Hungarian Church Press, 1949 (1. évfolyam, 4-13. szám)
1949-08-26 / 10. szám
-To 10.-4-But - - u irf orburumte ly is- -B-ot -1 h a- -dam i n c^t.i n g phoncmen-on of our Churcli history of that tine. The outstanding feature is, that Hungarian xceformed religious and church life suppressed by the united effort of the court, the clergy, the public administration and the feudal latifundium found protection under the wings of the Ref őrsied elements, of the gentry, which became filled up through marriage with tho Reformed aristocracy left in Transylvania and with some noble Hungarian gentries. It was this element and class which could support the church most effectively with its legal routine, sense of politics, and a fidelity to the Church inherited from the ancestors. The trouble cane from the fact, that our Church with its whole ministry of the Gospel, including theological teachings, began to adapt itself with an increasing perilous partiality to the ideology of the aristocratic, gentry and middle class, which rescued and supported it. Already from the middle of the 18th century onward, the church gradually departed from the Scriptures and from the most vital messages of our Creed into a rationalism, which in the ground remained the sane until our days. Between 1750-1850 the teachings of our Church became very nearly saturated with these typical middle-class ideological elononts, and that spirit found but little resistance until the beginning of this century, which is a unique phenomenon in tho history of other Protestant Churches throughout Europe and America. The other trouble, closely linked with the previous one was, that the spiritual leaders, preachers, pastors of our Church did not merely adhere and accoosoiate for a too long period and too readily to the mentality of this gentry middle-class in preaching and teaching, -but also ideologically, in their social and political views. That is why it was' so tragic that a strong, solid, united, Hungarian Reformed society could not develop, ^nd even if it did develop, it was not the Church that shaped.the gentry middleclass after its imago, as it happened for instance in Britain, just tho contrary, the offsprings of the Church changed rather after the imago of the gentry also ideologically. Our pastors did not merely fail to recognice and search the tremendous possibilities hidden in the evangelical revival of the Hungarian soul, they did not merely put up with the so called regular "spiritual care*1 customary among the middle class and peasant folk, /when churches wore packed at great holidays, or at beautiful funerals, but empty at other ocassions/, but they also acquired from the mentality of tho middle class and peasant folk the things they ought not to have • . That cold distrust towards tho poor peasants toiling and suffering in that huge farm land, and the complete callousy for tho fact that their state is untolerablo out of both Christian and also human point.
