Protestantism in Sweden and Denmark - James Aitken Wylie

is mistaken in saying that this assembly took the
Augsburg Confession as the rule of their faith. The
Augustana Confessio was not then in existence,
though it saw the light a year after (1530). The
Swedish Reformers had no guide but the Bible.
They taught; the birth of all men in a state of sin
and condemnation; the inability of the sinner to
make satisfaction by his own works; the
substitution and perfect expiation of Christ; the free
justification of the sinner on the ground of His
righteousness, received by faith; and the good
works which flow from the faith of the justified
man.
Those who had recovered the lights of truth,
who had rekindled in their churches, after a long
extinction, the lamp of the Gospel, had no need,
one should think, of the tapers and other substitutes
which superstition had invented to replace the
eternal verities of revelation. Those temples which
were illuminated with the splendor of the Gospel
did not need images and pictures. It would seem,
however, as if the Swedes felt that they could not
yet walk alone. They borrowed the treacherous
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