“When a crisis in the world of thought and religion was brought about by the new theories of natural science in the seventies, Björnson was carried away by the new movement, which shook the ground on which he based his faith. His psalms of that period show how his mind was torn asunder, what a struggle it cost him to tear himself from the soil in which his poetry had been so strongly rooted, and which had given birth to the deepest life of his heart.
Chieftain as he was, he suffered not only his own pain and fought his own fight, he felt the responsibility of carrying a whole people with him. But his desire for truth and knowledge drove him out to new conquests. He once more went out into the world to find the greatest thing in it – to find what is truth.
The Christians, terrified, fled to the churches and closed them against him. Truth was a revelation; it was to be found, complete and unchangeable, in the form which Lutheran theology had fixed it. Old friends deserted him, and Björnson had to go his way alone.”
Ella Anker, ‘Björnson and his Christianity’, The Contemporary Review, London:1910
