CHRISTINA, Daughter of Gustavus Adolphus II. ] CHAPTER IV. GUSTAVUS AND HIS KINGDOM. We have now these two young men, Gustavus Adolphus and Axel Oxenstiern, his chancellor, sitting down to play the game of war against all the powers of northern Europe. The stake was the national existence of Sweden. Buckle thinks that, given the time, the man may be predicated. But the times did not produce Jesus Christ. Nero was the natural product of that period. Gustavus Adolphus, like Luther, was a special soul sent of God to be the incarnation of spiritual force against the evil and awful indifference of a corrupt age. First, he enlarged the place of his generous cousin, Duke John, who doubtless had foreseen the great period of war before them, and gladly had placed the responsibility in the abler hands of Gustavus. Then the young king pursued the war with Denmark until the King of Denmark renounced his claim to the Swedish crown. It took him two years to secure this concession. During these two years he enlarged the rights of his people, stirred the patriotism of the peasantry, won the affections of the nobility of Sweden, and unified his people into a strong nationality. When Gustavus Vasa introduced the doctrines of the Reformation into Sweden the inhabitants were a rude people, but fifty years of instruction on the part of the clergy and independent thinking on the part of the people had greatly changed this state of affairs. The revival of learning and the Reformation which caused an active study of theology and literature, had greatly pushed forward the intellectual standing of Germany. Lutheranism has always been a scholarly faith; it was born in universities, and never took on the severities or iconoclasms of Calvinism. Sweden now kept all that was brilliant, attractive and energizing in the ideas of the Reformation, and gave to the Lutheran faith a new impetus, so that in the time of Gustavus Adolphus the aristocracy of Sweden were among the most cultivated people of all Europe. As in Scotland the Reformation changed the very nature of the entire nation, so now it did the same for Sweden, with this difference, that the Scots followed the doctrines of Calvin, which stripped religion of its æstheticism and made it severe and to some degree forbidding, while the Lutheranism of the Swedes beautified their lives, stirred their æsthetic taste and improved their intellects, so that from that day to this Sweden has been regarded as a scholarly country, and has produced its fair share of literary and scientific men and women, beside many great inventors, and artists of world-wide renown.