Soren Kierkegaard

in the window of the episcopal residence on the other side of the square.
They wanted to get out to the cemetery, which soon became a sea of
people; groups large and small surged over the graves and their little gated
plots of flowers, trying to arrive by the time Kierkegaard’s coffin showed
up. Immediately after Tryde had cast earth on the grave, a tall, pale man,
clad in black, stepped forward from the crowd. He removed his hat, looked
around, and apparently wanted to speak, but this was the against the rules,
so Tryde protested. The man was not to be deterred, however, and cried
out to the crowd: “In the name of God. One moment, gentlemen, if you
will permit me!” Fifteen-year-old Troels Frederik Lund, who was just old
enough to be able to follow what happened, suddenly recognized the pale
man as his cousin Henrik, the physician, who was usually so friendly and
who not so long ago had written Troels an amusing letter from Paris in
which he had included a drawing of a tin soldier. “Who isthat?” could be
heard emanating from various points in the crowd. “I am Lund, a medical
graduate,” the black-clad figure replied. “Hear, hear!” shouted someone,
while another could give assurances that “He’s pretty good!... Just let
him speak!”
And then Lund spoke his words of protest against the church burial of
this ferocious warrior against the Church, who had “been brought here
against his repeatedly expressed will,” and had thus “in a way been vio-
lated.” As support for the truth of his claim, he referred to the articles that
the deceased had published inFædrelandetas well as to the various issues of
The Moment; he also quoted from the third chapter of the Revelation of
Saint John, about the judgment that awaits all who are neither cold nor hot.
After reading a short piece titled “We Are All Christians” that had appeared
in the second issue ofThe Moment, Lund asked the multitude: “Isn’t this
description of the situation correct? Is not what we are all witnessing
today—namely, that this poor man, despite all his energetic protests in
thought, word, and deed, in life and death, is being buried by ‘the Official
Church’ as a beloved member—isn’t this in accordance with his words? It
would never have happened in a Jewish society, not even among the Turks
and Mohammedans: that a member of their society, who had left it so deci-
sively, would, after his death and without any prior recantation of his views,
nevertheless be viewed as a member of that society. That was something
reserved for ‘official Christianity’ to commit. Can this be ‘God’s true
Church,’ then?”
When Henrik Lund’s speech was over, there was scattered applause in
the crowd. People stood about waiting to see what would happennext, for
somethinghadto happen. But nothing happened. Henrik Lund stepped
down, and Rasmus Nielsen, who perhaps had had plans of saying something