ch He remained with them, "speaking of the things
pertaining to the kingdom of God"; that the Creed through the early
centuries had been regarded as too sacred to commit to writing and,
therefore had been transmitted orally; and that it constituted, together
with the words of institution of the sacraments and the Lord's prayer, in
a special sense "the living word of God" by which He builds and vivifies
His church. It should be stated, however, that Grundtvig's intention by
distinguishing between what he called "the living" and "the written
word," was not to belittle the Bible but only to define its proper place,
the place of enlightening and guiding those, who through God's living
covenant with them in their baptism already have become Christians. A
Christian, he believed, is reborn in his baptism, nourished in the
Communion and enlightened by the Word.

A critical examination of Grundtvig's theory, about which thousands of
pages have been written, lies beyond the scope of this work. Grundtvig
himself felt that his "discovery" had given him a solid foundation for
his stand against the Rationalists. And his theory unquestionably did
enable him, in the midst of an almost hopeless religious confusion, to
reassert the essentials of Evangelical Christianity, to refute the
contentions of the Rationalists by weighing them on an acknowledged
historical basis of faith, and to reemphasize that the Christian church
is not a creation of theological speculations but of God's own work in
His word and sacraments.

Grundtvig for some time previous to his discovery had felt exceedingly
depressed. His long struggle for the reawakening of his people to a
richer Christian and national life appeared fruitless. Most of the
intellectual and spiritual leaders of his time looked upon the very idea
of sharing the richer cultural and spiritual values of life with the
common man as a visionary conception of an unstable and erratic mind. One
ought naturally, they admitted, to be interested in improving the social
and economic conditions of the lower classes, but the higher treasures of
mind and spirit belonged in the very nature of things to the cultured few
and could not be shared with the common herd.

In spite of these discouragements, Grundtvig somehow experienced a
wonderful rebirth of his hope in the spring of 1824, an experience to
which he gave eloquent expression in his great poem, "New Year's
Morning." He writes in the preface that he h