A statute in itself is a set of words on paper. Its actual power and meaning--its real existence--are in the place it holds in the minds of members of society. The making of a law, then, does not cease with the passing of a bill; the law merely enters another phase, and is made and remade in the tradition that is its life. --Rhys Isaac (1) IN ITS FEW WORDS dedicated to religious the Swedish Constitution (2) of stands as an example of the way in which the principles embodied in a national charter, even explicitly, can exist wholly apart from the law as it is actually applied and understood. It represents the occasional tendency of lawmakers, by the standards of the society for which they legislate, to be ahead of their time--if not in their immediate intentions, then at least in their rhetoric. In the early nineteenth century, Europe was still deep in the midst of what historian Roland Bainton called the long travail of religious liberty, an ordeal that Sweden was late to experience, but ultimately would not escape. In establishing a Europe of religious pluralism, the same sixteenth-century Reformation that gave rise to the Church of Sweden set into motion a factionalizing process that would eventually challenge the very idea of a national church. By the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers championed freedom of conscience and questioned faith itself, even as Pietists insisted on a faith more vigorous and genuine than that offered by the established ecclesiastical order. The common struggle to accommodate new ideas in a landscape of old religious institutions took different forms in different places; in 1809, Sweden could look to American and French models of accommodation, while Britain (with its own stare church) lumbered toward embracing freedom of worship. The drafters of the Swedish constitution addressed the subject of religious liberty directly in the document's sixteenth paragraph and in so doing appealed to the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment. And yet it would be decades (and arguably more than a century) for those ideals to be realized in legal practice. While the language of religious liberty in the constitution of 18o9 speaks to the influence of Enlightenment thought among the Swedish elite--and even the beginnings of genuine change--the practical effects of that language revealed a society far from ready to embrace the idea of religious freedom. The document was the product of trying times. As the historian Teofron Save wrote, Om Sveriges rike och folk vid nagon tidpunkt hafva statt vid undergangens rand, sa var det 1809 (VI:I) [If ever there was a time in which Sweden's kingdom and people stood at the edge of ruin, it was 1809]. In September of that year, the Treaty of Fredrikshamn ended the Filmish War, which had begun with the invasion of the eastern reaches of the Swedish realm by the armies of Czar Alexander I in February 1808. Despite a formidable number of men under arms, the Swedish military under King Gustav IV Adolf bungled the defense, allowing the Russians to press all the way to the Gulf of Bothnia. The terms of the treaty ceded the whole of Finland and the Aland Islands to Russia, costing Sweden a third of its territory. The loss of Finland, which had been an integral part of the country for seven hundred years, represented the most dramatic diminishment of the kingdom in its history. Five years later, following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, Norway would enter into a union with Sweden under the Swedish crown. At the same time, Sweden ceded its Pomeranian territory in northern Germany to Denmark, handing over the last vestige of its seventeenth-century empire (see Scott 292-6). As Sweden's losses on the battlefield reshaped its borders, political revolution in Stockholm reshaped the fundamental structure of Swedish government. In March 1809, by which time the disastrous consequences of the poorly managed war with Russia were apparent, elements within the military forced the abdication of Gustav IV Adolf. …