# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S371
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church in Hungary. 371

...toward Magyarization... The superintendents and preachers who did not politically convert — that is, would not go over to Magyarism — were reviled as traitors to the country, mocked in everyday life, their signatures defiled with shameful nicknames. The author has himself seen a scrapbook in which the signature of the very respectable superintendent Jozefi was furnished with abominable epithets... In the filling of Protestant preaching posts, no regard was paid to moral conduct or theological knowledge, but solely and only to whether the candidate was proficient in the Magyar language. That Protestant clergyman was reckoned the best who could most skillfully drum the Magyar catechism into the Slavic children of his congregation. Whether they understood what they had learned was a matter of indifference; it was entirely sufficient, and was praised, if at the visitation or school examination the children rattled off the Magyar catechism. If in a Slavic congregation there were only a couple of Protestant Magyars, a Magyar preacher was sent to the congregation, who had to preach in Magyar every second or third week. Some congregations refused to accept such preachers; the county authority in question had them flogged with cudgel-blows as opponents of the Magyar language. When one of these congregations complained to the governor's office, and the governor's office demanded an explanation from the county, the county replied that this had been required by the dignity and majesty of the nation, and the imposed preacher remained... The author of the present work has had the documents in hand."

So it went in Hungary in the period 1840–1848. The aforementioned Count von Zay, with his associates, hoped in this way to secure the sure execution of the disastrous union, until at last the believing Lutheran man, Pastor Hurban, stepped forward against it with youthful energy, with the vigorous Lutheran conviction and churchly resoluteness of the old fathers, and, through the living word as well as through a series of writings — and especially through his work "Unia" of the year 1846 — with great sharpness annihilated those unionizing endeavors of Zay's and his followers. In this connection the highly deserving, believing elder statesman, the late superintendent Dr. theol. Paul Jozefi, likewise earned great merit, and, joining with him, so did other Lutheran men of Hungary among the clergy and the teachers, for the integrity of our Hungarian-Lutheran church.

The marks of church life in general among the Lutheran Slovaks and Germans, as also in some Magyar congregations, bear witness in every respect, in this period too — thank God! — that the spirit of the pure Gospel was active among them, even though church life in general was weakened in many places under those sorry products of "the Magyar intelligentsia."

In the year 1848 the revolution broke out in our land of Hungary. Unfortunately, two Lutheran superintendents, several professors, and