, with a population of 1,500,000, thinly scattered over a very
large territory, has 485 parishes, with an average of 3600 souls apiece.
But the clergy are pluralists, and as many as five parishes are often
united under a single incumbent. Holstein has only 192 preachers for an
almost exclusively Lutheran population of 544,000. In Schleswig many
parishes have been deserted because they were too poor to maintain a
clergyman's family. Sometimes there are only two ministers for 13,000
persons. In the Baltic provinces the proportion is one to 4394. In this
way the people have to bear the burden of a clergy with families to
support.

The most brilliant and important part of this chapter is devoted to the
state of Protestantism in the author's native country. He speaks with
the greatest authority and effect when he comes near home, describes the
opinions of men who have been his rivals in literature, or his
adversaries in controversy, and touches on discussions which his own
writings have influenced. There is a difference also in the tone. When
he speaks of the state of other countries, with which he has made
himself acquainted as a traveller, or through the writings of others, he
preserves the calmness and objectivity of a historian, and adds few
reflections to the simple description of facts. But in approaching the
scenes and the thoughts of his own country, the interests and the most
immediate occupations of his own life, the familiarity of long
experience gives greater confidence, warmth, and vigour to his touch;
the historian gives way to the divine, and the narrative sometimes
slides into theology. Besides the position of the author, the
difference of the subject justifies a change in the treatment. The
examination of Protestantism in the rest of the world pointed with
monotonous uniformity to a single conclusion. Everywhere there was the
same spectacle and the same alternative: either religion sacrificed to
the advancement of learning, or learning relinquished for the
preservation of religion. Everywhere the same antagonism between
intellectual progress and fidelity to the fundamental doctrines of
Protestantism: either religion has become stark and stagnant in States
which protect unity by the proscription of knowledge, or the progress of
thought and inquiry has undermined belief in the Protestant system, and
driven its professors from one untenable position to another, or the
ascendency of the sectarian spirit