# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S373
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church in Hungary. 373

...church should shortly be definitively regulated in accordance with §4 of Article 26 of the law of 1790–91.

Since that time, then, the Lutheran Church of Hungary has looked with great longing toward the uniform constitution striven for over so many years. All saw that things could not remain as they were: everything was in motion. Many deputations turned to the Emperor for permission to hold a synod, until finally, in the year 1856, a ministerial decree, in the form of a draft for the constitutional affairs of the Lutheran Church as well as the Reformed, lent a hand. This legislative draft had in view the best interest of both Protestant churches of Hungary. With great confidence, many liberties were granted to us in the spirit of our traditional church autonomy. The two churches were to stand under a supreme church council composed entirely of their own co-religionists, whose members the Emperor was to appoint. This church council was to have its representatives in the general synod, to be held every three years; clergy and laity were to be represented at the smaller and larger conventions as well as at the synod; but at the conventions to be held by the local congregations, the local clergyman was to hold the presidency.

This draft alone, however, was rejected by the greater part of the Lutherans, and entirely repudiated by the Reformed — and indeed for this reason, that it was given not by the church, but by the imperial government.

That draft, then, which was rejected, was followed by the well-known imperial patent of 1 September 1859, to the issuing of which Emperor Franz Joseph found himself moved after the recent events of the war in Italy. According to this patent, the internal constitution of our church, as well as the matter of schools and instruction and the status under public law of the Lutherans as well as of the Reformed in Hungary, Croatia, Slavonia, and the Voivodeship of Serbia, in the Banat of Temesvár, and on the Military Frontier, is now to come into the order so long yearned for. What had been striven for in vain for centuries is now offered to us through this patent. As long as the Lutheran Church has existed in Hungary, it has never yet possessed so good a presbyterial-synodal constitution as the one held out in prospect to it by this imperial patent. According to this patent, there is at last to come about a uniform constitution for all the superintendencies of the Lutheran Church of Hungary. This constitution rests on an autonomous foundation of congregational representation.

Under this patent, the congregation elects the presbytery for six years, to which, as a committee of the whole congregation, a comprehensive sphere of action belongs. The election of pastors, schoolteachers, and elders belongs entirely to the congregation (Patent §31). The presbyteries elected by the congregations, in turn, elect the seniors and seniorate inspectors, as well as the superintendents and superintendency inspectors, so that the