Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/179

But the independent development of thought in the religious field, the development for which the Reformation had furnished the germs, was nevertheless essentially obstructed by this suppression of its most eminent champion. Every free utterance was forbidden, and henceforth the exclusive task of theology was to maintain and develop the established system and to see that religious thought was "kept permanently and rigorously within the limits assigned to it. A genuine type of this whole tendency, and at the same time its foremost representative, is Jesper Beochmand, Bishop of Zealand (1585-1652), the most learned theologian of Denmark in the seventeenth century. By his activity as a writer, university professor and as clergyman, he was above all others the man who impressed upon Danish theology the stamp which it long afterward bore, by guiding it into the groove of strict Lutheran orthodoxy in opposition to the more independent direction which Hemmingsen represented. He sprang from a prominent burgher family, and the circumstance that as a boy, scarcely sixteen years old, he was appointed instructor in the school in which he had received his own education is a proof of the confidence which his talents inspired. After having been a tutor (Hörer) for two years, he went abroad, studied for three years in the University of Leyden, devoting himself particularly to Greek, history, and philosophy, remained another couple of years in Holland, and then after serving two years as rector in the school where he had been educated as a boy, he was, in his twenty-fifth year, appointed professor in the University of Copenhagen. He was at first made professor of pedagogics, afterward of Greek, and, finally, in 1615, of theology. As theological professor his commanding and energetic individuality developed that great authority and exercised that decisive influence on his epoch, and his autocracy became even more established, when, in 1639, he became Bishop of Zealand, an office which he held together with his professorship in theology until his death in 1652. His literary activity belongs to