almost indispensable to a man of his social position, and his parents
earnestly wished him to enter the church. Nor was his attitude toward
Christianity greatly different from that of his fellow students or even
from that of many pastors already preaching the emasculated gospel of
God, Virtue, and Immortality which the Rationalists held to be the true
essence of the Christian religion. Believing the important part of the
Gospel to be its ethical precepts, Grundtvig, furthermore, prided himself
upon the correctness of his own moral conduct and his ability to control
all unworthy passions. "I was at that time," he later complained,
"nothing but an insufferably vain and narrow-minded Pharisee."

From this spirit of superior self-sufficiency, only two things
momentarily aroused him during his university years--the English attacks
upon Copenhagen; and a series of lectures by his cousin, Henrik Steffens.

Steffens, as a student at Jena, had met and become an enthusiastic
disciple of Schelling, the father of natural philosophy, a pantheistic
colored conception of life, opposed to the narrowly materialistic views
of most Rationalists. Lecturing at the university during the years
1802-1803, Steffens aroused a tremendous enthusiasm, both among the
students and some of the older intellectuals. "He was a fiery speaker,"
Grundtvig remarks later, "and his lectures both shocked and inspired us
although I often laughed at him afterward."

Despite his attempt to laugh away the impression of the fiery speaker,
Grundtvig, nevertheless, retained at least two lasting memories from the
lectures--the power of the spoken word, a power that even against his
will could arouse him from his cynical indifference, and the reverence
with which Steffens spoke of Christ as "the center of history." The human
race, he contended, had sunk progressively lower and lower from the fall
of man until the time of Nero, when the process had been reversed and man
had begun the slow upward climb that was still continuing. And of this
progress the speaker in glowing terms pictured Christ as the living
center.

Grundtvig was graduated from the university in the spring of 1803. He
wished to remain in Copenhagen but could find no employment and was
forced, therefore, to return to his home. Here he remained for about a
year, after which he succeeded in obtaining a position as tutor for the
son of Lieutenant Steensen Leth of Egelykke, a large estate on the island
of