# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S377
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Protestantism in Austria. 377

should, in strict consistency, likewise have removed the Catholic president from the association of consistories. This has not happened to this day, although even Catholic canonists have pointed out the self-contradictory and absurd character of this arrangement.

Things stand not much better in Hungary. Not content that the government had left the canons of the general synod of the year 1790–91 unresolved until the year 1850, Field Marshal Haynau — because some members of the Evangelical Church of Hungary had taken part in the revolution — on February 10 of the year named overturned, with merciless arbitrariness, the existing constitutional structure resting on a presbyterial-synodal basis. The functions of the general inspector and of the district inspectors among the Evangelicals of the Augsburg Confession, as likewise those of the curators among the Evangelicals of the Helvetic Confession, were declared extinct; the elected Lutheran superintendents were simply removed from office, and replaced by administrators appointed and salaried by the state; the district conventions ceased, and their surrogate, like the local conventions, were made subject to the intervention of sovereign commissioners. The ministerial decree of July 3, 1854 did indeed lift the state of siege that Baron von Haynau had also imposed upon the Evangelical Church, but did not let the general inspector, the district inspectors, and the curators come back to life, let the administrators continue in office, allowed sovereign commissioners to intervene at the now permitted large local conventions and then at the seniorate and superintendential conventions, and finally subjected every newly elected pastor and schoolteacher — which had not been the case before — to confirmation by the governor's department. The year 1856 finally brought improvement. Linking to the 26th Diet article and to the synodal acts of the year 1790–91, the ministry let a draft church order go out for free discussion to the superintendential conventions. Not all the conventions gave a substantive opinion on this draft — which was received and discussed with much approval by Professors Hase and Schenkel in Jena and Heidelberg, but was otherwise deficient in many points — but all of them requested the convening of a synod and the restoration of the former church constitution. Since then three years have passed. The government held out the prospect of a speedy decision. Deputations and petitions were not lacking. Official newspaper articles urged confident patience, of which there had been no lack since the year 1790–91. The German press, in particular the Allgemeine Zeitung, made this matter its own; yet the Protestants in Hungary wait in vain for the decision so often and so often promised.

Even the Evangelicals in Transylvania have to this day not seen the reorganization of their church constitution accomplished. The church constitution of the Evangelical Saxons in Transylvania was so thoroughly grown together and intertwined with the seven-hundred-year-old municipal