“Judged by the reception it met at the hands of those in power, both in Church and State, equally in Roman Catholic and in Protestant countries, the Anabaptist movement was one of the most tragic in the history of Christianity; but, judged by the principles, which were put into play by the men who bore this reproachful nickname, it must be pronounced one of the most momentous and significant undertakings in man's eventful religious struggle after the truth. It gathered up the gains of earlier movements, it is the spiritual soil out of which all nonconformist sects have sprung, and it is the first plain announcement in modern history of a programme for a new type of Christian society which the modern world, especially in America and England, has been slowly realizing—an absolutely free and independent religious society, and a State in which every man counts as a man, and has his share in shaping both Church and State.”

Coming to its three-hundredth anniversary, the Westminster Assembly encounters in the United States somewhat more congeniality than it has experienced in a considerable rather recent period. Were they aware of it, this might not greatly concern its members, for they did their work through good report and ill, in the strength of their own convictions. But the fact has significance. One reason for it is a change in the theological climate. After a predominance of other influences the understanding of the Christian gospel which the Reformation brought in and the Westminster divines held is again in the ascendant. This has occurred in a time like that of the Reformation and like the century of the Assembly, of violent political change, calamitous war, deep anxiety, widespread despair. In such times the Christian doctrines of the judgment and providential purpose of God, of the evil and absolute need of man, of God's revelation and sovereign redeeming grace, of a salvation beyond history, for which the men of Westminster stood and yet stand in their works, find sympathy denied to them in more prosperous and self-sufficient years.

This remarkable man (father of an even more remarkable son, Emanuel Swedenborg) is familiar to students of Swedish church history through the works of Tottie,1 Annerstedt,2 Cornelius,3 Pleijel,4 and others, but now he makes himself known to us more intimately through his autobiography, published at long last, and edited by Dr. Gunnar Wetterberg, Librarian of Lund University.5 He tells us that, because “children like to have their ancestors' portraits and see what they were really like,”6 he undertook, in his old age, this “Jesper Svedberg's biography written by himself, truthfully and in detail, and read through annually and augmented, to remind himself of God's good and strange providence. Bequeathed to his children and descendents for the necessary instruction in how to traverse the world happily,—to whom may God give his grace!”7 He states, somewhat naïvely, “No one can know me better than I myself, especially since, with God's grace, I take sufficient care that self-love shall not blind me and lead me astray.”8 (In spite of which “sufficient care,” the work has been disrespectfully described as a biography “written by a onesided, enthusiastic, and uncritical admirer”9!) He made seven copies, one for each of his children, of which four are still extant. To one who has leafed through the 1100 folio pages of the Linköping MS, struggling hopelessly to decipher the faded script, with its peculiar spelling and sentence structure, Dr. Wetterberg's achievement seems nothing short of miraculous!