Note 273 — Chapter IX

Jensson, American Lutheran Biographies, 25 ff; The Home Missionary, XXII, 263, 264; XXIII, 119. In Anderson’s report for 1850 is an account of a visit to Dane County, Wisconsin, where ‘one of the Formalists,’ after five years of labor had failed to bring much enlightenment. “There are some four thousand or more Norwegians in one settlement, about three-quarters of whom are members of this man’s church, and the rest are sheep without a shepherd. They had had preaching there for the last five years, but such gross immorality I had never witnessed before.... We have no reasonable ground to hope that a single individual of those three thousand souls is converted to God; for all are intemperate and profane.... Of all I saw (and I saw a great many) two out of three were intoxicated, or had been drinking so that it was offensive to come within the sphere poisoned by their breath; and of every two I heard talking together one or both profaned their Maker.”