http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Bjornson_Poems/Bjornson_PoemsC6P5.htm
TO MISSIONARY SKREFSRUD IN SANTALISTAN
(See Note 67) 
I honor you, who, though refused, affronted,
  Have heard the voice, and victory have won;
I honor you, who still by malice hunted,
  Show miracles of faith and power done. 
I honor you, God-thirsting soul so driven,
  'Mid scorn and need the spirit's war to wage;
I honor you, by Gudbrand's valley given,
  And of her sons the foremost in this age. 
I do not share your faith, your daring dreaming;
  This parts us not, the spirit's paths are broad.
For, all things great and noble round us streaming,
  I worship them, because I worship God. 
Note 67.
TO MISSIONARY SKREFSRUD IN SANTALISTAN. Written in 1879. Lars Olsen Skrefsrud, born in Gudbrandstal in 1840, at first a metal worker, led for a time a wild life, and was committed under a sentence of four years to a penitentiary, where he remained from February, 1859, to October, 1861. Here he underwent a complete inner transformation and resolved to become a Christian missionary. Rejected by the Norwegian missionary institutions, he went in 1862 to Berlin, and entered a School for Missions there. He supported himself by work as an engraver, and by unflagging private study acquired learning and the knowledge of languages. He went to a German Mission in India, which he left in January, 1866. In 1867 he began his independent work in Santalistan. Here his persistence and success attracted the attention and support of the English, and thus he gradually became known and esteemed in his native land, where a Santalistan Society was formed to aid his undertakings. In 1882 he was duly ordained as clergyman by a bishop of the State Church. In 1873 he published a grammar and in 1904 a dictionary of the language of Santalistan.
  I do not share your faith. The memorable speech which Bj?rnson delivered to the students in Christiania on October 31, 1877, the anniversary of Luther's posting his theses in Wittenberg, revealed that after a hard inner struggle he had freed himself from the religious faith of his early life. The theme of his speech "Be in the truth!" showed that for him henceforth the supreme thing was freedom of thought and fidelity to the truth as expanding development might manifest it to the individual. Liberal in thought from the beginning, Bj?rnson departed more and more, not least through the influence of Grundtvig, from the strict dogmatic orthodoxy of the State Church. The study of Darwin, Spencer, Mill, and Comte led him still farther on to a position which may be called that of the agnostic theist, that of Spencer, who does not deny God, but says ignoramus. We may recall the late utterance of Bj?rnson, quoted above: "Grundtvig and Goethe are my two poles." It was the dogma of Hell, the teaching of eternal damnation and punishment, that began Bj?rnson's breach with the Church. He saw how this doctrine enslaved and dwarfed the souls of the peasants, and blighted all liberal development, both personal and political.