Fraternity-Testvériség, 1961 (39. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1961-09-01 / 9. szám
8 FRATERNITY century. Within, all was not well with the Church; for one thing, the churches were virtually empty. We are told that it was a frequent occurrence after the mid-century for a minister to look out of his manse door after the bell had been tolled to see if anyone was coming to church, then when he saw no one on the road, give a nod to the church officer to lock up the church, and go in again to his manse. People seemed to be out of sympathy with the ministry, even anti-clerical in outlook. There is a case on record where the villagers refused to help the minister fight a fire in his manse, and stood by watching it burn to the ground. But the peasantry never completely deserted the Church; it was rather the middle-class, the intellectuals in their own eyes, who became almost wholly irreligious at this period; yet little was done to stem the tide of apostasy. No church paper was issued between 1848 and 1858; in some city parishes there was no properly constituted Kirk Session. With the coming of “equality” as a result of the Revolution, one would have expected that Sessions would have been chosen from amongst the ordinary members of the congregation. But it was not so. In many parishes the Church remained feudal in government at the very period that the country itself was growing ever more democratic. In some parishes the people themselves collected funds for the building of a new church, while the Kirk Session ferely looked on and did nothing to help! The ministry had now fallen into a hopelessly poor condition; moreover, being depressed materially, it was also depressed spiritually. The collection plate at the church door might bring in, with the poor church attendance that was now general, a matter of only a few florins a year. Financially, both the ministry and the church schools were in a desperate material position, and more and more of it came to be felt that help would have to come from the State. The State on its part was also coming around to see the necessity of granting aid to
