Fraternity-Testvériség, 1958 (36. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
1958-11-01 / 11. szám
FRATERNITY 15 Thus the Reformation in itself did nothing to induce the Hungarian people to look with kindlier eyes on their Turkish overlords; rather, what it did do was to give them a spiritual weapon in exchange for the material one that had been wrested from their hands. Perhaps most important of all, there developed amongst them both a cultural and a religious self-consciousness that was part and parcel of the Reformation movement. The Directions Which the Reformation Took By the turn of the mid-century there had grown up a division in the ranks of the Hungarian Reformation. In 1552 the strict followers of Luther, and the followers of Buliinger and Calvin, and even Melancthon, began to see that they would each have to go their own way. One result of this dissension wTas that in some places in Hungary more interest was felt in the promulgation of the various Confessions of Faith than in the Gospel itself. In opposition to the great majority who adhered to what we call the Reform movement, there arose at this period groups of people who began to attack the orthodox Christian belief in the Holy Trinity, as well as others who definitely called themselves Unitarians. Thus it came about that the “Lutherans” saw the necessity of closing their ranks against the “Reformed” and the latter in turn of closing their ranks against the “Unitarians”. One consequence of this was that much of the warmth and brotherliness apparent in the first decades of the Reformation gave place to suspicions and even to hatreds. On the whole, however, the names of Luther and Calvin were not intimately linked with “schools” in Hungary; rather, they were in the nature of finger-posts. Reformers like Dévai and Meliusz went their own way and sought to express the central questions of the Faith in an independent manner. This independence, however, gradually died out as the century advanced, because the Hungarian reformers were now compelled to turn to the writings of the Swiss and German giants in their search
