Christ left out of it. While, therefore, they have broken with the Church because of her lack of life, they are no less suspicious of the schools, for learning to them means only the hindrance and death of spiritual life. They do not want their preachers to be taught by men, but only by the Holy Spirit. All other learning is vain and puffeth up. This prejudice against an educated ministry is greatly hindering the growth of the free church work in Denmark and Norway, and among these nationalities here. In Sweden, however, this feeling is rapidly disappearing before the influence of educated leaders and excellent free church seminaries. It has seemed necessary to point out these two very opposite results of the rule of the Lutheran Church in Scandinavia in order to understand how much she may be relied on as a factor in the development of the Scandinavians in this country, for as she is there so she is here, only modified by the irresistible influence of her environment. The bane of the spiritual power of the Lutheran Church is this: She exists for herself and not for the people, she is not the means to an end, but is herself the end. She bears testimony to this in her attitude of opposition to every effort made by other Christian Churches to elevate and convert the Scandinavian people. One of her ministers, writing some years ago, and deploring the spiritual condition of his Norwegian countrymen here in Chicago, said, that of the 40,000 of them in the city then, all baptized and by law made members of the Church, not more than 5,000 could be found in her places of worship. Yet he branded every attempt by Christians of other denominations to draw some of the remaining 35,000 away from the saloons, beer gardens and Sunday picnics, where he said large numbers of them were to be found, as base and un-Christian efforts to proselyte, and steal them away from their spiritual mother. This is the spirit of the whole Church. In the first meeting of her united factions in America in 1890, the Norwegian United Church passed some resolutions, especially aimed at our Congregational work, condemning and vigorously protesting against all missionary efforts of other denominations among the Scandinavians.