y from Sweden,
preached the first sermon to the Wilmingtonians in May, 1699; and after
him a succession of Swedish apostles arrived, trembling at their own
courage, and feeling as our preachers would do if assigned to posts in
Nova Zembla or Patagonia. The salary offered was a hundred rixdollars,
with house and glebe, and the creed was the Lutheran doctrines according
to "the Augsburg Confession of Faith, free from all human superstition
and tradition." Dutch ministers alternated peaceably with the Swedish
ones, who bore such Latinized names as Torkillus, Lokenius, Fabricius,
Hesselius, Acrelius. The last wrote in his own language an excellent
history of the Swedish settlements on the Delaware, only a part of which
has been rendered into English by the New York Historical Society.
William Penn proved his tolerance by giving the little church a folio
Bible and a shelf of pious books, together with a bill of fifty pounds
sterling. The building was planted half a mile away from the then city,
in the village of Christinaham. Its site was on the banks of the
Christine, and its congregation, in the comparative absence of roads,
came in boats or sleighs, according to the season. The church was well
built of hard gray stone, with fir pews and a cedar roof: iron letters
fixed in the walls spelled out such holy mottoes as "LUX L. I. TENEBR.
ORIENS EX ALTO," and "SI DE. PRO NOBIS QUIS CONTRA NOS," and
commemorated side by side the names of William III., king of England,
William Penn, proprietary, and Charles XI. of Sweden. Swedish services
were continued up to about the epoch of the Revolution, when, the
language being no longer intelligible in the colony, they were merged
into English ones: the last Swedish commissary, Girelius, returned by
order of the archbishop in 1786, and the intercourse between the
American Swedish churches and the ecclesiastical see in the fatherland
ceased for ever. The oldest headstone in the churchyard is that of
William Vandevere, who died in 1719. Service was long celebrated by
means of the chalice and plate sent over by the Swedish copper-miners to
Biorch, the first missionary at Cranehook, and the Bible given by Queen
Anne in 1712. The sexes sat separately. In our grandfathers' day the old
sanctuary used to be dressed for Christmas by the sexton, Peter Davis:
he was a Hessian deserter, with a powder-marked face and murderous
habits toward the English language. Descending from their sledges and
jumper