# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S369
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church in Hungary. 369

...has chosen for itself a local inspector from the midst of the laity (though usually from among the nobility).

This wretched shape of the constitution, as we have just sketched it, the Lutheran Church of Hungary has borne, by and large, down to the most recent time.

Under Ferdinand V, 1835–1848, the provisions of the diet of 1843–4 are especially notable — concerning the upbringing of children of mixed marriages, marital pledges [Reversalien], and conversion from one church to the other (provisions that were established in favor of the Lutherans) — a gratifying moment. Article 20 of the diet of 1848 sets forth the general principle of the complete equal rights of all religions received in Hungary. These resolutions, however, gained no real validity, on account of the revolution that broke out soon afterward.

Before we now set forth the further history of the Lutheran Church of Hungary down to the present day, we wish to try to depict somewhat more closely the church life of the last two decades. We shall, namely, take into view the period from 1830 to 1850.

The Enlightenment has unfortunately found many representatives in the Lutheran Church of Hungary as well, among the clergy, the teachers, and especially among the nobility. For at the very time when the return to positive church doctrine began in Germany, we see the Enlightenment first spreading very powerfully in Hungary. We may say that in the two decades mentioned — indeed down to the most recent time — no considerable number can be shown among the Lutheran clergy, teachers, and nobles (who properly represent what is called among us the "intelligentsia") who faithfully confess the positive church doctrine; but the few who are decidedly church-Lutheran are branded by the enlighteners as hypocrites and with other terms of abuse, and are hated unspeakably. — The oath on the Symbolical Books has been entirely abolished, and it is scarcely credible what ignorance, paired with contempt and disdain, the so-called learned Hungarians and the enlightened upper classes display whenever religion, faith, and the teaching of Scripture come up for discussion. — The church institutions of our believing forefathers, in the places where the schools are located, are throughout either ignored by the "highly learned professors," or at least treated with such disdain that the pupils are certainly led by it to no serious Christian consciousness.

A man deeply tried, and faithfully confessing the living faith of the fathers, from the midst of our Lutheran clergy in Lower Hungary, speaks of this period (Hornyansky, Evangelisches Wochenblatt No. 46, p. 747, in the year 1859, as follows: "We were raised unbelieving, unchurchly. Our higher educational institutions were the workshops of that superficial rationalism of reason, which allied itself with the...