Fraternity-Testvériség, 1959 (37. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1959-12-01 / 12. szám

FRATERNITY

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the war continued, only to exhaust kuruc forces, many of whom deserted and went home to their families. Finally, in 1711, they agreed to terms by which the king promised to observe the earlier treaties dealing with religious freedom. Then almost at once Joseph died. Charles III, who came to the throne in 1712, affirmed in his turn that he would uphold the law of the land. Owing to the advance of a plague in that same year, however, Parliament had to disband before the clauses on religious freedom were reached in the discussions. By the time it sat again, all the old aggravations had been resumed, and the Protestant element had to put before the king a long list of its grievances against the Roman hierarchy. All that the king thereupon did was to dismiss both parties. By doing so he thus allowed things to go on from bad to worse. From 1714 onwards one by one places of worship in northern Hungary (part of which is now in Czechoslovakia) were closed down. The following year, however, the king graciously announced that he would uphold the 1681 and 1687 enactments, but intimated that he would annul all that had been won by the peasantry through the kuruc wars. He even forbade the calling of a Synod except by royal permission. By this action he thus moved closer to that absolutism which can insist that all citizens must worship as the king commands. Hungary had thus taken a retrograde step just at the moment when the other lands of Europe were finding and putting into effect a new conception of freedom of thought and worship.

The Romanian Mission

Whilst the Reformed Church in Hungary was vexed with the constant need for self-defence against the Counter-Reformation, the Transylvanian Reformed Church turned its energies to the evangelization of its Romanian-speaking neighbours. The Saxons had sought to give the latter the Christian Gospel as early as 1540, but without much success. A generation later, however, the Hungarian element in Transylvania began its