Our Unitarian Heritage : Division 4
 

UNITARIANISM IN TRANSYLVANIA

CHAPTER XXI

Down to the Beginning of Unitarianism in Transylvania in 1564

 

    If asked when and where Unitarianism was first organized, the average person would be likely to answer that it was in America, or perhaps in England, about the beginning of the nineteenth century.  He would be greatly amazed to be told that in a remote country of Europe Unitarian churches have had an unbroken history for more than three hundred and fifty years.  That country is Transylvania, and we come now to the story of the heroic struggle of churches which began there at almost the same time with the separate organization of the Minor Reformed Church in Poland (whose tragic history has occupied the six preceding chapters), and which have bravely weathered all storms of persecution and misfortune down to the present day — hence by far the oldest Unitarian churches in the world.

    Transylvania formed (until the World War) the eastern quarter of the old kingdom of Hungary, to which it bore much the same relation as Scotland to England.  It is about half as large as the state of Maine, or a quarter larger than Switzerland; hedged in on all sides by the lofty snow-capped Carpathians and other mountains, forest-covered, as the name of the country implies.  It has a great variety of grand and beautiful natural scenery, and has been called the Switzerland of Hungary.  One traveler writes that whereas other lands are beautiful in spots, Transylvania is all beauty; while another calls it a sort of earthly paradise.  It has an agreeable climate, a fertile soil, and great mineral wealth; and ever since Roman times its mines have supplied a large part of the gold of Europe.

    So much for the physical background of our story.  The history of the country has yet more to do with the development of it. Located on the extreme frontier of western Europe, facing other civilizations, Transylvania has been in the natural path of conquest, and during sixteen centuries has been repeatedly overrun by armies.  Early in the second century Trajan conquered it for the Romans, and it thus became the Roman province of Dacia Mediterranea.  Trajan’s Column at Rome still stands to commemorate the conquest, and shows us how the inhabitants of that time looked.  Then came various hordes of barbarians invading the Roman Empire, generally striking Transylvania first of all, plundering the land, destroying its towns and houses, and killing its people: the Goths in the third and fourth century; the Huns in the fifth, led by Attila, who struck such terror into Christian Europe that he was called “the scourge of God,” sent to punish the world for its sins; after them the Burgundians, Gepides, Lombards, and Avars, all leaving ruin and death in their train.  Of all these it is the Huns that are of greatest interest to us, because when they retreated eastward after their defeats in France and Italy, the remnants of Attila’s horde are said to have been stranded in the foothills of eastern Transylvania, and there settled in what is now known as Szeklerland.  The reputed descendants of these, called Szeklers, form the bulk of the Unitarians, a farmer people, having special political privileges, and hence called “nobles,” a sort of peasant aristocracy, altogether a very fine stock.

    In the ninth century, under Arpad, came nearly a million Magyars, related to the Huns, and speaking the same tongue with them.  After ravaging Europe for two generations, they finally settled in Hungary, where they have lived ever since in their whitewashed villages — another fine race, fond of liberty, and with a spirit and institutions not unlike those of the English and Americans.  Most of them are Calvinists or Roman Catholics.  In the thirteenth century a new element gradually came in from the eastern shores of the Adriatic, the Wallacks, whose descendants (now known as Rumanians) speaking a modern form of the Latin tongue, now comprise over half of the population: the peasantry of the land, picturesque, ignorant, degraded, and adhering chiefly to the Greek Catholic Church.  In the thirteenth century also came another deluge of half a million Mongol Tatars, ravaging and plundering, burning and butchering, leaving three quarters of Hungary in ashes; while if their invasion was frightful, the repeated invasions of the Turks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the bloody uprising of the Rumanians in 1848, and last of all the desolations of the World War, have been hardly less so; and all these misfortunes have been further aggravated by the frequent plagues and famines that have followed in their wake.  These afflictions have made of the survivors a heroic and self-reliant race, inured to hardship, indomitable in spirit, and devoted to freedom; as indeed they needed to be to face all the persecutions they were to suffer for their religious faith.

    Besides the Rumanians, the Szeklers, and the Magyars, of whom we have spoken, the remaining important element of the population of to-day are the “Saxons,” as they are called, all of them Lutherans in religion.  They were brought from the region of the lower Rhine in the twelfth century to settle and guard the frontier country, which repeated wars had left a wilderness;¹ and in their isolation from the fatherland they still preserve little changed the language, customs, and dress of medieval Germany.  Gypsies, Armenians, and Jews scattered here and there through the country complete the list of distinct stocks which people Transylvania, living side by side as separate as drops of oil and water, and differing from one another in race, in language, in religion, and in customs — a most interesting patch-work of people.  Amid such surroundings Unitarianism has had its longest home.

    After being for several centuries a part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Transylvanian nobles in 1526 elected a king from among their own people, John Zapolya, and during the ten years’ war which followed they maintained their cause against Hungary by the aid of the Sultan; and in return for his protection they continued to pay him annual tribute for more than 150 years, electing their princes subject to his approval, though in other respects they had an independent state until 1690, when Transylvania was joined to Austria.  King John had for his queen, Isabella, daughter of King Sigismund I of Poland, but he died in 1540, only a few days after she had borne him a son, John Sigismund, whom the nobles elected King of Hungary soon after his father’s death.  He is notable for being the only Unitarian king in history.²  The young king was born to troubles, for there was in western Hungary also a rival king, supported in his claim by the Pope, as John was in his by the Sultan, and he looked with envious eyes upon Transylvania.  Taking advantage of John’s infancy, and of the inexperience of the Queen-mother Isabella, who was acting as regent in his stead, he kept intriguing against Transylvania in every way possible.  The result of many vicissitudes in the matter was that although John was nominally King of Hungary, with dominions extending to the Tisza (Theiss), he actually held not much more than Transylvania alone; and in 1570, as the price of peace with the Emperor Maximilian II, it was agreed at the Diet of Speyer that he should lay aside his empty title of king and his claim to the Hungarian crown, in return for the acknowledgment of Transylvania’s independence of Hungary.  He died the following year.  It is in his reign that the history of Unitarianism in Transylvania begins.

    Christianity is said to have reached Hungary even before Trajan, and the Goths in the fourth century fostered the Arianism which they professed.  At the end of the eighth century, however, the Avars were converted to Catholic Christianity under Charlemagne, and when Transylvania was conquered in 1002 by St.  Stephen, the first Christian king of Hungary, its inhabitants perforce accepted his religion.  Hungary was too far away from Rome, however, and the Hungarians were of too independent spirit, for the Roman Church to gain complete power there.  The simple, scriptural form of Christianity taught by the Albigenses and Waldenses was widely spread from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, and the reformation of the Hussites won many adherents a century later; and much persecution failed to suppress these heresies.  The soil was thus well prepared for the Protestant Reformation.

    As early as 1520 Saxon merchants returning from Germany brought Luther’s books to Transylvania, where they found many eager readers; while two monks returning from Wittenberg preached the Reformation.  Severe laws were passed to prevent the spread of the heresy, some books were seized and burnt, and two persons were put to death by John Zapolya; but wars were on hand, the laws were not much enforced, and so the Reformation spread more rapidly in Hungary than in any other land.  By 1535 all the Saxons had become Lutherans, and the Magyars and Szeklers rapidly followed, until at length only three of the magnates remained faithful to the Catholic Church, and even these attended Protestant worship.  In 1556 the Catholic priests were driven out, and the church property was confiscated or given over to the Protestants; Hungarian students went in hundreds every year to Wittenburg to prepare for the Protestant ministry, and Catholicism seemed all but extinct.  Nevertheless at the Diet of Torda in 1557 legal toleration of both religions was established when Isabella decreed, ‘in order that each might hold the faith which he wished, with the new rites as well as with the old, that this should be permitted him at his own free will.’  Save for the similar decree in the Grisons in 1526, this was the first law in Christian Europe guaranteeing equal liberty to both religions.  The principle of full toleration to all religions was slow in developing, and was not realized until very long afterwards.

    At this same Diet of Torda it was decided to establish a national synod where the Protestant ministers might soberly discuss the serious differences of view which were already arising among them about the Lord’s Supper.  This had already long been the subject of fierce controversy between Lutherans and Calvinists elsewhere, the Lutherans holding that the body and blood of Christ are present in the bread and wine, while the Swiss reformers held that these are only symbols.  Calvin’s doctrine had come into Hungary in 1550, and was rapidly infecting the Lutheran Protestants there, and Calvinistic churches were now being formed.  In the end most of the Magyars and Szeklers became Calvinists, while the Saxons remained Lutherans; but the separation was preceded by some years of angry dispute.  It is in one of the earliest of these discussions that we first hear, in 1556, of one Francis David (of whom we shall soon hear a great deal as the hero of this part of our story) taking part on the Lutheran side; and he was for some time the leader of the opposition to Calvinism among the Hungarian Protestants.  The king became concerned lest the violent quarrels which were distracting the Church should also disturb the peace of the state, and he had synods called to see whether harmony could not be restored; but nothing was accomplished.  The Diet of Torda therefore in 1563 renewed and confirmed its earlier decree of toleration, ordering “that each may embrace the religion that he prefers, without any compulsion, and may be free to support preachers of his own faith, and in the use of the sacraments, and that neither party must do injury or violence to the other.”  Seeing that all other efforts proved vain, the king at length settled the matter at the synod of Nagy Enyed the next year, by ordering the parties to separate into two distinct churches, each with its own superintendent or bishop.  Transylvania thus took another step toward religious toleration, having now three recognized churches, the Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Reformed.

    While these things were going on, seeds of Unitarianism were also beginning to sprout.  It might almost be said that the Hungarians had been predisposed to that doctrine by their history.  As we have already seen, Arian Christianity flourished here under the Gothic occupation.  In 351 also Photinus, Bishop of Sirmium (Mitrovicz) on the Save, was condemned as a heretic and banished for holding that Christ’s nature was essentially human.  His heresy long survived him in those parts, and Unitarians have often been called Photinians.  Arianism existed more or less widely spread as late as the formal conversion of the Hungarians to orthodox Christianity in 1002; and even after that it fused with the faith of the Albigenses and Waldenses until the fifteenth century, and was widely spread among the people.  Early in the Reformation period Anabaptists had also been here and prepared the way, and the writings of Servetus had been read and his doctrines had gained scattered followers, so that the first Protestant synod in Hungary had found it necessary as early as 1545 to condemn opponents of the Trinity.  The first prophet of Unitarianism in Hungary was one Thomas Aran, who in 1558 wrote a clear and bold book denying the Trinity, and in 1561 began to preach his doctrine at Debreczen, the very Geneva of Hungarian Calvinism.  The Calvinist preacher there, Peter Melius, was aroused like a Hungarian Calvin to put down the heresy.  A public discussion was arranged, and the question was debated for four days; when such pressure was put upon Aran by the civil power that he confessed defeat and retracted, though he later professed Unitarianism again in Transylvania.  His teachings, however, were discussed in various synods, and had spread so far that Melius felt obliged to publish a book against them.  Not a few churches adopted them, both in the northern counties where be had taught and in the great plain of Lower Hungary.

    It was in Transylvania,  however, that Unitarianism had its most important influence.  The real forerunner of Unitarianism here was Stancaro.  He had came to Transylvania in 1553, and for five years he persistently advocated the same views of the work of Christ which he spread a little later in Poland. He was bitterly opposed, by David and others, and at length was expelled and went to Poland, where we have already noted his career.  Although he did not himself deny the Trinity or the deity of Christ, the result of his teaching was in both countries the same, to pave the way for others to deny them.  Unitarian doctrines were little likely, however, to make much headway against orthodox opposition unless they could have the backing and leadership of some person of considerable influence.  Such a leader now came upon the scene in the person of Biandrata, who may be credited with successfully introducing Unitarianism into Transylvania.  We have already met him in Switzerland, and in Poland.  In 1554, when he was court physician to Queen Bona of Poland, she had sent him to Transylvania to attend her daughter, the young Queen Isabella, with her little son, the young Prince John Sigismund; and he had then lived at the Transylvanian court for eight years.  It was but natural, therefore, that when the young king lay dangerously ill in 1563 he should send for the able physician of his boyhood.  Biandrata was glad enough to escape from a position in Poland which Calvin’s efforts against him had made disagreeable and might make dangerous, and to accept the high post of court physician to the King of Transylvania.

    Until his sixteenth year John Sigismund’s education had been under Catholic influences, but he had now for several years supported the Reformation as a Lutheran.  He had already driven out the priests and monks from the land; and now that he was hard beset by foes in war and by conspiracies which his enemies had stirred up against him at home, he sought consolation in religion, and interested himself seriously in the further reform of it.  He was now twenty-three, and the Italian officer who commanded his body guard wrote home to his sovereign, the Grand-Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, giving a most interesting and admiring sketch, which is still extant.  Though of slight physique, he says, and not strong of health, the king was skillful in all manly sports.  He was highly intelligent, and spoke eight languages; of refined tastes and manners, and with a charming personality; brave, industrious, generous, and frank, distinguished for his personal virtues, and devoted to religion.  His residence was at Gyulafehervar, which thus becomes an important place in our history.

    Biandrata, on the other hand, was now in the prime of life, and by his adventurous history, his handsome appearance, his courtly manners, and his eloquence he made a marked impression upon the king and at court, where he soon became the leading figure.  Within a year he had won the confidence of the king to such a degree as to be made his private counsellor, and was presently rewarded by the handsome gift of three villages, and given the privileges of a noble; though just because of his great influence with the king he was feared, rather than popular, at court.  He lost none of his interest in the reform of theology, but still kept in communication with the brethren in Poland; and finding the king also deeply interested in religion he eagerly seconded and guided his impulses for further reformation, proceeding cautiously, and not at first disclosing how far he had himself gone.  They must have talked much of theology from the first, for within a few months, when the controversy over the Lord’s Supper was at its critical stage in 1564, the king sent ‘his most excellent Giorgio Biandrata, his physician, an eminent man, learned and uncommonly well versed in the Scriptures,’ to the general synod at Nagy Enyed at which the Calvinists were finally separated from the Lutherans, with full power and authority to take part in the discussion and if possible settle the controversy.  Biandrata here of course took the side of progress and supported the Calvinists, and here too he discovered in David, who was the leader on the Calvinist side of the debate, a man admirably suited to promote in Transylvania the further reform in which he had himself taken a part in Poland.  As David was soon to become the great leader of Unitarianism in Transylvania, its hero, martyr, and idol, we must here turn aside from our narrative to see who and what he was.

CHAPTER XXII

Francis David and the Rise of Unitarianism in Transylvania, 1564-1569

 

    Francis David was born at Kolozsvar (Klausenburg), the capital of Transylvania, about 1510, and was thus a close contemporary of Calvin and Servetus, and a few years older than Biandrata.  He was the son of a shoemaker, and perhaps a Saxon, though he spoke and wrote both German and Hungarian, as well as Latin, with perfect fluency.  He was doubtless first educated at the school of the Franciscan monks at Kolozsvar, and later went to the cathedral school at Gyulafehervar, where he showed himself a brilliant student, and made influential acquaintances.  After being in the service of the church here for a time, be was sent by a wealthy friend to the University of Wittenberg, where many Catholic students still went in spite of Luther's heresy centering there.  He may also have studied at Padua.  After two or three years he returned home in 1551 an accomplished scholar and became rector of a Catholic school at Besztercze for two years, and was then for two years more parish priest of a large village in the same county.  Many of the Catholic clergy of the vicinity were then accepting the doctrines of the Reformation.  David joined them, gave up his priesthood, and became a Lutheran.  His reputation was already such that three of the most important Protestant churches in the country called him to their service.  He accepted the call to his old home at Kolozsvar, where he spent the remaining twenty-four years of his life, in a position of the greatest influence, and idolized by his people.

    David's rise was now rapid.  He seems to have been made rector of the Lutheran school in 1555, and chief minister of the largest church the following year; while by 1557, having already won a great reputation by his brilliant debates against Stancaro and the Calvinists, and thus come to be recognized as the leader of the Reformation in Transylvania, he was bishop (or superintendent) of the Hungarian Lutherans.   He was, however, by nature, of an open mind, and after debating against the Calvinist view of the Lord's Supper for several years, he was at length won over to it by its chief defender, Melius, and accordingly resigned his office of bishop in 1559.  Though the Lutherans expelled him from their synod in 1560, he still kept his pastorate, and tried to the very end to prevent a split in the church.  He took an active part in the debates that occupied every synod, and now came to be regarded the leader of the Calvinists as he had formerly been that of the Lutherans.  His persuasive eloquence won the king and many of the magnates to the new view, and when the two churches were separated in 1564 it was but natural that Biandrata should have used his powerful influence to have another removed and David appointed in his stead, first as court preacher, and then as bishop this second time as bishop of the new Reformed Church in Transylvania.

    David was now at the very summit of his powers, the most eloquent and famous preacher and the ablest public debater in Transylvania; so well versed in Scripture that he seemed to have the whole Bible at his tongue's end, while in debating a point of doctrine he would quote texts and compare passages with a readiness that often put his opponents to confusion.  Having David at court, Biandrata now became intimate with him, and confided to him his hopes of a further reformation of the doctrines of the Church.  Biandrata, taught by his past experiences in Italy, Switzerland, and Poland, was cautious and moved slowly.  David was bold and fearless.  In that very year, in the king's presence at the Diet of Segesvar, he openly spoke against the Trinity; and the king, instead of objecting, only smiled.  In 1566 David found one of the professors in the Kolozsvar school teaching the old doctrine about the Trinity, and ventured to correct him.  The teacher, angered, publicly charged David with heresy.  David had him removed, and then began carefully and systematically to preach the unity of God from his Kolozsvar pulpit.  The teacher went to Hungary and joined Melius who, with the spirit of a new Athanasius, made himself the champion of orthodoxy, and from Calvin and Beza brought the king warnings against Biandrata, and asked that a synod be called to debate the matter.

    Prolonged and heated controversy followed, and from now on for nearly five years there were almost every month debates over the doctrine of the Trinity at synod, Diet, or public debate.  Many of these discussions took the shape of formal disputations, in which each side appointed its best debaters to present and defend carefully framed theses and antitheses, while stenographic reports were taken by the secretaries.  At several of these the king himself presided and occasionally took part, while the clergy and the nobles from far and near would be present in large numbers.  The records would then be published on a press which the king had already provided for Biandrata and David to use in their work of reformation, and these became valuable documents for propaganda throughout the whole country; for people at that time were as keenly interested in these themes as they can now be in the most burning political questions.

    Public discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity began in Transylvania at the national synod held at Gyulafehervar, and thence adjourned to Torda, early in 1566.  The ministers present, under the leadership of Biandrata and David, after accepting the Apostles's Creed, adopted a statement of their belief on the Trinity which gave it a Unitarian interpretation, and rejected the Athanasian doctrine as untenable.  At another synod a few weeks later they expressed their belief more fully and carefully, and soon afterwards they published a catechism.  Their purpose, like that of Servetus and the Polish Brethren, seems to have been simply to restore the doctrine of the New Testament and the primitive Church, as a basis on which all Christians might unite.

    Melius, who had by now become bishop of the Reformed Church in Hungary, had thus far been disputing on hostile territory, where the liberals were in the majority; the next year he therefore called a synod at Debreczen in his own district, and got some strongly orthodox propositions adopted, while the Helvetic Confession just adopted in Switzerland as a bar to further heresy there³ was signed by his ministers.  In Transylvania meanwhile the press was busy on the other side, especially with a book On the True and the False Knowledge of the One God, which sought, among other things, to ridicule the absurdities of the doctrine of the Trinity by means of coarse pictures, and therefore greatly angered the orthodox, while it made an indelible impression upon the minds of the common people.  In his dedication of this book to the king, David makes a plea for toleration which is far in advance of his age: There is no greater piece of folly than to try to exercise power over conscience and soul, both of which are subject only to their Creator.  This spirit found sympathy with the king, and soon afterwards, at a Diet at Torda in January, 1568, where David made an eloquent plea for religious toleration, the decrees of 1557 and 1563⁴ were renewed and strengthened.  The king decreed that preachers shall be allowed to preach the Gospel everywhere, each according to his own understanding of it.  If the community wish to accept such preaching, well and good; if not, they shall not be compelled, but shall be allowed to keep the preachers they prefer.  No one shall be made to suffer on account of his religion, since faith is the gift of God.  This is the Magna Charta of religion in Transylvania, and it deserves to be remembered as a golden date in Unitarian history, for it saved the Unitarian faith from being crushed out there as it was in other lands.  In the generation in which it was passed, the Inquisition was doing its worst to crush Protestantism in Spain and Italy, Alva was putting Protestants to death by the thousands in the Netherlands, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew with its 20,000 or 30,000 victims in France was yet four years in the future; while deniers of the Trinity were still to be burned alive in England for more than forty years.  It long stood as the most advanced step in toleration yet taken in Europe; and the king who passed this enlightened law was but twenty-eight years old.

    Melius, displeased with the way things were running, now sought to stem the tide by inviting the Transylvanian ministers to a joint debate at Debreczen in Hungary, where everything was strongly orthodox; but as this was out of the jurisdiction of King John, so that they could not enjoy the protection of his tolerant laws, and as a few weeks before an antitrinitarian minister had been seized in that vicinity and imprisoned without trial, Biandrata suspected a plot, and would not let the invitation be accepted.  Instead, the king, wishing to see the debated questions settled, and to quiet the disturbances that were arising out of them, summoned a general synod of the ministers of both Hungary and Transylvania to meet in his own palace at Gyulafehervar, to hear a formal debate on the subject.  Five debaters, led by Biandrata and David, represented the Unitarian side, while on the side of the Calvinists were six speakers, headed by their bishop, Melius.  It was the greatest debate in the whole history of Unitarianism.  It took place at Gyualafehervar in the great ball of the palace before the king, the whole court, and a great throng of ministers and nobles, who occasionally enlivened the proceedings by their questions or comments.  The debate began on March 8, 1568, at five o'clock in the morning, with solemn prayers on each side; it was conducted in Latin, and lasted ten full days.  Melius appealed to the authority of the Bible, the creeds, the Fathers, and the orthodox theologians; David, to the Bible alone.  The discussion began with some heat, which did not much cool off as it went on.  On the ninth day the Calvinists asked to be excused from listening further.  The king intimated that this would he confessing defeat, and they remained; but as nothing was being accomplished to bring the parties to agree (how could it ever have been really expected?) the king ended the debate the next day, recommending that the ministers give themselves to prayer, seek harmony, and refrain from mutual abuse as unbecoming in them.

    The debate was generally regarded as a complete victory for the Unitarians, whose side the king evidently favored; but the Calvinist historian's comment is that it ended without any profit to the Church of Christ, which was perhaps his way of stating the same thing.  In the course of the debate Biandrata showed himself a poor debater, and he did not enter public discussion again; but David, who opened and closed the debate, and was ready with a convincing answer to every question or objection, covered himself with glory.  He now returned home to Kolozsvar.  The news of his triumph had preceded him.  The streets were crowded to receive him.  Without waiting for him to get to the church, the people made him mount a large boulder at a street corner (it is still preserved by the Unitarians of Kolozsvar as a sacred relic) and speak to them of his victorious new doctrine.  They received his word with the greatest enthusiasm, and after a time they took him on their shoulders and carried him to the great church in the square, where he went on with his sermon.  His eloquence was so persuasive that on that day, so the tradition runs, the whole population of Kolozsvar accepted the Unitarian faith.  Not quite the whole, however; for the Lutheran Saxons of Kolozsvar were so disgusted with this proceeding that they left the city forthwith, and had it removed from the number of their seven fortified towns which had for centuries enjoyed special privileges granted to the Saxons.  From now on for many years Kolozsvar was practically a Unitarian city, all its churches and schools were Unitarian, and all the members of the city Council and the higher officials were Unitarians.  In this year, 1568, David for the third time became bishop, this time of the Unitarian churches.

    Being thus defeated in Transylvania, the Calvinists now appealed to the judgment of the professors in the German universities, who were considered the highest authorities in Protestant Europe on questions of theology.  Of course the replies were in their favor, for all Germany was orthodox; and several of the professors wrote books against David and Biandrata, and tried to stir up feeling against them.  They also began somewhat to rally their forces in Transylvania; while in Hungary, all through the year 1568, they kept holding synods in different districts, confirming the orthodox doctrine and condemning the Antitrinitarians.  Disregarding the king's decree of tolerance, they persecuted and drove out ministers holding Unitarian views, if they would not deny their faith, and forbade them to speak in their own defense, lest they thus make more converts to their views.

    Many, however, wished that a discussion might be held in the Hungarian language, which they could all understand.  David therefore determined to carry the war into the enemy's country, and with the king's sanction called another synod to meet at Nagyvarad (Grosswardein) October 10, 1569.  The orthodox clergy denied his right to summon them to a synod, having in Melius a bishop of their own, and at first were unwilling to attend, though at length they yielded.  The conditions of the debate were carefully drawn, and officers appointed as usual.  David presented a statement of his faith and of the propositions he stood ready to defend.  His opponents offered counter-arguments, and presented propositions of their own, signed by sixty ministers.  Gaspar Bekes presided, the most powerful magnate in the kingdom, and the king's most intimate councillor.  The king and his court were present with many generals and magnates, and the leading clergy from both Transylvania and Hungary; and he himself frequently took part in the discussion. The attendance was larger than even at Gyulafehervar.  There were nine disputants on each side, though the debate was mainly between David and Melius, and was carried on with the greatest intensity.  On one occasion Melius attacked David with such violence that the king himself rebuked him, and suggested that if the orthodox ministers did not believe in freedom of conscience they had better remove to some other country.  We wish that in our dominions, said he, there be freedom of conscience; for we know that faith is the gift of God, and that one's conscience can not be forced.  David pleaded eloquently for religious liberty.  After six days the king saw that nothing further could be gained, and having charged the orthodox with evading the real issue he closed the debate.  He, Bekes, the court, and the majority of the company were won to David's views, and henceforth the king clearly accepted the Unitarian faith.  The orthodox minority contented themselves with drawing up and signing a confession of faith of their own, condemning David and his views.  This was the decisive debate in the controversy over the Trinity, and it clinched the victory won at Gyulafehervar two years before.

CHAPTER XXIII

Unitarianism in Transylvania, Until the Death of Francis David, 1569-1579

 

   The churches accepting David's views had now definitely separated from those of the orthodox faith, although it does not appear precisely when or precisely how the division was finally effected. They had thus far no distinctive name of their own. For a time the ministers signed themselves "ministers of the Evangelical profession"; in laws of 1576 they are mentioned as "those holding the religion of Francis David"; and as late as 1577 a vote of the Diet of Torda refers to them merely as "of the other religion"; while since the center of their power was at Kolozsvar, the churches and their bishop were also long spoken of as "of the Kolozsvar Confession." There is some reason to think that in the debate between David and Melius the name Unitarian was already applied to the party of David, though it is not found in records until 1600, and it did not become the authorized designation of the Church until 1638. The guess of a Calvinist historian writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, that the name was derived from a union between the four religions of Transylvania in 1568, though it has often been quoted as authentic, must be dismissed as incorrect. The name is undoubtedly derived from Unitarians' belief in the unity of God, as the name Trinitarian was supposed to be derived from belief in the Trinity. Catholic writers of the period, however, commonly called the Unitarians Trinitarians (as Servetus had called Calvin), meaning by that nearly the same as tritheists. The name Unitarian, which thus originated in Transylvania, was at length taken up by the later Socinians, and thence passed to England and America.

   We are now at the golden age of Unitarianism in Transylvania, when the new faith rapidly spread in all directions, as rings spread on the water. The king had openly given it his adherence, and so of course the court followed his example to make doubly sure of enjoying his favor. At one time seven of his councillors became Unitarians; generals, judges, and many of the higher officials followed, until there remained hardly a family of importance that had not accepted the new faith. Its strength was especially in the larger towns and in the villages of Szeklerland; while able professors whom David had secured, some of them distinguished refugees from persecution in other countries, taught it in thirteen higher schools or colleges, chief of which was the college founded by the king at Kolozsvar, and occupying the buildings of an abandoned Dominican monastery. The press, too, was unceasingly active in the cause, and in the one year 1568 no fewer than twelve works, eight of them by David himself, were published in Latin for scholars, or in Hungarian for the common people. As in Poland, so here, when a noble became Unitarian, the churches on his estates were likely to be placed under ministers of his faith, and thus became Unitarian also. Before David died there were far over three hundred Unitarian churches in Transylvania and the neighboring counties of Hungary; and before the end of the century some four hundred and twenty-five, beside some sixty more in lower Hungary. This considerably exceeded the number in Poland.

   There was one misgiving to trouble David's mind. So long as the king lived, they were sure of his protection and sympathy; but he was not in strong health suppose he should die? To be sure, freedom of worship and preaching had been decreed, and persecution on account of religion had been forbidden; but the Unitarian Church had no such legal standing as the other churches had. David urged this matter upon the attention of the king, and he was not slow to respond. At the Diet of Maros Vasarhely held early in 1571, after ample discussion, the king granted the people and church of Kolozsvar certain privileges which had been impaired by the withdrawal of the Saxons; and, what was of more importance, he established perfect equality of the four chief religions, Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Unitarian. These were henceforth known as the four "received religions": that is, while other religions might be merely tolerated, these were legally recognized and protected, and their members had the right to hold high public office. This action crowned the broad policy of King John Sigismund with regard to religious matters. All rulers of Transylvania were required henceforth to take oath at coronation to preserve the equal rights secured by this decree, and it has ever since been the most prized and the first mentioned of all the rights the constitution grants. It is worth more than passing notice that at the only time in history when there has been a Unitarian king on the throne, and a Unitarian government in power, they used their power not to oppress other forms of religion, nor to secure exceptional privileges for their own, but to insist upon equal rights and privileges for all.

   Less than two months after this act the king died. The day after the Diet rose, while he was about to go to one of his castles for a rest, he was seriously injured by a runaway accident. His health was already frail, complications set in, and he passed away at Gyulafehervar March 15, 1571, not yet thirty-one years old. He was deeply mourned, for, apart from animosities arising out of religion, he had been popular with his subjects for his qualities of mind and heart and for his personal character, and was known for his justice and mercy. During his whole reign he had had to contend with enemies who coveted his throne and land, and who were constantly inciting troubles within his kingdom. Nine times his life had been attempted. He died childless, for though he would gladly have married, his enemies repeatedly prevented such an alliance, urging against him that he was an abandoned heretic, but really desiring to see his line become extinct, that they might obtain his crown. Though always in delicate health he more than once showed himself an able general and a resourceful statesman; and realizing that Transylvania would fare best if separate from Hungary, he followed a policy which laid the foundation for a century of independent national life for his country. He fostered science and art, was the friend of scholars and the patron of education, doing much to found and support schools and colleges; but above all else he was interested in religion, and no name among modern rulers deserves to stand higher than his for his pioneer work in the cause of equal freedom to different religions. Let him be remembered by us in honor as the one Unitarian king.

   While Unitarianism was thus rapidly gaining ground in Transylvania, a more modest growth was also at the same time taking place in Hungary proper. Though his control of them was disputed, King John Sigismund was supposed to rule over ten or twelve of the Hungarian counties north and west of Transylvania; and although the Calvinists were strongly in the majority there, Unitarians were in the less danger of being persecuted in those parts. The chief apostle of the faith in the upper counties was Lukas Egri, minister of the church at Ungvar and one of the most learned ministers in the country. He won so many converts to his views that the synod was forced to take notice of it in 1566, when he presented a statement of belief that was regarded as unsound as to the Trinity, though no action was then taken. Two years later the orthodox called another synod at Kassa, under the auspices of the Catholic General Schwendi who was in command there. Egri was summoned to attend, and presented twenty-seven theses, which were debated. He was condemned as heretical; and as he refused to retract and sign an orthodox confession, the general threw him into prison without further trial, and there he lay for five long years, nor was he released until three years after he had recanted. The spread of Unitarianism in Hungary was also much furthered by the last great controversy between David and Melius at Nagyvarad in 1569.³ Soon after that, Stephen Balasz (Basilius) succeeded in converting a church of 3,000 members at Nagyvarad to the Unitarian faith, and this church, with its fine school attached, lasted far on into the next century. A little later Unitarianism was preached even at Debreczen, as well as at numerous other places east of the Tisza, and even as far west as Esztergom (Gran), and Melius had to exert himself to the utmost to prevent its spread in other centers in Hungary.

   In Lower Hungary the Unitarian faith spread much faster yet. That district was then under the rule of the Sultan, who allowed much greater religious freedom than did either Catholics or orthodox Protestants. After his successful work at Nagyvarad, Balasz proved a most effective missionary in that region, spreading his faith from city to city south and west. He soon called two ministers from Transylvania to assist him, and others followed them. They held the usual public debates, and their progress through the country was a triumphal procession. They came at length to have in the two counties of Temes and Baranya alone more than sixty churches, many of them with schools, of which the chief were at Temesvar, the seat of the Turkish government, and at the old university city of Pecs (Funfkirchen), which also had a famous school and became an active missionary center for the region. Government officials joined the movement and assisted it with their wealth; and after King John's death, the press which he had given the Unitarians at Gyulafehervar was brought here, and through the circulation of Unitarian books many of the Calvinist ministers of the county were converted. After a few years these churches became separated from those in Transylvania, and had their own "Bishop of Lower Hungary," Paul Karadi, whose seat was at Temesvar.

   Not all went smoothly, however. A tragic discussion was held in 1574, in which the Calvinist preacher Vörösmarti debated against the Unitarians Lukas Tolnai and George Alvinczi. The Calvinists won the debate, and their bishop thereupon induced the local government to condemn their opponents to death. Tolnai escaped to Pecs, where he was protected; but Alvinczi was hanged. A bold move was then made. A wealthy Unitarian living in the vicinity, despite the fact that a complainant had been beheaded some years before, complained of the matter to the Turkish Pasha at Buda, and demanded as a satisfaction for the death of Alvinezi that the Calvinistic bishop also be put to death. The bishop was ordered to appear. He maintained that he had acted within the law. A disputation was ordered, with three debaters on each side, and it took place before a great crowd representing Catholics, Greeks, Reformed, Unitarians, Jews, and Turks. The Pasha decided at the end that the execution of Alvinczi had been inhuman, and condemned the three Calvinists to death as murderers. The orthodox were in a panic at the prospect of having to take some of their own medicine, and interceded for the lives of the three. The Unitarians supported their plea, saying they did not wish revenge. After lying in prison for some time in suspense, the three were released upon payment of a large ransom, and a large further annual tribute was levied on the whole province. This was both more satisfactory to the Calvinists and more profitable to the Pasha than an execution would have been. The Calvinists did not venture to repeat the offense. Later discussions were milder in their tone, and at a famous one at Pecs in 1588 between the Unitarian missionary Valaszuti and the Calvinist scholar Skaricza, the Unitarian side was victorious.

   To return to Transylvania. The death of King John Sigismund was the beginning of sorrows for the Unitarians. They had hoped that his successor might be Gaspar Bekes,⁴ who was the king's own choice, and had been his high chamberlain and closest adviser; for he would carry out the political policies that John had at heart, and he was also a Unitarian; but unfortunately he was absent on a political mission when the king died. His enemies intrigued against him in his absence, and his rival's brother was in command of the army; so that, although he returned home as soon as possible, and mustered all his forces at the Diet following, the nobles chose one who was like themselves a Magyar, though a Catholic, and one of the very few magnates who had remained in that faith.

   Upon receiving the crown the new prince, Stephen Bathori, was required to take oath to protect the four received religions in all their rights; and he was, for his time, a fair and just ruler, who declared that it was a grievous crime for one to try to rule the conscience of another. Although unfriendly to the Reformation, he promoted Calvinists and Lutherans to public office without prejudice; but he set his face against Unitarianism, and determined by all fair means to check its spread. Moreover, as his rival Bekes had been an eminent Unitarian leader, and as most of his followers had been of that faith, and as they had raised an insurrection, refusing to acknowledge Stephen's authority, the whole Unitarian community of course fell under suspicion of being not only heretical but also disloyal. He therefore at once began an anti-Unitarian movement, which was of course eagerly fostered by the Lutherans and Calvinists. The king removed all Unitarians from court and from high public office, and he appointed another court preacher in place of David. Reviving an old law, he made it impossible for them to print their books without his leave, and he thus cut off one of the chief means they had used to spread their faith. The Unitarian printer was exiled, and took his press to Pecs in Hungary.

   Another line of attack was upon the teaching of the Unitarians. The Diet decreed in 1572 and 1573 that any "innovators," introducing further reforms or changes in religion, should be excommunicated and banished, or even imprisoned or put to death for blasphemy, at the discretion of the prince, and we shall soon see to what this led. In 1574 David's life and teaching were investigated at the synod of Nagy Enyed in order if possible to discover some scandal that might humiliate him and destroy his influence. Each year things went from bad to worse. In 1575 Bekes was utterly defeated, many of his followers were killed in battle, over two score of the Unitarian magnates were executed as rebels, more were mutilated, and a large number of the nobles were degraded from their rank and had their property confiscated; his party (mostly Szeklers) was almost exterminated. With the Unitarian cause so shattered, the prince now attempted to proselyte those that were left, though with little success.

   All this time Biandrata had managed to retain his position as court physician, and continued to be high in the counsels of the prince. When the throne of Poland fell vacant in 1574, and Stephen became a candidate for it, he sent Biandrata thither in his interest, and it was largely through his physician's efforts that Stephen received the election in the following year. But for him, perhaps the Unitarians might have fared far worse than they did; and it is significant that soon afterwards, at the Diet of 1576, the office of the Unitarian bishop was given legal recognition. Stephen left the government of Transylvania to his brother Christopher as regent, who proved less tolerant than he, and more determined to restore the Catholic Church; but despite objections from Catholic quarters he still retained Biandrata in his service and in his place at court. In the year after Christopher took control, further measures were taken to restrict the activity of the Unitarians. The Diet ordered that their bishop be forbidden to visit their churches and to hold synods except at Kolozsvar and Torda, where they were most numerous. Elsewhere the oversight of the churches was assigned to the Reformed superintendent, with leave to convert them to Calvinism if he could. In Szeklerland this rule was in force for more than a century, much to the detriment of the Unitarian cause, as we shall see. Even the Reformed were forbidden to make other proselytes.

   Every effort was thus made to give the Catholics a chance to win the country back to their own faith, and in 1579 the prince appealed to the Jesuits to come and assist in restoring the influence of their church, as they had been asked to do in Poland fifteen years before. They came with alacrity, and with his support at once set up schools at Nagyvarad and Kolozsvar; while at Gyulafehervar, where Christopher gave them the Unitarian school, he at once put the young Prince Sigismund under their instruction. This of course now at once became the fashionable school, where the sons of the magnates might be educated along with their future prince. Jesuit influence spread rapidly, both with the prince and among the people so rapidly, in fact, and with so much interference in policies of state, that in 1588 the nobles in the Diet unanimously voted to have them expelled from the land, lest through their machinations Transylvania be soon brought under the rule of Catholic Austria, which was indeed the Jesuit design. They managed to get back again more than once, but the feeling against them was so strong and so general that they were never allowed to stay long enough to gain control of things, as they did in Poland. It is due to this fact as much as to any other that Unitarianism was not overthrown also in Transylvania.

   While the Unitarians had received staggering blows in the death of King John, the overthrow of the party of Bekes, and the succession of laws which the Diet had passed to limit their growth, yet their internal life went on much as before. Especially in their thought, which they had not caused to set like plaster by adopting a binding creed, they kept on advancing. It was this very growth in their thought that brought about their next great trouble. Although they no longer believed that Christ was equal with God, they had inherited from their past the habit of praying to him. There were some of their leading thinkers, however, able scholars like Sommer and Paleologus, rectors of the Kolozsvar school, and others, who believed that this practice had never been taught in Scripture nor commanded by Christ himself, and who therefore held that it ought to be given up. This view had already been put forth about the time of King John's death, and had then been discussed by the Unitarians, Biandrata included, without meeting serious objection; and it had evidently spread widely among them without arousing much of a stir. To the more orthodox, however, this seemed like giving up Christianity altogether and going back to Judaism; and when the Jesuits came into the land in 1579, and found David supporting this view, this seemed to them the most vulnerable point in the Unitarian armor, and they therefore began urging that David be prosecuted for teaching such blasphemy. It is they that were really at the bottom of what followed.

   David, whose mind was always ready for progress, had adopted this view by 1572, though for several years he had happened to say little or nothing upon it. At this unfortunate time, however, just as the Catholics were becoming aggressive, and the Diet in 1577 had renewed the law against further "innovations," he began to preach boldly. At the Unitarian synod at Torda in 1578, with 322 clergy present, he had taken occasion to speak against the worship of Christ, and infant baptism had also been abolished as unscriptural. David went on in public addresses and private discussions to further reformation of doctrine; and though the Diet the next month uttered yet another warning against "innovations," he ignored the warning, and at the autumn synod continued the doctrinal discussions as before. Biandrata at court saw full well what the Jesuits were waiting for, and that the prince under their pressure was growing impatient; and he realized that there was great danger lest all Unitarians be banished from the country. He urged David to keep quiet, and when David replied that this would be hypocrisy, Biandrata next suggested to him that in order to save the whole cause from ruin it might be well to have two or three of the ministers who were most zealous in spreading this new teaching tried for heresy. It might have been a politic move to make, but David indignantly rejected a proposal so dishonorable.

   Biandrata now tried another tack. He had heard of Faustus Socinus and his famous debate at Basel early that year on Christ the Savior, and he sent for him to come and try to bring David around by arguments out of the Bible. Socinus came, by way of Poland, bearing recommendations from the Polish churches; and from autumn to spring he lodged and boarded at David's house, at Biandrata's expense, conducting a running discussion with him on the subject of the worship of Christ. Many of the ministers came in and took part in the debate. Socinus warned David that such views would lead men back to Moses and Judaism; but David remained of the same opinion still. Then Biandrata had David's income from the church cut down; whereat David bitterly protested, comparing this persecution of himself to Calvin's persecution of Servetus. Biandrata replied in anger that if David did not abandon the offensive doctrine he should be accused and tried at the next Diet for the crime of innovation. So it was agreed between them that the matter be referred to a committee of the ministers, who in their turn put it over until a general synod. Biandrata also proposed that all the arguments on both sides be put in writing and submitted to the Polish churches for their judgment. It was agreed that this be done, and that meantime David should preserve silence on the subject. He and Socinus both prepared statements of their views, which were shown to the prince and then sent to Poland. Without waiting for the answer, however, David called another synod at Torda, despite Biandrata's opposition. Upon this Biandrata, thinking David incorrigible and defiant, called fifty of the ministers together, told them that David's case was soon to come up at the Diet, gave them a statement of David's views which seriously misrepresented him, and covertly suggested to them how they had better vote if they did not wish to be removed from office and banished. At the same time he wrote Socinus to tell David that whereas he had thus far defended him with the prince, he should now take side against him. The prince then ordered the Kolozsvar Council to have David removed from his pastorate and kept under guard in his own house, and secluded from visitors. David now suspected Socinus of treachery and ordered him from his house. All this time David was ill; but the next day, being Sunday, he roused himself and preached in the two churches at Kolozsvar, telling his people of what was impending, eloquently defending the Unitarian doctrine, and declaring the worship of Christ to be just the same as invoking the Virgin Mary or the saints. It was the last sermon he ever preached. "Whatever the world may say," he concluded, "it must some time become clear that God is but one."

   The prince was naturally very angry at this, although the Kolozsvar council did their utmost to appease him, and so did many of the nobles; but he insisted that David be arrested. Socinus, having recovered from an illness, went to Poland, where we have already followed his later career. Biandrata's feeling toward David had now deepened into bitter personal animosity. He had him kept under the strictest guard, and would not allow anything done to relieve David's physical sufferings, nor permit even his family to go to him, except rarely. Though too weak to stand, David was at length taken in a wagon to Gyulafehervar and brought into court before the prince. The question was whether his teaching against the worship of Christ was "innovation" or not. Much evidence was brought to show that these views, instead of being new, had long been current among the Unitarians, and once assented to by even Biandrata himself. After the case had been submitted, David and his friends were required to withdraw. A score or more of the Unitarian ministers, remembering Biandrata's threat, and also the orthodox ministers, swore that they had never shared these views. Only one was bold enough to declare that these things had been discussed at Nagyvarad without creating any scandal there. The nobles, however, declared that they agreed with David; while on the other hand the Jesuits last of all pronounced his teachings damnable blasphemy. David was again brought into court. The complainants asked mercy for him, but the orthodox ministers from Hungary demanded his life. The prince pronounced him guilty, and sentenced him to imprisonment in the castle at Deva. Further appeals in his behalf were in vain. The judgment of the Polish churches had not been waited for, but when it did come it was unfavorable to David's teachings. He himself did not long survive, but died in his prison November 15, 1579. His enemies afterwards circulated terrible legends about his last days; but it is probable that he died of the illness from which he had long been suffering.

   Francis David deserves to stand along with Servetus as one of the two greatest martyrs in Unitarian history. He was an untiring student of Scripture, and in his efforts to carry the reformation of Christianity through consistently he never shrank from taking the next step. This made him seem to his opponents to be utterly unstable, for their ideal was that one's religious views once formed should never be changed; but his changes were simply phases of a steady movement in one consistent direction, and he was not a man to believe a thing in his heart but keep silent about it when in his pulpit. Neither bribes nor threats could move him from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it; and his example of unswerving fidelity to his faith, even unto death, has continued to inspire his followers in Transylvania during three hundred and fifty years, of which few have been free from some sort of religious persecution. In his beliefs and teachings he was far in advance of Socinus, and of his own time; and he was the only one of the earlier Unitarian leaders in any country who would feel spiritually much at home among Unitarians of the twentieth century. While this is now his greatest praise, it then brought the greatest danger to his cause, and death to himself.

   As for Biandrata's part in this tragedy, it is not easy to be sure whether one is fair and just to him. Was he moved to it by envy and jealousy that the reformation which he had introduced into the Reformed religion should so soon and so fully have passed from his influence under that of a man whom he had himself discovered and brought forward? Was it a sense of revenge that, when his own reputation was under a cloud, and he is said to have been shunned by all respectable people, made him wish to humiliate one who had reproved him? Or was it that being in the intimacy of a Catholic court he realized that the Unitarian Church was in imminent danger of destruction unless its headlong movement away from the familiar faith and practices of all the rest of the Christian world could be arrested? All these explanations of his conduct have been given, and perhaps all of them are in some measure true. Certainly, as the trouble went on, his feeling toward David seems to have grown into ever more bitter hatred as David seemed to him to grow more stubborn and headstrong. The Unitarians of Transylvania have never ceased to hold his name in execration. Yet after all has been said, it deserves still to be remembered that one of the earliest and most persistent pioneers of Unitarianism, who for years imperiled his life for it, who did more than perhaps any other one person for its early spread in Poland, and was responsible for introducing it to those who could best promote it in Transylvania, was the Italian physician, Giorgio Biandrata.

   Though he had gained a temporary victory in securing the condemnation of David, and still guided the policy of the church for a little while afterwards, Biandrata's influence among the Unitarians from this time on grew steadily less. While it is not likely that he ever returned to the Catholic Church, as is sometimes charged, the rest of his life was spent in Jesuit circles at court, and his interest in his own church is said to have grown cold. Legend surrounds the time, place, and circumstances of his death, but the truth probably is that he died a natural death in 1588 at Gyulafehervar.

   Socinus's part in the transaction also brought much criticism upon him, and it was believed for a time that he had willingly joined with Biandrata in a conspiracy to bring about David's death. But his conduct when carefully examined seems to have been entirely correct, as of one who tried simply by force of argument to bring David to a different view. Failing in this, he left Transylvania without having any part in David's trial, or being even aware that anything more was intended than to restrain him from preaching until a general synod should settle the doctrine of the church.

 

CHAPTER XXIV

Unitarianism in Transylvania, after David's Death, 1570-1690:  A Century of Calvinist Oppression

 

    The imprisonment of David left the Unitarian churches without organization or leadership.  Biandrata's interest in their cause led him at once to set about organizing them on a foundation which should make them safe from further attacks under the law, and should ensure them an orderly and responsible growth. Within a month he called a general synod at Kolozsvar, and it was attended by nearly all the clergy.   In their hearts very many of them sympathized with David and shared his views, and they were little inclined to fall in with any plans Biandrata might now have in hand; but to save the church from the charge of being deniers of Christ, he got them (by misrepresentation or a trick, it is said) to adopt a confession of faith which was supposed to be compiled from books published in the time of John Sigismund.  It made the adoration of Christ henceforth compulsory in public worship, and was designed to be a bar to any further changes in the direction in which David had been moving.  A consistory of twenty-four members was chosen to manage church affairs, and a little later twelve deans were elected to have supervision of as many separate districts.

    Biandrata also had a candidate for bishop; but the brethren were unwilling to vote for him while David still lived, so that on Biandrata's nomination the prince appointed his candidate both bishop and chief minister of the Kolozsvar church.  The new bishop, Demetrius Hunyadi, was wisely chosen.  He had been a proteged of John Sigismund, a friend of Stephen Bathori, and rector of the Kolozsvar school.  While conservative in his beliefs, he was highly educated, as well as a man of great organizing ability.  He soon convened the consistory to establish rules for the government of the churches, and it ordered that infant baptism, which had not been observed for some time, should be restored; while the ministers were all made subject to the bishop and consistory.  In the autumn the judgment of the Polish churches on the case of David was received, strongly condemning the views of David.  All but sixteen or eighteen out of 250 ministers subscribed to it, while most of the rest at length gave in.  All debate on the disputed questions was henceforth closed.  Bishop Hunyadi lived until 1592, and in his time the church became well established in ways that were safe and conservative, though they left little room for progress.

    In many cases, however, the conformity was only outward.  Whatever they might have been compelled to adopt, the ministers could not so easily change their convictions, and many of them continued quietly to believe and preach and practice as before.  In fact, as soon as Biandrata's pressure was off, no serious attempt was made for several years to enforce the severe laws which had been passed against David's teaching; and various high nobles and officials were known openly to hold his views.  Even a hundred years later there were many of the Unitarians who did not practice infant baptism; and refusal to adore Christ was widespread for nearly sixty years until, as we shall soon see, the subject again brought the Unitarians before the Diet.

    David's views had been very generally accepted among the churches in Lower Hungary, and as these were not subject to Transylvania but under the Turkish rule, they paid no heed to the new regulations.  Moreover, many of the best ministers in the church now left Transylvania and went to Hungary that they might enjoy greater religious freedom.  There was an angry interchange of letters, the Hungarians sharply upbraiding the Transylvanians for their desertion of David.  The Hungarian churches now withdrew by themselves and chose a bishop of their own, and henceforth, in spite of efforts to win them back, they had little to do with the brethren in Transylvania, and little sympathy with them.  At the same time, many of the nobles, setting political prospects before religious convictions, abandoned the Unitarian Church and professed the Calvinist or the Catholic faith.  Transylvania was on the way to become Catholic again; and the next prince, the young Sigismund Bathori, who had been educated by the Jesuits, was the willing tool of their policy to turn the country over to Catholic Austria.  He was persuaded to put many of the Protestant magnates to death on a false charge of treason and he left his land for some years like a football to be fought over between Austria and Turkey, and to be wounded, burned, and pillaged by each in turn.  For eighteen years from his accession in 1588 there was no peace or security in Transylvania.  All this aggravated the misfortunes of the Unitarians.

    Prince Sigismund surrendered his government to the Emperor Rudolf in 1595 and retired from the country.  The Emperor then sent his bloody General Basta to subdue Transylvania and exterminate Protestantism.  The Catholic bishop recommended that the Unitarian churches be taken away and their ministers banished, and in many cases this was done.  The Jesuits returned and were given the chief Unitarian church at Kolozsvar in 1603.  General Barbiano, a Roman monk turned soldier, declared that they would kill every grown person in Hungary and Transylvania who refused to join the Catholic Church.  Basta treated the Protestants so cruelly that for generations they used his name to frighten their children.  He hung ministers up to smother in smoke from piles of their own burning books, or flayed them alive.  His soldiers pillaged the houses of the nobles, and ravished their wives and daughters.  Terrible famine followed.  For a few months, while their enemies fell out with one another, there was a successful uprising of the Transylvanians under the leadership of a brave Szekler named Moses Szekely, who was a Unitarian.  He proved a great general, and won most of the country back, took Kolozsvar, expelled the Jesuits, and restored their church to the Unitarians.  It looked for a time as if the Unitarians were again to have a ruler of their own faith; for after winning sweeping victories Szekely was elected prince at Gyulafehervar in 1603.  He was about to be recognized by the Emperor when the enemy settled their quarrels and united against him, and a few weeks later he was defeated and killed in a night battle near Brasso (Kronstadt), and most of the nobility of the land were captured or fell with him.  Basta returned, more cruel than ever.  Most of the ministers fled the country, and the Unitarian bishop saved his life by hiding in an iron mine.  The church at Kolozsvar was again given to the Jesuits, and for three years the Unitarians there had to worship secretly in a private house.

    At length the Protestants of Hungary and Transylvania rallied under the heroic leader Stephen Bocskai, a Calvinist of Nagyvarad, who was elected prince in 1605.  Basta was utterly defeated, and the emperor sought peace.  The liberties of both Protestants and Catholics were proclaimed, and Bocskai again expelled the Jesuits and restored to the Unitarians their churches and schools.  The next year he died of poison.  Of course in this troubled period the Unitarians could not hope to increase; but wasted as they were by war and persecution, it was wonderful how steadfastly they stuck to their faith under the leadership of their fearless and faithful bishops.

    With Bocskai began a rule of Transylvania which, for nearly a century, remained in the hands of Calvinists, and the Reformed Church thus held the lead until 1690.  They did not violently oppress the Unitarians, and they pretended to observe the laws of religious freedom; but they were as unfriendly as ever to the Unitarian faith and church, and hampered its growth whenever possible.  Thus they insisted in 1605 that the Calvinist minority should be given equal rights with the large Unitarian majority at Kolozsvar.  Soon afterwards it was ordered that Calvinistic preaching should be had there, where until now there had been only Unitarian churches; and then a church and school were set aside for the Reformed, and then another and another.  In 1615 it was enacted that a church having mixed membership should be wholly controlled by those of the majority faith; and in general the government in every way used its power to favor the Calvinist cause as much as the law allowed.

    From 1613 to 1629 Prince Gabriel Bethlen ruled.  He was perhaps the greatest of Transylvania's native rulers, a wise and firm statesman; also a zealous Calvinist, deeply interested in religion, and determined in every lawful way to promote his own form of it.  Yet the Unitarians, in spite of all they had suffered, were still very strong, and could have kept at least even, had it not been for one thing which now arose to trouble them.  When religious bigotry wishes to pursue a course of persecution, any pretext, however slight, will serve the purpose for entering on it.  Bethlen found his pretext in the Sabbatarianism of some of the Unitarians.  To understand this matter we must go back a little.  After the death of David, Unitarianism showed two distinct tendencies.  The conservatives of course followed the beliefs and observed the practices established by Biandrata and Bishop Hunyadi in 1579; but there were a great many who held with David, even though they dared not confess it, and who continued to go on further in the direction in which David had seemed to be setting out.  Reacting against the new requirements, they took to studying their Bibles more than ever, and especially the Old Testament, in which they found various neglected commands which they now felt bound to keep.  Hence very few years after David's death it was charged that at Kolozsvar many had given up having their infants baptized, were abstaining from eating pork or blood or things strangled, and in various other ways resembled the Jews, especially as they celebrated Jewish festivals and observed the Sabbath.  Thus they came to be called Judaizers, or Sabbatarians.  They spread most of all in Szeklerland, among the rural population; but they were inoffensive, held no open meetings, and for some time were generally tolerated.  Their founder was one Andrew Eössi, who had come to his beliefs about 1588 while reading his Bible for consolation after the death of his three sons.

    In the time of Sigismund Bathori, Sabbatarianism was coming to be regarded as practically a new religious sect, and it was proposed to punish it severely as an "innovation"; but war soon put a stop to the persecutions that were begun.  Although one or two more Diets passed laws against them, the laws were not enforced; but Bethlen discovered here a chance, by attacking the Sabbatarians, to weaken the Unitarian Church, to which the most of them belonged, and in 1615 he began a severe persecution of them as blasphemers. Three years later he had a general synod of the Unitarian churches called, and sent the Reformed Bishop Dajka to preside over it as his personal representative, and had the Sabbatarians summoned to attend it.  To escape prosecution many of them at once went over to the Reformed Church; the rest were then excluded from their membership in the Unitarian Church and turned over to the Reformed ministers to be converted back to Christianity.  Accompanied by 300 soldiers, Bishop Dajka next went through two whole counties where the Sabbatarians were most numerous, and under pretense of rooting them out he took the churches away from the Unitarians right and left, wherever there was the least suspicion of Sabbatarianism, and turned their ministers out of their pulpits and placed them under arrest.  The Diet thought this was going too far, and interfered.  In 1622, however, Bishop Dajka attained the same end in another way.  As the law then stood, even the Unitarian churches in Szeklerland were to be visited and supervised by the Reformed bishop rather than by the Unitarian.  He converted a well-known Unitarian minister to the Reformed faith, though the fact was kept a secret, and took him with him as he visited the Unitarian churches.  He would ask the members if they professed the same faith as this pastor Siko, to which they answered yes.  Thereupon he reported that in his presence all these churches had abjured Unitarianism and professed the Reformed faith; their Unitarian ministers were turned out, and Reformed ministers were settled in place of them.  Thus by a contemptible deception the Unitarians were deprived of sixty-two churches at once, and no attempt was ever made to right the wrong.

    Sabbatarianism was now in a way to die out (for the exclusion of its followers from the church meant their disqualification from holding public office, and this was regarded as a very great loss), had it not been revived in a singular way.  A man named Simon Pecsi had in earlier life been teacher of the three sons of the Eössi above mentioned, and after their death Pecsi had been adopted by him, and at length had inherited his large fortune.  He then went abroad for extensive travel and study, and returning entered upon public life, became secretary to Bocskai, and at length chancellor under Bethlen.  Falling under suspicion of disloyalty, he was imprisoned for nine years, during which he gave himself to much thought upon religious subjects.  The result was that he came out of prison a zealous Sabbatarian, and by his able published writings and his wide personal influence soon spread the movement widely among all classes; while the Unitarian bishop, being a Pole, knew too little Hungarian to keep track of what was going on in his churches.  Bethlen had now been succeeded by George Rakoczy I, another zealous Calvinist, who had less love for Unitarians since they had supported his rival for the crown, one of their own number.  After settling his political problems, therefore, he began a new persecution of the Sabbatarian Unitarians, whom he required to return to one of the other "received" religions on pain of death and confiscation of property.  Pecsi himself was again imprisoned, and forfeited nearly all his property, though when at length released he is said to have secured himself against further trouble by joining the Reformed Church.

    One more line of attack remained to be tried against the Unitarians: as to whether they were observing the law about the worship of Christ, which had been forced upon them at the time of David's trial.  It was well known that many of the ministers had accepted the new creed at that time simply because they must, or else run the risk of being imprisoned or perhaps put to death as innovators; while many of the nobles had made no secret at David's trial that they favored his views.  The matter was allowed to drift at the time, since for a generation the country was too much upset by political disturbances to pay much attention to the details of religion.  They continued in their heresy.  Rakoczy, however, began in 1635 to take more vigorous measures, and threatened, unless they changed, to prosecute them before the Diet.  As they still persisted, a special Diet was called at Dees in 1638 to take up the matter.  Again, as before, many became alarmed lest they lose their political rights, and for safety went over to the Reformed Church.  In the end the parties reached an agreement known as the Settlement of Dees (Complanatio Deesiana), which was accepted by the prince, the Diet, and all others concerned.  This gave the Unitarian belief a new and clearer statement, and required a stricter adherence to the worship of Christ (though not as God), and to the use of the sacraments; while any one found innovating again was to be beheaded and to have his estates confiscated.  All this was then duly ratified in the church synod, a new catechism was based upon it, and from that time on the subject gave no further trouble.

    The Diet at Dees took other actions affecting the Unitarians.  It forbade the publishing of Unitarian books without license from the prince.  Further action was also taken against the Sabbatarians, of whom some were sentenced to death, many others were imprisoned, and one was stoned to death by a street mob as a blasphemer, and his wife pilloried in the marketplace and banished; while yet others had to submit to public humiliation, and all who would not recant had their property confiscated.  From this time on, the Sabbatarians became negligible, though a few of them still remain to this day, now professed Jews in faith and customs.

    Besides the misfortunes of which we have spoken, the Unitarians lost many churches in Szeklerland through an invasion of the Tatars in 1622, and in the same year many of their members at Kolozsvar died of the plague; while yet others in this troubled period (1616 - 1632) became demoralized, as we have noted, because their Bishop Radecki, being a Pole, could not speak Hungarian, and thus could not give his churches the oversight they required. Hence the sixty years after David's death were a time during which Unitarianism in Transylvania steadily lost ground.  Those that survived did so through their heroic faithfulness, and thus developed qualities they were greatly to need under Catholic persecutions in the next century.  Meantime they were first to enjoy a half century of comparative quiet, during which they might regain lost ground, and again develop a healthy church life.

    During the rest of the seventeenth century the Unitarians of Transylvania saw better days, and held their own fairly well.  Their ministers and teachers were well educated in their college at Kolozsvar, and the more promising were sent for further education to Luclavice in Poland, to Germany, or to Leiden and Amsterdam in Holland where they were kindly received by the Remonstrants.  From now on they worked unweariedly to repair their losses and build up their church.  They never long escaped injury from war, however.  Prince George Rakoczy II was, as we have seen, lured into invading Poland in 1657, and of his army of 50,000 only 3,000 returned.  The flower of Transylvanian nobility perished or were taken into captivity, among them of course large numbers of Unitarians; and not long afterwards, while Austria invaded the country on the one side, Turks and Tatars came with fire and sword on the other, carrying many into slavery, and leaving burned homes and churches behind them; and in the wake of all this came the plague ravaging the whole land.  For two years the church was unable even to elect a bishop, no synods were held, and the college at Kolozsvar was reduced to but nine students.

    It was just at this period that the miserable company of Polish exiles arrived, to find their Kolozsvar brethren kind and hospitable though impoverished; for friendly relations had long been kept up between the Unitarians of both countries, scholars and teachers had gone back and forth, and Poland had furnished several ministers for the Saxon Unitarian church at Kolozsvar, and even one bishop.  The new Prince Michael Apaffi I arranged for their permanent settlement at a time when hardly another country in Europe was ready to make them welcome.  Later on they were joined by other exiles, from Poland or Prussia; and while all were poor, and long afterwards were still obliged to ask aid from their more fortunate brethren elsewhere, on the whole they brought strength to the Unitarian cause.

    The number of churches had now fallen to not much over 200, hardly half of what they had been in David's time; but under Bishop Koncz, 1663 - 1684, recovery again began, and churches were rebuilt or repaired.  In one instance the Unitarians took from the Calvinists by force a church which had formerly been their own, and the prince approved their action.  Koncz especially fostered a school by each village church, and soon brought these to a high state of excellence; the churches flourished again, and good discipline was maintained.

    In Lower Hungary for more than fifty years after David's death, Unitarian churches, being under the protection of Turkish rule, flourished wonderfully in seven counties, a country as large as Transylvania itself.  At Pecs in 1632 the Catholics were extinct, and nearly every citizen was a Unitarian; and so it was in three whole counties west of the Danube.  Our records of these churches, however, are meager.  After having had but one bishop of their own, they seem to have drawn closer to the Transylvanian brethren again, and not to have appointed another.  Many of their ministers came from Transylvania, and they sent many of their sons to Kolozsvar to college.  Toward the end of the seventeenth century they commenced surely to decline.  The Jesuits had begun to come in and win the field back again.  Wars between Austria and Turkey ravaged the country.  In 1687 the Turks were driven from the land, and it now came back under Catholic rule. When the Emperor took Pecs from the Turks he therefore gave the Unitarian church to the Catholics, and banished its ministers.  The Calvinists were still tolerated in Hungary, and where they were numerous they, too, severely persecuted the Unitarians.  Under this irresistible double oppression, and with no legal protection whatever, they had to yield.  By 1710 the last of the churches in Hungary had been uprooted; their ministers were banished, and their members died off or joined the other churches.  Ten years later but few were left, and before the middle of the century all had become Calvinist or Catholic, or else had left the country.  Not until late in the nineteenth century was Unitarianism again planted in this region.

CHAPTER XXV

Unitarianism in Transylvania under Austrian Rule, 1690-1867:  A Century and a Quarter of Catholic Oppression

 

    Ever since 1526 the Turks had occupied a large part of Hungary, and had held a sort of political guardianship over Transylvania; but in 1690, they were expelled from the land for good, at the end of a war in which the Unitarians bore a prominent part.  Transylvania, with much enthusiasm at being again united in government with a kindred people, was joined to Austria, and Leopold I, King of Hungary and Emperor, was elected its prince.  Now throughout its history Austria has been more closely under the influence of the Catholic Church than perhaps any other European country unless it be Spain.  The century of intermittent oppression by Calvinists of which we have spoken in the last chapter was therefore now to be followed by a century of steady and severe Catholic persecution which was far worse.  Soon after his accession Leopold issued in 1691 a celebrated document (the Diploma Leopoldinum) which was regarded as the Magna Charta of Transylvania.  It was designed to secure to the Transylvanians under the new government all the rights they had enjoyed under the old; and in particular it promised that the existing rights of the four received religions should be continued without injury to churches, schools, or parishes, that all church property should remain in possession of its present holders, and that the members of the several churches should have a fair share of the public offices and honors which they so highly prized.

    The ink was hardly dry on Leopold's signature before plans began for breaking the promises he had so solemnly and publicly made.  Leopold had been educated for the priesthood and was designed for a bishop, when his elder brother died and the crown fell to him at the age of seventeen.  He was largely under the influence of the Jesuits, and his long reign was their golden age in Hungary as it was the dark age of the Protestants.  Before becoming Prince of Transylvania he had been unspeakably cruel to the Protestants of Hungary.  The Jesuits, maintaining that one was not bound to keep a promise made to heretics, soon induced Leopold to break his oath to preserve the religious liberties of his Protestant subjects.  The Catholics therefore now began making demands upon the Protestants, and each demand yielded to only led to more.  We need speak only of the oppressions affecting the Unitarians.  In 1693 they were compelled to give up to the Catholics the school at Kolozsvar which John Sigismund had given them in 1566.  Next the Catholics demanded the great church in the square which the Unitarians had held since David's time, and had lately repaired at large expense; but the demand was refused.  In 1697 came a great fire which destroyed this church and another, as well as the school they had only just built to take the place of that seized by the Catholics, and several other buildings belonging to the church.  Bishop Almasi sent one of the professors in the Unitarian school to Holland to solicit aid from the Remonstrants and Collegiants, and received 9,000 thalers (nearly $7,000) in response to his appeal,¹ and with contributions from the whole membership the buildings were restored; though, as we shall soon see, they were not to be kept for long.  The other three religions now each demanded a church and a school with equal rights at Kolozsvar, thus crowding the Unitarians further out of the seat they had held for long over a century.  In fact, the only ray of light in this dark reign was that in 1693 the right of visiting the churches in the Szekler counties² was restored to the Unitarian bishop, and that in 1696 the Unitarians were permitted to set up a new press at Kolozsvar, though they soon had to hide away even this.

    Under the reign of Charles VI (1711 - 1740) oppression was still the rule.  He took the oath as usual, and under Jesuit advice broke it as usual.  In defiance of the law of the land he brought back the Catholic bishop and the Jesuits, and his agents began despoiling Unitarians and driving them from their churches by force in all parts of the land.  In 1714 he sent General Steinville to Transylvania as governor, who began carrying on the oppression in true military fashion.  He billeted his soldiers in the homes of the prominent Unitarians.  In 1716 he at length took away from them by military force the great church at Kolozsvar which the Catholics had been coveting for over twenty years, and the Unitarians had occupied for a century and a half; and along with this the minister's house, school, professors's houses, endowment property, and press, all under a decree approved by the same emperor who had pledged his sacred word to secure them in all the rights they had possessed.  The value of the property thus taken from the Unitarians at Kolozsvar was estimated at not less than 200,000 crowns.  The students of the school were scattered, and for a time no worship was allowed even in private houses.  In 1721 yet another church at Kolozsvar was taken away, with its endowment funds; then that at Torda, then here and there all over the country churches were taken from the Unitarians on any pretext or none and given to the Catholics, even when the latter had but two or three members in a place.  It was forbidden to build new churches to replace the old without express imperial permission, which of course could never be obtained.  Persecutions like those of the early Christians were inflicted far and wide.  Unitarians were gradually excluded from public offices, even the lowest, and were refused the political equality which was theirs by law.  Even then, though many fell away, and many congregations were scattered or broken up before the end of the century, most did not lose hope even under the severest persecutions, but only redoubled their devotions and sacrifices.

    Charles was succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresia whose long reign (1740 - 1780) continued the same policy toward Protestants which her father had practiced, but carried it yet further.  She stands in history as one of the ablest and best rulers that Austria ever had; and she seemed to herself to be an advanced religious reformer, for she fell out with the Jesuits and expelled them in 1773.  She was, however, a devoted and zealous Catholic; and although at her accession she had assured the Transylvanians that she would preserve all their ancient rights, privileges and liberties, heresy was to her mind an unpardonable sin which had no just claim to toleration.  Hence she was little inclined to let mere laws of the land, though repeatedly confirmed by her predecessors, or promises made by them or herself, stand in the way, if by ignoring them she could suppress or destroy in any part of her realm what she of course deemed the most damnable heresy.  Her hand therefore fell heavily even upon the Saxon Lutherans of her own race, but most heavily of all upon the Unitarians.  There is little to tell of what the Unitarians did during her reign, for they were reduced to their lowest ebb; but there is much to tell of what they suffered, for it is a melancholy story of forty years during which every conceivable means was used to destroy their church.  The queen would use the arts of persuasion, and the subtle bribery of promises of favors and offices, when they would work; and when they would not, she resorted to various means of force.  Thus by promising them high offices she got many wealthy nobles to change their religion.  When a promising Unitarian youth went up to Vienna, she made him her godson, and gave him rich presents, to induce him to turn Catholic.  On the other hand she would give no high office to a Protestant, and hardly any office at all to a Unitarian; she forbade the election of Unitarian magistrates in all but two towns; she refused to let Unitarian books be printed, so that whatever books the ministers or professors wrote had to be circulated in manuscript copies; and during her whole reign only two Unitarian books were published.  A carefully drawn plan for the systematic oppression of Unitarianism was adopted in 1744, which included a large fund for converting Unitarian boys and girls at Kolozsvar.  Unitarians who sought a university education had long been going to the Protestant universities of Holland, Germany, and Switzerland, where funds had been established for their assistance; but in order that they might be forced to attend the Catholic university at Vienna, they were now forbidden to study abroad without special permission.  Unitarians were forbidden to carry on public religious discussions, or to make converts from other churches; their pastors were not allowed to visit the sick or administer baptism except among their own members, and no member of another church might marry a Unitarian.

    The persecution did not stop at these acts of merely negative oppression.  Children were taken away from their parents by force to be educated as Catholics; Unitarian schools were closed, and their scholars were then forbidden to go to any other school but a Catholic.  An old law was revived which gave possession of the church in a community to the body having a majority of the population; and by colonizing for the purpose she secured Catholic majorities enough to claim the churches in many places.  Various churches, schools, and parsonages were taken away by force, and it was still forbidden to repair old churches or build new ones.  The support of the churches by tithes was cut off.  At Szent Rontas, where the Unitarians some ten years before had assisted in the building of a pretty Catholic church, the Catholics turned about and seized the Unitarian church, school house, and cemetery, attacking in force while the Unitarians were at morning worship, and driving the pastor and the teacher from town.  The Unitarians did not meekly submit to this outrage, but a month later recovered their property by force; whereupon the queen ordered it taken from them again and held until judicial investigation could be had and she should give a decision.  It can easily be anticipated what decision she gave: after twelve years the case was at last decided in favor of the Catholics, and the name of the village was ordered changed to Holy Trinity.

    There were cases of the finest heroism, as when at Bagyon a Catholic mob attempted to seize the Unitarian church while the men of the village were away; but the enraged Szekler women turned out and defended the building themselves, the younger fighting desperately outside the church, while the older within prayed for their success.  In another village, when the Catholics raised a mob to attack the church, the Unitarians defended themselves and scattered the mob.  For doing this they were arrested and ordered flogged, and as a further punishment they were ordered to build the Catholics a handsome church.  At Brasso the Jesuits attacked the Unitarians during the celebration of the Lord's Supper, drove away the pastor, and spilt the bread and wine.  So it went on all over the land during forty long years.  The victims repeatedly appealed to the toleration decree of 1557, and to the guarantees in the Diploma of Leopold, so often confirmed since; but their complaints were uniformly ignored.

    All these things wofully reduced the number and strength of the Unitarian churches, as it was meant that they should.  Of the 425 churches and thirteen higher schools and colleges in Transylvania late in the sixteenth century, two-hundred years of persecution had left fewer than 125, all of these of course far weaker than before, with a total membership of but 50,000, and only one school and college.  Yet even now their spirit was not crushed.  A young Unitarian officer, upon being dismissed from his office on account of his religion, wrote to his father, I will beg before I will give up my religion. Such noble families as still remained were most generous to their church.  The fewer they became, the more they comforted and helped one another.  Their persistence in hanging together, and their willingness to sacrifice for their faith, became proverbial.  The result was that persecutions which had been intended to destroy them not only failed of their purpose, but left them instead a united band of heroes; and this quality has persisted to this day.

    To guide and inspire them in this dark period, God raised up a great man, their greatest bishop after David, Michael Szent Abrahami, whom they love to call the eye, heart, and tongue of the Unitarians of this period, since he watched over them as their bishop, fathered them as their pastor, and taught them as the rector of their college.  After an ample education at home and abroad, and a brief ministry, he began to teach in the college at Kolozsvar just before the Unitarians were robbed of it by the Catholics.  After a time he opened the college in new quarters, now for the third time in its broken history, and before long became its rector.  In 1737 he became bishop, and served thus for over twenty years.  By his great energy and wisdom he saved the Unitarian Church from shipwreck, and recreated it.  He was a man of distinguished ability as scholar, teacher, theologian, preacher, and administrator.  He laid the foundation of the endowment funds of the Church, and gave it a much better organization than before.  He reformed the church schools and, what was of greatest importance, he reduced its theology to a system.  His Substance of all Theology according to the Unitarians, a work composed for his classes in theology, and widely circulated in manuscript for thirty years or more until its publication was allowed in 1787, is a work which did for the Unitarians of Transylvania what the Racovian Catechism did for the Socinians of Poland.³  It is very conservative, is founded entirely on proof texts of Scripture, teaches the worship of Christ and the eternal punishment of the wicked, and in various other details would seem to us now quite orthodox.  It was evidently much influenced by Servetus, and by the editions of the Racovian Catechism published after the original Socinianism had become modified in Holland; but it has no Anabaptist tendencies.  It lays much stress on the practical conduct of Christian life, and must have had great effect in shaping the Christian character of the Unitarians in Transylvania.  It is written in the finest spirit, is not at all controversial, and hence was well suited to overcome or soften down the enmity of the other churches; and in western Europe its publication aroused fresh interest in Unitarians and their teachings, and increased respect for them.

    With the reign of Emperor Joseph II (1780 - 1790) better days began to dawn upon the Unitarians of Transylvania.  Long before his mother's death he had revealed a much broader spirit than hers, and now he began to carry out a more tolerant policy.  When on a visit to Transylvania as prince, he had received complaints from the Unitarians as to the injustice they had to suffer, and had promised to do for them what he could.  So long as the queen lived he could do nothing; but when he came to the throne he redeemed his promise.  Though he was full of reforming ideas, his rule is commonly called a political failure; but it is rendered glorious by the fact that he issued in 1780 an Edict of Toleration of the four religions, restoring and guaranteeing their ancient rights.  He forbade further seizure of churches; and although he did not restore those that had been taken away, he offered indemnity for them, ordered 5,000 florins repaid to the Kolozsvar Unitarians for the loss of their church, did various other things for their relief, and allowed them to print Szent Abrahami's book just now mentioned.  His brother Leopold II (1790 -1792) was also wise and enlightened, and preserved the liberties that Joseph had granted, allowing Unitarians again to hold office and have equal rights.

    Under the long reign of Francis I (1792 - 1835), the same liberal policy was continued.  The edicts of toleration were ratified by the Diet and made a part of public law; the four religions were again declared equal before the law, seizure of church property was forbidden forever, and freedom of the press was restored without censor.  Unitarians were given a fair share of public offices, some of them high ones, and Francis came to be known as Restorer of the rights of Unitarians. Thus protected by free and just laws, their weakened churches began at length to recover strength, and many new churches were now built in towns or villages.  At Kolozsvar, where they had long had to worship in a common dwelling, they now built a large and fine church, college, and parish buildings.  With revived strength came renewed growth and the planting of new churches, and lost ground began step by step to be regained.

    In this period a great impulse was given to the Unitarian cause by a noble bequest from one of its followers.  Laszlo Zsuki was the last surviving member of one of the oldest and most prominent families in Transylvania, and the heir to large estates.  He had been educated at the Unitarian college, and felt that he owed much to it.  He therefore determined to leave all his property for Unitarian causes, and to that end remained unmarried. After spending his lifetime in trying to improve the agricultural condition of his country, and being generous to his college, and rebuilding various churches, he left at his death in 1792 nearly 80,000 florins (about $40,000).  This generous legacy helped to meet the most urgent needs of the poor churches and the college.  A new college building was erected, professors salaries were raised, and the needs of poor students and poor ministers and their widows were provided for.  This good example was soon followed by others, and in 1837 the greatest of all their bequests was received.  Paul Angustinovics was descended from the Polish exiles who came to Transylvania in 1660, and was the son of a poor minister who had died and left him and his mother dependent upon the charity of the church.  They were aided from the Zsuki fund, which enabled him to get his college education at Kolozsvar, and assisted him in getting started in his profession of the law.  He showed his gratitude in a munificent manner.  After having spent many years in high public office, he also died unmarried, leaving to the church a bequest of 100,000 florins (about $50,000), nearly his entire fortune, which has furnished its largest single endowment down to this day.

    In 1821 something of pathetic interest occurred, when this little, persecuted, struggling, but heroically faithful group of churches made the thrilling discovery that beside themselves there were other Unitarians in the world, who were free, prosperous, and rapidly growing in strength.  Ever since the exiles from Poland had gradually melted away over Europe, until at length the Transylvanian churches no longer heard from them, the Transylvanian brethren had generally supposed themselves the only Unitarians left in the world.  For Transylvania was remote from western Europe, it was before the age of railroads, and there was only the rarest connection with England or America.  It is true that one of the Unitarians (later to become Bishop Szent Ivanyi), while pursuing his studies in Holland, visited England not long after 1660; but if he met any liberal Christians there, they were not yet known as Unitarians, and they had as yet no organized movement.  From time to time English travelers also had brought home reports of the interesting Unitarian Church in Transylvania; but their accounts had fallen on heedless ears, for English Unitarianism had no organization; and although some of the Transylvanians had for a generation known in a dim way of a similar movement in England, the knowledge had made no real impression.  It was not until 1821, after the Unitarian Fund had for some years been organized in London, that its Secretary, hoping to discover and interest liberal Christians on the Continent, sent abroad for circulation a little Latin tract entitled The Unitarians in England: their Faith, History, and Present Condition briefly set forth.  It found its way to Transylvania and into the hands of the Unitarians there, among whom it aroused the greatest interest.  It was like receiving powerful reenforcements at the end of a long and exhausting fight.  An answer was sent in due time and communications have been kept up between the Unitarians of the two countries ever since.  The Transylvanian brethren began to visit England, where they were most gladly received; a few years later two of them went to America, where they reported a yet more flourishing body as then sweeping all before it in eastern Massachusetts.  It was a great tonic to the weary strugglers, and a prophecy that the cause they had fought for so long was going to win at last.  In more recent years visits of western Unitarians to their brethren in Transylvania have been more frequent; and since 1860 their most promising candidates for the ministry have gone to England to finish their education.  The mother church of Unitarianism has been aided in distress by its more fortunate kindred in England and America, who have strengthened its churches and colleges by generous gifts, while the works of English and American writers have been published in Hungarian.

    Under the happier conditions now enjoyed after two full centuries of almost incessant struggles against oppression and cruelty, it might have been hoped that the Unitarians had entered upon a period of enduring peace. For nearly two generations, indeed, they had little that was serious to disturb them, and were steadily regaining their strength and extending their influence. It was the longest quiet period that this martyr church has ever enjoyed.  In 1818, however, came the revolution by which Hungary strove to free itself from the long and heavy oppression of Austria.  Hungary declared its independence, and in its new Constitution recognized the Unitarian religion as legal throughout the whole kingdom (instead of merely in Transylvania, as before), and granted equal and perfect freedom to the several religions.  But the revolution failed.  Russia came to the aid of Austria; and Transylvania, as so often before, was again a battleground.  The Wallacks (Rumanians) dwelling there, long denied relief from the oppression they had themselves suffered for centuries, now seized the occasion to rise against their Hungarian masters, against whom they committed the most fiendish atrocities, butchering hundreds of families in cold blood, killing old men, women, and children without distinction, and sacking and burning whole villages.  The worst of these things were done where the Unitarians happened to be the most numerous, among the villages of Szeklerland.

    When the revolution had been put down, Austria determined to crush the national spirit of Hungary, and realized that the center of this was in the Protestant churches.  She therefore put the religious affairs of the country under the military administration of General Haynau, notorious for his cruelty.  He abolished all the rights of Protestants, forbade their assemblies, dismissed their church officers, and placed the religious arrangements of the churches in every detail in charge of Catholic overseers.  This policy did not succeed, and after two or three years the independence of the churches was restored; but attempts were still made to break them down in other ways.  The Unitarian Bishop Szekely, with a salary of but $260 a year, was offered wealth, honors, and high office if he would enter the service of the Catholics; but of course he refused.  When he had gone to his reward soon afterward, it was nine years before the Unitarians, in spite of repeated protests, were permitted to elect a new bishop in his place.

    In 1857 the Austrian government made one final attempt to stop Protestantism at its source.  Under the pretense of raising the standard of education, it attempted to destroy the Protestant schools.  It demanded that in number of professors and in salaries paid they should be made equal to the Austrian state schools; else their graduates would not be recognized, and would be excluded from the professions and from all important civil offices.  It was necessary within a limited time for the Unitarians to raise something like $70,000; and the demand struck them, of all Protestants, most heavily, since they were the fewest and the poorest.  They were horrorstruck, for they realized that the demands had been purposely made so high that they could not possibly be complied with.  In that case the government proposed to take their schools over, and Unitarian young people would henceforth have to be educated under Catholic or orthodox Protestant influences.  Fortunately an English Unitarian named John Paget had long been living in Transylvania, and had been actively interested in the Unitarian cause there.  He presented to the English Unitarians the appeal which their Transylvanian brethren sent forth, and by them it was also forwarded to America.  The English raised 13,000 florins ($5,200), and sent it in 1858 by the hand of their Secretary, Mr. Tagart, who was the first English Unitarian minister to visit them.  He brought them direct personal assurance of foreign sympathy, which gave them the greatest encouragement to continue their struggle. All arrangements were made to take up a collection also in the American churches, when a sudden and overwhelming financial panic swept over the country, so that nothing effective could be done.  The Transylvanians themselves were roused as never before to save their cause from ruin.  They were all poor people, mostly farmers or villagers; but by assessments and subscriptions, and by mortgaging their farms to an eighth of their value, and making the most enormous sacrifices, they managed to raise in all as much as $72,000.  Although they could not meet the full demands made upon them, their cause was saved, for their schools remained their own.  The crisis had proved in some ways a blessing in disguise; for it awakened, as nothing else might have done, their dormant appreciation of what their church meant to them, it raised up friends in the West whose generous interest has been more active for them since that day, and it greatly improved their schools.

    After this storm there now came another long period of calm. The churches now numbered but few over 100, and the members only from 50,000 to 60,000,⁴ but again they took fresh heart.  They were granted leave to elect a bishop again in 1861, and the honorable title of bishop, which the Catholic government had since the seventeenth century refused to recognize, was at last restored in place of that of superintendent.  Since 1867, when Transylvania was again united to Hungary, and the Hungarian constitution was restored, the Unitarian Church has had in Hungary all the equal rights which had been promised at the revolution of 1848.  The three-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the church was celebrated in 1868 with impressive ceremonies. State aid to the churches has been granted since that year, and Unitarians have been appointed to some of the highest state offices.  Church funds have been increased.  English and American visitors have come more and more frequently, and have made generous gifts.  The works of Channing and other western Unitarians have been translated and published in Hungarian.  The first Unitarian church in modern Hungary, organized at Budapest in 1873, has been followed by a dozen or more others on the territory where many churches had flourished three-hundred years ago.  This brings the romantic story of Unitarianism in Transylvania down to the end of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER XXVI

The Unitarian Churches of Hungary in the Twentieth Century

 

    From the beginning of the twentieth century to the year 1914 the Unitarian Church in Transylvania, with its newer branches in Hungary proper, enjoyed a happy and prosperous life.  All signs pointed to a long period ahead in which it might devote itself to the work of pure religion, unhindered by persecution or misfortune.  The principle of religious toleration appeared to be permanently established in Hungary, and the oppression of one religion by another seemed forever a thing of the past.  Ever since the revolution of 1848, which had brought all four churches closely together in the struggle against a common foe, the four "received religions" had lived side by side in the most friendly relations.  It remains to describe the life of the churches during this period.

    The Hungarian Unitarian Church, as its legal name now ran, had early in the twentieth century about 160 churches, of which some fifty were filial or mission churches with no regular pastor, but only occasional supplies from neighboring churches, these latter being usually made up of converts from other forms of religion.  The churches ranged in membership from a handful to over 2,000 each, and some fifteen had more than 1,000 members each.  The total membership was about 75,000, and was increasing pretty steadily at the rate of something over one per cent a year.  The great majority of the Unitarians were Szeklers, the rest Magyars.  They had few magnates or higher nobility, but were mostly of the middle and lower classes, chiefly villagers or farmers, and half of them poor.  The ministers must all be graduates of the Unitarian college at Kolozsvar, and had generally taught a few years in the parish schools before entering the pastorate.  Their salaries ranged from $320 to $700 a year, but a large share of this was often paid in produce.  Each minister had beside this the use of his house and a small farm which he tilled with his own hands, often assisted by the members of his congregation.  His wife would herself make the homespun which the family wore.  Pastorates were usually for life, but after forty years service a minister might be pensioned, as his widow would also be, with provision also in case of accident.

    If we went to visit one of the Szekler villages, we should find near the middle of its one long street a plain whitewashed church with belfry, and a schoolhouse near by.  Entering on a Sunday we should find on the side of the room a high pulpit looking down on rows of plain wooden benches, all of them free.  The men enter first, then the women, the elder before the younger.  Men and women, all dressed in their gayest clothes, sit on opposite sides, with a large vacant square separating them.  The service is very simple, consisting only of prayer, hymns, Scripture, and sermon.  There is now no liturgical form; but though the sermons are without manuscript the prayers are written out and read by the minister.  He is gowned, and his sermon is likely to be on some theme of practical religion, with little doctrine, and no attack upon other churches or controversy with their beliefs, since this is forbidden by their constitution. There is both morning and evening service on Sunday.  On weekdays, too, summer and winter, the farmers come to the church at daybreak, for a brief service of morning prayer; and on returning from their work at the end of the day they go to the church for evening prayer before returning home.  There are churches in which it is said that not a day has passed for over 300 years without this daily worship.  The Lord's Supper is observed four times in the year with great solemnity, for it is held in the greatest reverence.

    There were elementary schools connected with each of the larger parishes, where the Unitarian children were taught by teachers receiving salaries of about $200 a year besides house and garden.  At Kolozsvar, Torda, and Szekely Keresztur there were also Unitarian higher schools, or gymnasia; and at Kolozsvar was the Unitarian college, comprising a lower school, a higher school, and a divinity school, with nearly 400 students, half of them from other churches; a faculty of some twenty-five well trained scholars; a library of 50,000 volumes, and a handsome stone building erected at the beginning of this century.  All these institutions are supported from the church funds, though even the college professors get hardly more than $500 a year and house, with a retiring pension. Though the Unitarians of Transylvania are a poor people, they have always paid especial attention to their schools, and these are so superior that they have been largely attended by students from Calvinist and Catholic homes.

    The organization of the churches somewhat resembles that of the Presbyterians, and is close and efficient.  At the head of the whole church is the bishop, though we shall better understand his office if we think of him as a superintendent, a title which a Catholic government long insisted on applying to him instead of the other and more ancient one.  He has previously been a minister, and usually a professor at the Kolozsvar college.  He has the general oversight of churches and schools, their property and income.  He visits churches and schools, and inspects the work and character of the teachers and ministers; calls synods, ordains ministers, and gives them their appointments.  His salary is but $1,200.  The governing body of the whole church is called the representative consistory, which consists of ministers and influential laymen, and is headed by the bishop and two chief curators or lay presidents.  It meets each month, and is responsible to the chief consistory, which meets once each year at Kolozsvar, and every fourth year in one of its districts.  It examines the reports of the representative consistory, meets in different districts in turn, passes laws for the churches and schools, administers the more important affairs of the church, and elects the bishop when his office falls vacant.  Once in four years the consistory holds an especially important session, which is then called a synod.  The church as a whole is divided into nine administrative districts, each of which is under the charge of an officer whom we may best describe as a district superintendent, or dean, who visits the churches and schools in his own district once every year and inspects their condition.

    The beliefs of the Unitarian churches in Hungary are on the whole rather more conservative than those of English and American Unitarians.  The Bible is taken as authority, and many of its traditions and teachings which have been abandoned by Unitarians in other lands are still accepted.

    Until recently such were the story of Adam and Eve, the miraculous birth of Jesus, and his resurrection and ascension.  In most other respects the beliefs of the Hungarian Unitarians are not notably different from those of their brethren in other countries; and the Christ worship long required by law and observed in form has disappeared from practice and from statements of belief.

    The Transylvanian Unitarians throughout their history not only have been devoted and heroic in the extreme, as the previous chapters have amply shown, but in other respects they have manifested such characters as one might expect from those whose beliefs and practices are plain and simple, and who lay the greater stress upon homely piety and the good life because they attach the less importance to creeds and ceremonies.  In the earlier period of their history an old Hungarian chronicler recorded that the Szekler Unitarians were stricter in their morals than other Hungarians.  When Maria Theresia was employing every device to persecute the Unitarian Church out of existence, a Catholic bishop wrote to the court in Vienna that its members were thrifty, industrious, law-abiding, and exemplary citizens; but that these very qualities, and the growing prosperity that they produced, made their detestable doctrines the more dangerous and the more likely to infect their neighbors, while they were also a standing reproach to the character of the Catholic clergy.  He therefore strongly urged that they be repressed.  A Protestant historian a generation later reports that their simple worship, the strict morality of their communities, the dignity, piety, and learning of their superintendents, have gained for them great consideration in the country.  A German traveler of the last generation speaks of them as highly respected by the other churches for the fervor and simplicity of their faith, and says that their schools, the morality of their villages, and their Sabbath observance, are universally praised.  They are devoted to good education and to political freedom and progress, a brave, energetic, intelligent, and virtuous people, whose influence on the higher life of the country is admitted to be quite out of proportion to their numbers; while their influence upon religious thought has been such that many in other churches, even as in England and America, accept their beliefs, though not confessing their name.

    Our story should have ended happily with the nineteenth century; but the great World War makes it necessary to add a supplement of new oppressions and sufferings, perhaps more nearly fatal than any previous ones in all the long and tragic history.  In 1914 the brave Szekler farmers were called to arms, and many of them left their homes, never to return.  This fact alone, added to the usual hardships of war, must have greatly weakened their churches.  In 1916 the Rumanians invaded Transylvania, overrunning Szeklerland, though little else, before they were driven back.  This meant further ruin to the Unitarian churches so numerous on that frontier.  Finally, just as the war was at an end, the Rumanians again seized the now helpless land and began a brutal rule of oppression, robbery, and violence little if any milder than that used by the Germans in Belgium and France.  The churches were oppressed and their people maltreated as almost never before in the whole long history of their martyrdom; their ministers deprived of their living, and in some cases imprisoned; their venerable Bishop Ferencz held captive, and forbidden communication with his churches or ministers; many of their members exiled and deprived of their homes or farms; their schools closed; their professional men reduced to manual labor; the church estates divided up among Rumanian peasants.  The British and American churches have come to the rescue as far as rescue is possible, but only time can tell whether the heroic endurance so often shown in the past will be equal to these latest and severest trials.

    It is often asked why Unitarianism, if it be true, has not spread faster. Each chapter of this history makes one part of the answer more clear.  It did not spread in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany because it was crushed out by oppression, even unto death, before it ever had even a fair chance to be heard and judged on its merits.  Other faiths were never willing to meet it on equal terms.  They were protected and supported by the state, while the state treated Unitarianism as a crime.  In Poland, so long as it had even halfway protection under the law, it did spread and thrive wonderfully, as we have seen, in spite of the relentless opposition of every other form of religion, Catholic or Protestant; and it perished there only because the government abandoned its principle of toleration and made the profession of Unitarianism a capital offense.  In Transylvania where, for the first time in history thus far, it had both the protection of equal laws and the active support of the rulers, it soon converted almost the whole country, though even then it did nothing to oppress rival faiths; and three centuries of oppression did not succeed in destroying it.  What the result would have been if Unitarianism, arising only a few years later than Lutheranism, and even earlier than Calvinism, had in the past four centuries been given a chance to spread its doctrines in fair and even competition with theirs, can only be imagined.  But we have next to follow the story of it in England, and to see how, after some early persecutions and a few martyrdoms, it has for two happier centuries flourished there under freer laws and a more tolerant spirit.