Hungarian Church Press, 1949 (1. évfolyam, 4-13. szám)
1949-08-26 / 10. szám
-3-and fertilise. Our lord Jesus speaks of: "a well of water springing up into everlasting life" /John 4:14/ and the greatest secret of church history is to notice when and where that living Water sprang up from that eternal Well in the history of Man. Genuine seal of faith or "religious seal" is only prevalent, where it is not a human make, a forced human effort, or religious virtuosity, but nothing more and less than "regeneration" according to this Greek text: "Upspringing" Water. I should like everybody to see it as clearly as I see it out of this werk that, the greatest historical strength of our Hungarian Reformed Church is in the way it got into being. Unlike as it happened in many western countries, Reformed Christianity in Hungary doesn't owe its existence to constraining political or government actions. Even smaller agents of public power, such as feudal lords, free cities didn't influence Hungarian Helvetic Reformed Christianity in such a measure as they promoted and often even decided the sort of Lutheranism. X-think it will also be easy to learn out of the book, that the first fatal blow upon our Reformed Church was the same as fell upon our nation, and within the nation especially upon the millions of working people, this blow being: the ever increasing unhindered prevalence of a foreign dinasty and imperialistic world policy. Erom the end of the 17th century onward owing to the completed HabwSburg dominion, the fate of our Church was not merely sealed by strictest police measures hindering freedom in religious practice, and partly abolishing the respective constitutionary guarantees and partly cancelling them, but rather by the restoration of the system of church estates, which during the century of Reformation already began to disintegrate. At the same time the strengthening and recuperation of the.worldly big estates were effectively used in the programme of counter.Reformation. The Hungarian Reformed Church had every reason to consider the cause of its own freedom identical with -the cause of freedom of the country and the people. And it was its special tragedy, and later ever, its guilt, that although that sentiment v/as alive in the Church, yet it failed to draw the necessary conclusions, which as a Church it ought to have done. There was a misfortune, for which cur Church could not be counted responsible, that, owing to the predomination of 'ime big estate system the commercial and industrial middlaclass society was recruited of those purely Hungarian peasants and gentry classes, where Reformed Christianity was most prevalent. Wherever such a Hungarian Reformed middleclass society could dvelop, it gave a comparatively effective protection to every kind of direct or indirect counter-Reformationr -icy attempts. Uo 10.
