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The Origins of the Baptist Movement
Among the Hungarians
Brill’s Series in
Church History
Edited by
Wim Janse, Amsterdam
In cooperation with
Theo Clemens, Utrecht/Antwerp
Paul van Geest, Tilburg/Amsterdam
Alastair Hamilton, London
R. Ward Holder, Manchester, NH
Scott Mandelbrote, Cambridge, UK
Andrew Pettegree, St. Andrews
VOLUME 54
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/bsch

The Origins of the Baptist Movement
Among the Hungarians
A History of the Baptists in the Kingdom of Hungary
from 1846 to 1893
By
G. Alexander Kish
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2012
Cover illustration: The First Baptist Church of Budapest around 1890.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kish, G. Alexander (George Alexander)

The origins of the Baptist movement among the Hungarians : a history of the Baptists in the
kingdom of Hungary from 1846 to 1893 / by G. Alexander Kish.
p. cm. — (Brill’s series in church history, ISSN 1572–4107 ; v. 54)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-21136-0 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Baptists—Hungary—History—19th century. 2. Hungary—Church history—19th century.
3. Baptists—Missions—Hungary—History—19th century. 4. Missions, German—Hungary—
History—19th century. I. Title.
BX6310.H9K57 2012
266’.60943909034—dc23
2011034529
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters
covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the
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ISSN 1572-4107
ISBN 978 90 04 21136 0 (hardback)
ISBN 978 90 04 22112 3 (e-book)
Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
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Fees are subject to change.
CONTENTS
Abbreviations ................................................................................................... ix
I On the Historiography of the Baptist Movement Among the

Hungarians: An Introduction to a New Study of Hungarian
Baptist Origins ......................................................................................... 1
II Pioneers and Pilgrims: The First Attempt to Establish a

Baptist Movement in Hungary ........................................................... 13
The Religious Situation in Hungary from the Reform Period
through Neo-Absolutism ................................................................. 13
From the Reform Period through the Revolution of 1848 ..... 13
The Churches under Neo-Absolutism ......................................... 35
Roots of the Hungarian Baptist Mission .......................................... 48
J.G. Oncken—The Father of Continental Baptists .................. 48
“For the praise of God and for the welfare of man,
Hamburg, 1842.” ............................................................................. 50
Oncken’s “Mission-School” .............................................................. 53
The First Baptist Missionaries in Hungary: The Sending of
Rottmayer, Scharschmidt, and Woyka ........................................ 54
The Baptist Missions in Pest and Pécs up to the Revolution .... 58
Johann Rottmayer’s Early Work in Pest ...................................... 58
Johann Woyka and the Baptist Mission in Pécs ...................... 72
The Impact of the Revolution on the Hungarian Baptist
Mission and the Missionaries ........................................................ 76
The Mission to Pécs and the Fate of Woyka ............................. 76
Progress Suppressed: The Work in Pest and the Loss of the
German Brethren .......................................................................... 78
The Last Man Standing: Rottmayer and the Baptist Mission in
Pest under Neo-Absolutism, 1849–1866 ...................................... 86
Martial Law and the Bach Period, 1849–1859 ............................ 86
From the Patent Fight to the Eve of Dualism: Rottmayer’s
Renewed Cooperation with the Scottish Mission and the
Baptisms of 1865 ............................................................................ 97
The End of Rottmayer’s Work in Pest ......................................... 115
vi contents
III The Hidden Years: The Later Work and Ministry of Johann
Rottmayer and the Bible Colportage of Antal Novák ................ 125
The Bible Colportage and Evangelism of Johann Rottmayer
and Antal Novák as Preparation for Success of the
Hungarian Baptist Mission under Heinrich Meyer ................ 125
Antal Novák: Pioneer of the Magyar Baptist Mission ................ 126
Johann Rottmayer’s Work in Kolozsvár ......................................... 143
Early Work and Travels .................................................................. 143
Rottmayer’s Trip to Hamburg and Re-Marriage ..................... 152
The Development of the Kolozsvár Depot ............................... 154
Rottmayer’s Sunday School and Hymnbook ............................ 158
Rottmayer’s Baptist Mission in Kolozsvár and Cooperative
Baptist Work ................................................................................. 163
Rottmayer’s Retirement and the Closure of the Depot ........ 170
Why was No Lasting Baptist Mission Planted at the
First Attempt? .................................................................................... 175
IV Wandering Apostles and Prophets: The Establishment of a

Sustained Baptist Mission in Hungary ............................................ 185
The Impact of the Compromise on the Churches ...................... 185
Liberal Ideas of a ‘Free Church in a Free State’ and the
Constraints of Politics ................................................................ 185
Nationalism, Magyarization, and the Churches ...................... 200
The Churches in the Age of Liberalism .......................................... 205
Liberal Catholicism .......................................................................... 205
Liberal Protestantism, Confessional Orthodoxy, and the
Rise of Evangelical Renewal ..................................................... 209
The Problem of the Sects: To the Protestant First? ............... 222
The Renewal of the Baptist Mission in Hungary under
Heinrich Meyer ................................................................................. 239
Heinrich Meyer’s Early Life and Ministry ................................. 239
Heinrich Meyer’s Arrival in Budapest and Early
Baptist Work ................................................................................. 254
The Internal Life of the Early Hungarian Baptist Movement ... 284
The Social Composition of the Baptist Movement ................ 284
The Congregational Life of Hungarian Baptists ...................... 287
The Content of Hungarian Baptist Proclamation ................... 305
The Internal Organization of the Baptist Movement in
Hungary .......................................................................................... 308
contents vii
The Origins of the Magyar Mission ................................................... 321

Persecution of the Baptists, Anti-Baptist Polemics, and
Heinrich Meyer’s Struggle to Achieve State Recognition
for the Baptists .................................................................................... 365
V Concluding Thoughts on the Establishment of a Lasting

Baptist Presence in Hungary ............................................................... 445
A Lasting Presence .................................................................................. 445
The Importance of the Wesselényi Street Baptist Church ......... 445
The Rapid Growth of the Magyar Mission from 1881 to 1893 .... 454
Why did the Second Attempt to Establish a Lasting Baptist
Presence in Hungary Succeed? ...................................................... 464
Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 469

Index of Names ................................................................................................ 481
Index of Places ................................................................................................. 484
Subject Index .................................................................................................... 486
ABBREVIATIONS
BFBS British and Foreign Bible Society

NBSS National Bible Society of Scotland
PEIL Protestáns Egyházi és Iskolai Lap [Protestant Church and School
Paper]
VKM Vallás- és Közoktatásügyi Minisztérium [Ministry of Religion and
Public Education]
CHAPTER ONE
ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE BAPTIST MOVEMENT

AMONG THE HUNGARIANS
AN INTRODUCTION TO A NEW STUDY OF HUNGARIAN
BAPTIST ORIGINS
When reading a contemporary history of the Baptist movement, one will

fĳind much space devoted to the origins of the Baptist movement in Eng-
land and its subsequent history in the Anglo-Saxon world, predominantly
in Great Britain and the United States.1 This is no doubt to be expected.
Turning away from this focus, one fĳinds the Baptist movement in Africa,
Asia, and Central and South America viewed primarily through the prism
of the missionary endeavors of various British and American mission soci-
eties. When one turns to the continental European Baptist movement,
much mention is made of Johann Gerhard Oncken and his role as the
father of the movement. The story moves in concentric circles from Ham-
burg outward. The farther one moves away from Hamburg, the briefer
the narrative becomes. This is particularly true of the East European Bap-
tist movements, with the exception of the story of the Russian Baptists.
Among English-language works, one must rely on the pioneering effforts of
J.H. Rushbrooke to get a more in-depth account of the continental move-
ment.2 While an important early work, Rushbrooke wrote in the spirit of
a contemporary observer retelling recent history. In terms of genre the
work could best be viewed as a mix of historiography and devotional
missionary literature, with the aim being both to inform and inspire the
English-speaking Baptist world. In regards to his treatment of the Baptist
movement in Hungary, the broad outlines are given, but the full story of
the triumphs and tensions of the movement remain untold.3
1
See for example the formidable work of Southern Baptist scholar H. Leon McBeth, who
admits to the defĳiciency of his treatment of East European Baptists due to language and
primary source difffĳiculties in his preface. H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville:
Broadman Press, 1987). Note also the same emphasis in the standard work by Torbet. Rob-
ert G. Torbet, A History of the Baptists, Third ed. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1963).
2
J.H. Rushbrooke, The Baptist Movement in the Continent of Europe, Second Issue:
Revised and Re-written (London: The Kingsgate Press, 1923).
3
Rushbrooke’s work, however, has this advantage over the recent popular level intro-
duction to the subject of the history of the continental Baptist movement by Ian Randall,
2 chapter one
The aim of this study is to unfold the fascinating story of the origins
of the Baptist movement among the Hungarians, and to ask and answer
some questions which naturally arise from the narrative. While I hope the
narrative will be inspiring, my fĳirst goal is to give a critical historiographi-
cal examination of the movement that seeks to place it within the broader
context of its times. In this aim I difffer somewhat from the work of the
fĳine Hungarian Baptist church historians who have preceded me. Their
primary audience has been their own faith community, and the goal of
their historical explorations has been to present a narrative to their fel-
low believers that builds a Baptist identity and encourages the reader to
live out that identity in their own walk and world. My own introduction
into the fĳield has come from the work of these men.4 But my primary
audience is the academic community of historians, and in order to give a
critical history I must attempt to transcend my own sympathies and fĳirst
be a historian practicing his discipline.5 As such I have also sought to fĳind
and critically examine sources not known to my predecessors in order to
provide a more rigorous narrative of the development of the Hungarian
Baptist movement.
Before I proceed, a brief word on methodology is in order. My study
strives to be more than a critical retelling of the story of the origins of the
Hungarian Baptist movement. As noted above, my goal is to advance this
area of study by bringing new sources to bear on the subject, and to make
in that he was often recounting narratives that he had heard fĳirst hand from the men
involved in the Baptist missions. This was especially the case with the Hungarian Baptist
mission, as Rushbrooke played a signifĳicant role in the Committee of the Baptist World
Alliance mediating between the two sides into which the Hungarian movement had split
following the recognition of the Magyar lead mission in 1905. Ian M. Randall, Communities
of Conviction (Schwarzenfeld, Germany: Neufeld Verlag, 2009), 137–46.
4
In a real sense I am operating within a tradition of Hungarian Baptist historiographi-
cal scholarship. As Robert Wilken argued concerning Christian intellectual life, “Without
tradition, learning is arduous at best, impossible at worst. In most things in life—learning
to speak, making cabinets, playing the violin—the only way to learn is by imitation, by
letting someone else guide our movements until we learn to do the thing on our own.”
Robert L. Wilken, Remembering the Christian Past (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Pub.
Co., 1995), 171.
5
I fĳind helpful the argument put forward by D.W. Bebbington that history as a disci-
pline is a science not in the sense of the physical sciences and classical scientifĳic method,
but in the sense of the German term Wissenschaft, as a systematic quest: “The discipline
is nevertheless scientifĳic in that it is critical of received opinion, rigorous in examining
evidence and systematic in the presentation of its discoveries.” D.W. Bebbington, Patterns
in History: A Christian Perspective on Historical Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,
1990), 4.
introduction: a new study of hungarian baptist origins 3
an argument about the origins of the Hungarian Baptist movement.6 In

some ways I am in dialogue with fellow historians in the fĳield, sometimes
to elaborate and build upon arguments made before me, and sometimes
to correct mistaken assertions. I am also in dialogue with Heinrich Meyer,
because I disagree with the way he presented himself as the father of the
Hungarian Baptist movement. In setting the political and religious con-
text for my study of Hungarian Baptist origins, for both the fĳirst and sec-
ond attempts to establish a Baptist mission in the Kingdom of Hungary
I utilize secondary and some primary sources to paint a background to
add depth and richness to the primary subject of my portrait. But when
I focus on the narrative of the Baptist mission in Hungary, as much as
possible I build my arguments upon a close scrutiny of primary sources
and where helpful I bring the work and conclusions of other scholars into
the discussion.
What then are the primary sources I utilize, and which new sources have
I brought into the narrative I construct? For the fĳirst attempt to establish
a Baptist mission in Hungary, the primary sources are admittedly scarce.
However, a narrative can be reconstructed from both contemporaneous
reports from Johann Gerhard Oncken and Johann Rottmayer to religious
magazines, such as the American Baptist Missionary Magazine or the Ger-
man Baptist Missionsblatt, and from later remembrances of people active
in ministry in Budapest during this time, such as from Robert Smith, one of
the Scottish Missionaries to the Jews in Budapest. For the work of Johann
Rottmayer and Antal Novák for the British and Foreign Bible Society,
I have made extensive use of the reports regularly produced by the Bible
Society. Most of these British and American sources were not available
to Hungarian Baptist scholars. For the second attempt to establish a mis-
sion, I rely on materials from the Hungarian Baptist Archive in Budapest,
such as Heinrich Meyer’s autobiography, selections from his diary, church
conference minutes, and letters. The Oncken Archives in Germany also
provided some letters from Heinrich Meyer. I also make use of Meyer’s
written reports to German Baptists contained in Der Wahrheitszeuge.
6
D.W. Bebbington, in noting that the use of facts in history is never divorced from the
historian utilizing them, that there is an “interaction between the givenness of the past
and the creativeness of the historian,” makes a case for the role of argument in history:
“History, then, can never be defĳinitive. It can attain only probability. The historian does
not deal with pure facts. It follows then that there is always scope for discussion in history.
The evidence can be construed in diffferent ways . . . Historical writing is therefore struc-
tured in the form of argument.” Bebbington, Patterns in History: A Christian Perspective on
Historical Thought, 12–13.
4 chapter one
Finding sources to get the perspective of outsiders was difffĳicult, and is

primarily furnished through an extensive use of articles, notices, and let-
ters contained in the leading Protestant magazine of the day, the Protes-
táns Egyházi és Iskolai Lap, anti-Baptist tracts primarily from the archive
of the Ráday Library in Budapest, and also articles from a magazine of
the evangelical renewal, Szabad Egyház. In order to track the growth and
organizational changes of the Hungarian Baptist movement I reviewed
over a decade of reports from Heinrich Meyer contained in the statisti-
cal almanac of the German Baptist movement, a resource not accessed
by Hungarian Baptist scholars. Another new area of exploration were
the published debates of the Hungarian parliament, which were critical
in exploring the effforts of Meyer in the arena of church politics, and his
impact on the church political debates in Parliament between opposition
politician Dániel Irányi and VKM Minister Ágoston Trefort.7 By making
use of a wide variety of materials not previously explored, I am confĳident
that this study will open new ground in the research on the origins of the
Hungarian Baptist movement.8
In the historiography of the Hungarian Baptist movement, a very defĳi-
nite periodization of the origins of the movement has been followed by
succeeding scholars with only minor variations. This periodization is
attributed by Olivér Szebeni to Imre Somogyi, whom he characterizes
as the fĳirst of the “scientifĳic” historians of the Baptist movement.9 In his
7
I shall generally use the Magyar abbreviation VKM, which stands for Vallás- és Közok-
tatásügyi Minisztérium, to denote the Ministry of Religion and Public Education.
8
One area of new ground in the history of the Hungarian Baptist movement where I
have made a signifĳicant contribution is not contained in this study, but was published sep-
arately by the Journal of European Baptist Studies. This concerns the debate between Hun-
garian Baptist scholars and Adventist scholars in Hungary and Germany concerning the
denominational faithfulness of Johann Rottmayer in his last years. The Adventist Heritage
Center in the James White Library of Andrews University, the leading Seventh Day Adven-
tist academic institution in America, was kind enough to make available to me a number
of articles written by Ludwig Richard Conradi, a pioneering Adventist missionary active
in Austria-Hungary, which appeared in the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald concerning
his endeavors in Transylvania. With this new material not available to Hungarian Baptist
scholars I was able to show a wide discrepancy between the contemporaneous reporting of
Conradi concerning his evangelistic effforts in Kolozsvár and his later remembrances which
served as the basis for the claim that Johann Rottmayer quickly converted to Advent-
ism. I concluded that Rottmayer remained a Baptist, but was constrained to live as an
Adventist by his second wife, who should properly be honored as the fĳirst Adventist in
Hungary. Alex Kish, “Did the First Hungarian Baptist Become the First Hungarian Adven-
stist? Johann Rottmayer and the Practice of Free Church Missions in Nineteenth Century
Central Europe,” Journal of European Baptist Studies 7, no. 1 (September 2006): 23–43.
9
Olivér Szebeni, A magyarországi baptista egyház történelme [The History of the Hun-
garian Baptist Church], Tanulmányi anyag a Baptista Teológiai Szeminárium számára
overview of the fĳirst 125 years of the Hungarian Baptist mission, Jenő
Bányai summarizes Somogyi’s three-fold periodization of the origins of
the movement:
the fĳirst was the Anabaptist period which began in the sixteenth century;10
the second began at the dawn of the war of independence.11 This was the
period of Rottmayer and his brothers in faith; while the third began with
the arrival in our homeland in 1873 of Heinrich Meyer and remains til our
present day.12
Bányai comments about this fĳirst period that no organic link between
the Anabaptists and the modern Baptist movement exists.13 Rather, he
continues, “we honor them as predecessors in the faith and esteem them
openly.”14
This study will pick up the story at the second period, with the arrival
of Rottmayer and his compatriots in Hungary in 1846. We will follow the
[Instructional material for the Baptist Theological Seminary] (Budapest: Baptista Teológiai
Szeminárium, 1967), 10–11.
10
Several Hungarian Baptists historians have devoted attention to this period, one of
the earliest and most signifĳicant being A. Bertalan Kirner. See his major work, as much
an apology for the Baptist faith as historical inquiry. A. Bertalan Kirner, Baptista krónika
[Baptist Chronicles] (Budapest: Privately published, 1935). Among contemporary Hungar-
ian Baptist historians Olivér Szebeni has also explored Anabaptist history, including the
history of the Hutterites in Hungary and Transylvania. Olivér Szebeni, Anabaptisták [The
Anabaptists] (Budapest: Magyarországi Baptista Egyház, 1998), 99–143.
11
By this Bányai is referring to the Revolution of 1848. Johann Rottmayer and his com-
patriots arrived in Hungary from Hamburg in 1846.
12
Jenő Bányai, “A 125 éves magyarországi baptista misszió korszakainak áttekintése [An
Overview of 125 Years of Hungarian Baptist Mission],” in Emléklapok 3 (Budapest: Mag-
yarországi Baptista Egyház, 1972), 20.
13
According to Bányai, the last of the Anabaptist groups was forced to emigrate from
southern Transylvania by Maria Theresia towards the end of the 1770’s. The steady persecu-
tion of the remnants of the Anabaptists ceased only when they were forced back into the
Catholic church, except for a small minority which sought refuge in the Lutheran church.
A brief account of the fate of the Hungarian and Transylvanian Anabaptists is also given
by William Estep. Estep identifĳies these people more precisely as Hutterites driven out of
Moravia. According to him Jesuits were sent under the authority of the Empress. Their
fĳirst attack was against the Hutterites in Hungary. As he describes it, those who were not
martyred were forced to reconvert. A similar fate awaited those in Transylvania, although
a small remnant escaped to Wallachia and eventually Russia. Estep dates what he calls the
Jesuit “Blitzkrieg” on the four Hungarian Hutterite Brüderhöffe to 1759–62, while the attack
against the Transylvanian Hutterites followed shortly upon the success of the Hungarian
Jesuit mission. See William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm.
B. Eerdmans, 1975), 105–7.
14
Bányai, “A 125 éves magyarországi baptista misszió korszakainak áttekintése [An
Overview of 125 Years of Hungarian Baptist Mission],” 20.
6 chapter one
story into the third period, with 1893 serving as the end date of our narra-
tive. This date, as I will explain, is not arbitrary.
This study is concerned with the origin of the Baptist movement among
the Hungarians. But from what has been said so far, it is evident that it is
impossible to limit this study to ethnic Hungarians only, although that will
remain the focus of the study. Still, when the acknowledged father of the
Hungarian Baptist movement, Heinrich Meyer, was a German citizen who
despite forty odd years in Budapest never managed to learn Hungarian, it is
obvious that attention must also be given to the interconnection between
the outreach to the ethnic Germans of Hungary and the origins of the
movement among the ethnic Hungarians. The outreach to Hungary, and
especially to the Germans of Hungary, was fĳirst attempted when Johann
Gerhard Oncken sent Rottmayer and his compatriots back to Hungary in
1846 from Hamburg. It received a fresh start with the arrival of Heinrich
Meyer in Budapest in 1873. With regard to the Magyar mission, Johann
Rottmayer always showed a concern for reaching the Magyar population
of Hungary, and unlike Heinrich Meyer Rottmayer could speak halting
Hungarian, but the opportunity which resulted in the breakthrough to
the Magyar population came after Meyer had begun his full time Baptist
mission in Hungary.
Given these parameters, I wish to give an overview to the structure
and content of the study. Again I fĳirst turn to how Hungarian Baptists
have characterized their own history. One of the early leaders of the
movement, Attila Csopják, gave a descriptive history of the movement.15
The focus was not so much on the narrative story, but upon the impor-
tant personalities. Thus the fĳirst chapter detailing the ‘fĳirst steps’ of the
movement, gives the story of Johann Rottmayer, concluding with a brief
account of his friend and fellow worker Antal Novák. The second chapter
on the beginning of the movement in a continuous sense picks up the
story with the arrival of Heinrich Meyer in Budapest in 1873, and gives the
story of the leading early personalities of the movement. Among the other
people described are Mihály Kornya, Lajos Balogh and András Udvarnoki.
Balogh and Udvarnoki were two young peasant boys who were the fĳirst
Hungarians to study at the Baptist Seminary in Hamburg, and went on
to break with Meyer in the interest of the Hungarian-speaking converts
15
Attila Csopják, Képek a magyarországi baptista misszió történetéből [Pictures from the
History of the Hungarian Baptist Mission] (Budapest: Magyarországi Baptisták Könyvke-
reskedés, 1928).
who wanted independent Hungarian churches. The third chapter gives

accounts of the opposition the young movement faced. Several fascinating
accounts of trials overcome despite the opposition of local religious and
government personalities are retold. The fourth and longest chapter gives
numerous personal portraits of the ‘pioneers’ of the movement, biogra-
phies in miniature summarizing the faithful service each rendered for the
cause of their Baptist faith. The fĳinal chapter gives a brief account of vari-
ous ministries of the movement (e.g. social ministries, the seminary), in
addition to a summary of the great war and post-war experiences of the
church. Since Csopják was himself an important early leader of the move-
ment, it is understandable that his work is less historical narrative and
more hagiography and anecdotes drawn from personal remembrances
and conversations with fellow Baptists.
The effforts of contemporary historians return to an emphasis upon nar-
rative and attempt to outline an interpretive periodization of the move-
ment. Bányai, for example, in his brief summary of the history of the
movement in celebration of its 125th anniversary (dated from the return
from Hamburg in 1846 of Rottmayer, Woyka, and Scharschmidt to Hun-
gary), denotes fĳive periods. Here we are only interested in the fĳirst two.
The fĳirst period of ‘ploughing and seed-sowing’ extends from 1846 to 1880.
This extension of the fĳirst period until 1880 is interesting in that 1873, the
date of Heinrich Meyer’s arrival in Budapest, is often given as the second
beginning date of the movement. The only apparent reason for this cut-
offf date is so that the second period, described as the period of becoming
a denomination, might extend a 25 year period from 1881 to 1905. Bányai
alone also gives 1905 as the transition between one period and another,
but here he is on solid ground. He describes the period of 1905 to 1919 as
the ‘period of crisis’, which it indeed was. In 1905 the split between the
recognized and unrecognized wing of the church took place. This breach
was only healed in 1920, which begins the fourth period for Bányai. The
fĳifth period began in 1945 and extended into the time of his writing.
An alternative periodization, and probably the standard one for Hun-
garian Baptists, is the one shared by Szebeni, Mészáros, and, with one
small variation, the latest and most comprehensive efffort to date on the
history of the Hungarian Baptist movement, Krisztusért járva követségben,16
a collaborative efffort celebrating the 150th anniversary of the beginning
16
The title is taken from II Cor. 5:19–20, the translation of which is “We are Christ’s
Ambassadors.”
8 chapter one
of the Hungarian Baptist movement.17 It is this periodization that I will

partially follow in this study, because it captures better the true turning
points in the narrative of the development of the Baptist movement in
Hungary. Again my study is only interested in examining the fĳirst two
periods, although I will briefly describe here the third period in order to
give needed context to my study.
The fĳirst period is that of the appearance of the Baptist mission in
Hungary, which extends from 1846 to 1873. This traditional periodization
commences with the year Rottmayer, Woyka, and Scharschmidt arrived
in Hungary, and ends with the year Meyer arrived in Budapest and began
his work which resulted in the establishment of the fĳirst Baptist church
in Hungary. Most attention is given to the work of Rottmayer and his col-
leagues in Pest. Less space is given to Johann Woyka, who arrived with
Rottmayer and proceeded on to his hometown of Pécs with Lorders, a
German from Hamburg Johann Gerhard Oncken had sent to aid in the
work. The reason for this is that due to the severe opposition they faced
from Catholic clerics and from Woyka’s own family, they were forced to
abandon the work, returning to Pest to work with Rottmayer. I will fol-
low this precedent in part, but not entirely, because I divide my examina-
tion of this period into two parts, and I end the fĳirst section of the study
in 1866, when Johann Rottmayer departed Pest for Kolozsvár in order to
begin a new work for the British and Foreign Bible Society in Transylva-
nia. Behind this fĳirst section lies the question of why the Baptist move-
ment did not take hold during this period.
In the second section, which begins with Rottmayer’s move to Kolozsvár
in 1866, I difffer from the standard historiography by extending the narra-
tive well beyond 1873, and even beyond 1893, the end of the second period,
in order to complete the narrative. I do this in order to trace the life and
work of Johann Rottmayer. In addition to the exploration of Rottmayer’s
activities in Transylvania, the ministry of his friend and co-worker Antal
Novák, who entered into service with the British Foreign Bible Society
17
Again the anniversary is dated from 1846. The small variation in periodization between
1846 and 1920 is the dating of the second period from 1894, when some of the ethnic
Magyar churches declared their independence from Meyer’s Budapest church and formed
the Hungarian Baptist Union, rather than from 1893, when Udvarnoki and Balogh arrived
back in Hungary after their studies in Hamburg. László Gerzsenyi, “A baptista misszió
önállósulása (1894–1920) [The Baptist Mission Achieves Independence (1894–1920)],” in
„Krisztusért járva követségben”: Tanulmányok a magyar baptista misszió 150 éves történetéből
[“We Are Christ’s Ambassadors”: Studies from the 150 Year History of the Hungarian Baptist
Mission], ed. Lajos Bereczki (Budapest: Baptista Kiadó, 1996), 95–134.
around the same time as Rottmayer, is described. My goal in this section

is to answer the question of what is the relationship, if any, between the
fĳirst and second attempts to establish a Baptist movement in Hungary.
The second period is the ‘heroic period’ of the movement, starting in 1873
and continuing until 1893. This period includes the arrival in Budapest of
Heinrich Meyer and his early work there, expanding out to other regions
in the Kingdom of Hungary where he preached. It also includes the con-
version of János Lajos, Mihály Kornya, and Mihály Tóth in Nagyszalonta,
and the Magyar mission emanating from Nagyszalonta to the towns and
villages of the Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain in eastern Hungary, and
extending in to Transylvania. This Magyar mission was pioneered above
all by the tireless effforts of Mihály Kornya. With the expansion of the
work, attention is given to its early organization and the pioneers in dif-
ferent regions of Hungary. Also of interest is the early attempt of Meyer
to achieve state recognition for his church in the late 1870’s in view of
the rough treatment he and his co-workers often received at the hands of
local offfĳicials in their mission work. The second part of my study will deal
with these issues, with a particular focus on the early work of Heinrich
Meyer and the character of the congregations established, the origins of
the Magyar mission, and the twin issues of the persecution faced by the
Baptists and Meyer’s long endeavors in the arena of church politics. Of
interest here are the conditions in contrast to those of the fĳirst period that
allowed for the success of the Baptist mission.
The third period is what Szebeni and Mészáros call the ‘period of crisis’.
It begins in 1893 with the arrival back from Hamburg of Lajos Balogh and
András Udvarnoki, the fĳirst Hungarians to study at the Baptist Seminary
there. Their return marked the beginning of a rising younger generation
of Hungarian leaders who began to chafe under the leadership of Meyer
(in contrast to older Meyer loyalists such as Kornya and Tóth). During
the early development of the work the various churches were regarded
as stations of Meyer’s church, and he was the “pastor of the Baptists of
Hungary”.18 This was perhaps viable when the movement was young, but
not when it had grown considerably and the Germans were in the minor-
ity. Thus the organization of the growing work became an issue. This
happened at the same time the Hungarian people experienced a grow-
ing self-confĳidence, which expressed itself through nationalistic fervor, a
time when Hungarian society was starting to assert itself against Vienna,
18
Rushbrooke, The Baptist Movement in the Continent of Europe, 153.
10 chapter one
especially as the millennium celebration of the Hungarian tribes’ entrance

to the Carpathian Basin approached in 1896, to be followed closely by the
turn of the century. Apart from Meyer’s own personal shortcomings, this
no doubt added to the growing friction between the two parties.
Gerzsenyi dates the second period from 1894, when under the lead-
ership of Csopják, Udvarnoki and Balogh, several of the ethnic Magyar
churches declared their independence and formed a Magyar-oriented
mission.19 Another sign of the growing division were the separate min-
istries the two parties began. One example was the growing educational
work undertaken by Udvarnoki and Balogh, competing with the less
formal instruction given by Meyer. From Udvarnoki and Balogh’s work
came the founding of the seminary shortly after state recognition of the
denomination was achieved. Literary work was also undertaken along
parallel lines, with Udvarnoki associated with the founding of the stan-
dard Hungarian Baptist literary efffort, the Békehírnök in 1895, followed
closely by the appearance of Igazság tanuja by Meyer’s ally Lajos Bodoki.20
With state recognition in 1905 the growing split became formal. Baptist
World Alliance representatives attempted to mediate the split, but their
effforts proved unsuccessful.
Then the First World War intervened, bringing new trials to the work.
Many social ministries begun before the war, such as the orphanage and
the retirement home, became increasingly overburdened during the war
and post-war years. With the passing of some of the staunchest antago-
nists in the last years before 1920 and the looming dismemberment of
greater Hungary approaching, reconciliation and reunifĳication was at last
achieved in 1920. With reunifĳication and Trianon, a period of crisis came
to a close and new realities and new challenges awaited the Hungarian
Baptists.
I will end my study in 1893, the year in which Udvarnoki and Balogh
return to Hungary from the Baptist seminary in Hamburg. While the third
19
Gerzsenyi gives this period a diffferent designation, characterizing it as the period of
the Baptist mission becoming self-dependent, especially in terms of moving away from
Meyer’s German-oriented mission towards a Magyar-led and oriented mission. Gerzsenyi,
“A baptista misszió önállósulása (1894–1920) [The Baptist Mission Achieves Independence
(1894–1920)],” 97–98.
20
It is not surprising that Igazság tanuja is the Hungarian translation of the German
Baptist magazine title Der Wahrheitszeuge. What is somewhat surprising, given the desire
of Udvarnoki to break free of Heinrich Meyer’s authority to allow for indigenous Mag-
yar leadership of the Baptist movement in Hungary, is that Békehírnök is the Hungarian
equivalent of another German Baptist publication title, Der Friedensbote.
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from the influence of his patronage; that is to say, to the whole body
of American citizens.
The electors are not independent; they have no superior
intelligence; they are not left to their own judgment in the choice of a
President; they are not above the control of the people; on the
contrary, every elector is pledged, before he is chosen, to give his vote
according to the will of those who choose him.
He is nothing but an agent, tied down to the execution of a precise
trust. Every reason which induced the convention to institute
electors has failed. They are no longer of any use, and may be
dangerous to the liberties of the people. They are not useful, because
they have no power over their own vote, and because the people can
vote for a President as easily as they can vote for an elector. They are
dangerous to the liberties of the people, because, in the first place,
they introduce extraneous considerations into the election of
President; and in the second place, they may sell the vote which is
intrusted to their keeping. They introduce extraneous considerations,
by bringing their own character and their own exertions into the
presidential canvass. Every one sees this. Candidates for electors are
now selected, not for the reasons mentioned in the Federalist, but for
their devotion to a particular party, for their manners, and their
talent at electioneering. The elector may betray the liberties of the
people, by selling his vote. The operation is easy, because he votes by
ballot; detection is impossible, because he does not sign his vote; the
restraint is nothing but his own conscience, for there is no legal
punishment for this breach of trust. If a swindler defrauds you out of
a few dollars of property or money, he is whipped and pilloried, and
rendered infamous in the eye of the law; but, if an elector should
defraud 40,000 people of their vote, there is no remedy but to abuse
him in newspapers, where the best men in the country may be
abused, as Benedict Arnold or Judas Iscariot.
Every reason for instituting electors has failed, and every
consideration of prudence requires them to be discontinued. They
are nothing but agents, in a case which requires no agent; and no
prudent man would, or ought, to employ an agent to take care of his
money, his property, or his liberty, when he is equally capable to take
care of them himself.
But, if the plan of the constitution had not failed—if we were now
deriving from electors all the advantages expected from their
institution—I, for one, would still be in favor of getting rid of them.
I should esteem the incorruptibility of the people, their
disinterested desire to get the best man for President, to be more
than a counterpoise to all the advantages which might be derived
from the superior intelligence of a more enlightened, but smaller,
and therefore, more corruptible body. I should be opposed to the
intervention of electors, because the double process of electing a man
to elect a man, would paralyze the spirit of the people, and destroy
the life of the election itself. Doubtless this machinery was
introduced into our constitution for the purpose of softening the
action of the democratic element; but it also softens the interest of
the people in the result of the election itself. It places them at too
great a distance from their first servant. It interposes a body of men
between the people and the object of their choice, and gives a false
direction to the gratitude of the President elected. He feels himself
indebted to the electors who collected the votes of the people, and
not to the people, who gave their votes to the electors.
It enables a few men to govern many, and, in time, it will transfer
the whole power of the election into the hands of a few, leaving to the
people the humble occupation of confirming what has been done by
superior authority.
IN MEMORIAM.
Hon. James G. Blaine’s Oration on President Garfield.
THE GRAND MORAL OF HIS CAREER.
An Elaborate, Polished and Scholarly Tribute by an Accomplished

Orator, in the Hall of the House of Representatives, on Monday,
Feb. 27, 1882.
At ten o’clock the doors of the House of Representatives were
opened to holders of tickets for the memorial services, and in less
than half an hour the galleries were filled, a large majority of the
spectators being ladies, mostly in black. There were no signs of
mourning in the hall, even the full-length portrait of the late
President, James Abram Garfield, painted by E. F. Andrews, of
Washington, being undraped. The three front rows of desks had been
replaced by chairs to accommodate the invited guests, and the
Marine Band was stationed in the lobby, back of the Speaker’s desk.
Among the distinguished guests first to arrive were George
Bancroft, W. W. Corcoran, Cyrus Field and Admiral Worden, who
took seats directly in front of the clerk’s desk. Among the guests who
occupied seats upon the floor were General Schenck, Governor Hoyt,
of Pennsylvania; Foster, of Ohio; Porter, of Indiana; Hamilton, of
Maryland, and Bigelow, of Connecticut, and Adjutant-General
Harmine, of Connecticut.
At 11.30 Generals Sherman, Sheridan, Hancock, Howard and
Meigs, and Admirals Ammen and Rodgers entered at the north door
of the chamber and were assigned seats to the left of the Speaker’s
desk, and a few moments later the members of the Diplomatic Corps,
in full regalia, were ushered in, headed by the Hawaiian Minister, as
dean of the Corps. The Supreme Court of the District, headed by
Marshal Henry, arrived next. Mrs. Blaine occupied a front seat in the
gallery reserved for friends of the President. At twelve o’clock the
House was called to order by Speaker Keifer, and prayer was offered
by the Chaplain. The Speaker then announced that the House was
assembled and ready to perform its part in the memorial services,
and the resolutions to that effect were read by Clerk McPherson. At
12.10 the Senate was announced, and that body, headed by its
officers, entered and took their assigned seats. The Chief Justice and
Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, in their robes of office,
came next, and were followed by President Arthur and his Cabinet.
The President took the front seat on the right of the Presiding
Officer’s chair, next to that occupied by Cyrus W. Field.
Senator Sherman and Representative McKinley (Ohio) occupied
seats at the desk on the right and left of the orator of the day. Mr.
West, the British Minister, was the only member of the Diplomatic
Corps who did not wear the court uniform.
A delegation of gentlemen from the Society of the Army of the
Cumberland acted as ushers at the main entrance to the Rotunda
and in the various corridors leading to the galleries.
At 12.30 the orator of the day was announced, and after a short
prayer by the Chaplain of the House, F. D. Power, president Davis
said: “This day is dedicated by Congress for memorial services of the
late President of the United States, James A. Garfield. I present to
you the Hon. James G. Blaine, who has been fitly chosen as the
orator for this historical occasion.”
Mr. Blaine then rose, and standing at the clerk’s desk, immediately
in front of the two presiding officers, proceeded, with impressiveness
of manner and clearness of tone, to deliver his eulogy from
manuscript, as follows:
Mr. Blaine’s Oration.
Mr. President: For the second time in this generation the great
departments of the Government of the United States are assembled
in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a
murdered President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in
which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical
termination of his great life added but another to the lengthened
succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the
blood of the first born. Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when
brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate
had been banished from the land. “Whoever shall hereafter draw the
portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited where
such example was last to have been looked for, let him not give it the
grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black
with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a decorous smooth-faced,
bloodless demon; not so much an example of human nature in its
depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend
in the ordinary display and development of his character.”
GARFIELD’S ANCESTORS.
From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth till the uprising

against Charles First, about twenty thousand emigrants came from
old England to New England. As they came in pursuit of intellectual
freedom and ecclesiastical independence rather than for worldly
honor and profit, the emigration naturally ceased when the contest
for religious liberty began in earnest at home. The man who struck
his most effective blow for freedom of conscience by sailing for the
colonies in 1620 would have been accounted a deserter to leave after
1640. The opportunity had then come on the soil of England for that
great contest which established the authority of Parliament, gave
religious freedom to the people, sent Charles to the block, and
committed to the hands of Oliver Cromwell the Supreme Executive
authority of England. The English emigration was never renewed,
and from these twenty thousand men with a small emigration from
Scotland and from France are descended the vast numbers who have
New England blood in their veins.
In 1685 the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV.
scattered to other countries four hundred thousand Protestants, who
were among the most intelligent and enterprising of French subjects
—merchants of capital, skilled manufacturers, and handicraftsmen
superior at the time to all others in Europe. A considerable number
of these Huguenot French came to America; a few landed in New
England and became honorably prominent in its history. Their
names have in large part become anglicised, or have disappeared, but
their blood is traceable in many of the most reputable families, and
their fame is perpetuated in honorable memorials and useful
institutions.
From these two sources, the English-Puritan and the French-
Huguenot, came the late President—his father, Abram Garfield,
being descended from the one, and his mother, Eliza Ballou, from the
other.
It was good stock on both sides—none better, none braver, none
truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of manliness, of
imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence to principle.
Garfield was proud of his blood; and, with as much satisfaction as if
he were a British nobleman reading his stately ancestral record in
Burke’s Peerage, he spoke of himself as ninth in descent from those
who would not endure the oppression of the Stuarts, and seventh in
descent from the brave French Protestants who refused to submit to
tyranny even from the Grand Monarque.
General Garfield delighted to dwell on these traits, and during his
only visit to England, he busied himself in discovering every trace of
his forefathers in parish registries and on ancient army rolls. Sitting
with a friend in the gallery of the House of Commons one night after
a long day’s labor in this field of research, he said with evident
elation that in every war in which for three centuries patriots of
English blood had struck sturdy blows for constitutional government
and human liberty, his family had been represented. They were at
Marston Moor, at Naseby and at Preston; they were at Bunker Hill,
at Saratoga, and at Monmouth, and in his own person had battled for
the same great cause in the war which preserved the Union of the
States.
Losing his father before he was two years old, the early life of
Garfield was one of privation, but its poverty has been made
indelicately and unjustly prominent. Thousands of readers have
imagined him as the ragged, starving child, whose reality too often
greets the eye in the squalid sections of our large cities. General
Garfield’s infancy and youth had none of their destitution, none of
their pitiful features appealing to the tender heart and to the open
hand of charity. He was a poor boy in the same sense in which Henry
Clay was a poor boy; in which Andrew Jackson was a poor boy; in
which Daniel Webster was a poor boy; in the sense in which a large
majority of the eminent men of America in all generations have been
poor boys. Before a great multitude of men, in a public speech, Mr.
Webster bore this testimony:
HIS EARLY DAYS.
“It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and
sisters were born in a log cabin raised amid the snow drifts of New Hampshire, at a
period so early that when the smoke rose first from its rude chimney and curled
over the frozen hills there was no similar evidence of a white man’s habitation
between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I
make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the hardships
endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the
tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections and the touching
narratives and incidents which mingle with all I know of this primitive family
abode.”
With the requisite change of scene the same words would aptly
portray the early days of Garfield. The poverty of the frontier, where
all are engaged in a common struggle and where a common
sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a
very different poverty, different in kind, different in influence and
effect from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every
day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth on which it feels
a sense of grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed
no poverty. It is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless
possibilities of the future always opening before it. No man ever grew
up in the agricultural regions of the West, where a house-raising, or
even a corn-husking, is a matter of common interest and helpfulness,
with any other feeling than that of broad-minded, generous
independence. This honorable independence marked the youth of
Garfield as it marks the youth of millions of the best blood and brain
now training for the future citizenship and future government of the
republic. Garfield was born heir to land, to the title of freeholder
which has been the patent and passport of self-respect with the
Anglo-Saxon race ever since Hengist and Horsa landed on the shores
of England. His adventure on the canal—an alternative between that
and the deck of a Lake Erie schooner—was a farmer boy’s device for
earning money, just as the New England lad begins a possibly great
career by sailing before the mast on a coasting vessel or on a
merchantman bound to the farther India or to the China Seas.
No manly man feels anything of shame in looking back to early
struggles with adverse circumstances, and no man feels a worthier
pride than when he has conquered the obstacles to his progress. But
no one of noble mould desires to be looked upon as having occupied
a menial position, as having been repressed by a feeling of inferiority,
or as having suffered the evils of poverty until relief was found at the
hand of charity. General Garfield’s youth presented no hardships
which family love and family energy did not overcome, subjected him
to no privations which he did not cheerfully accept, and left no
memories save those which were recalled with delight, and
transmitted with profit and with pride.
Garfield’s early opportunities for securing an education were
extremely limited, and yet were sufficient to develop in him an
intense desire to learn. He could read at three years of age, and each
winter he had the advantage of the district school. He read all the
books to be found within the circle of his acquaintance; some of them
he got by heart. While yet in childhood he was a constant student of
the Bible, and became familiar with its literature. The dignity and
earnestness of his speech in his maturer life gave evidence of this
early training. At eighteen years of age he was able to teach school,
and thenceforward his ambition was to obtain a college education.
To this end he bent all his efforts, working in the harvest field, at the
carpenter’s bench, and, in the winter season, teaching the common
schools of the neighborhood. While thus laboriously occupied he
found time to prosecute his studies and was so successful that at
twenty-two years of age he was able to enter the junior class at
Williams College, then under the presidency of the venerable and
honored Mark Hopkins, who, in the fullness of his powers, survives
the eminent pupil to whom he was of inestimable service.
The history of Garfield’s life to this period presents no novel
features. He had undoubtedly shown perseverance, self-reliance,
self-sacrifice, and ambition—qualities which, be it said for the honor
of our country, are everywhere to be found among the young men of
America. But from his graduation at Williams onward, to the hour of
his tragical death, Garfield’s career was eminent and exceptional.
Slowly working through his educational period, receiving his
diploma when twenty-four years of age, he seemed at one bound to
spring into conspicuous and brilliant success. Within six years he
was successively president of a college, State Senator of Ohio, Major
General of the Army of the United States and Representative-elect to
the National Congress. A combination of honors so varied, so
elevated, within a period so brief and to a man so young, is without
precedent or parallel in the history of the country.
IN THE ARMY.
Garfield’s army life was begun with no other military knowledge

than such as he had hastily gained from books in the few months
preceding his march to the field. Stepping from civil life to the head
of a regiment, the first order he received when ready to cross the
Ohio was to assume command of a brigade, and to operate as an
independent force in Eastern Kentucky. His immediate duty was to
check the advance of Humphrey Marshall, who was marching down
the Big Sandy with the intention of occupying in connection with
other Confederate forces the entire territory of Kentucky, and of
precipitating the State into secession. This was at the close of the
year 1861. Seldom, if ever, has a young college professor been thrown
into a more embarrassing and discouraging position. He knew just
enough of military science, as he expressed it himself, to measure the
extent of his ignorance, and with a handful of men he was marching,
in rough winter weather, into a strange country, among a hostile
population to confront a largely superior force under the command
of a distinguished graduate of West Point, who had seen active and
important service in two preceding wars.
The result of the campaign is matter of history. The skill, the
endurance, the extraordinary energy shown by Garfield, the courage
imparted to his men, raw and untried as himself, the measures he
adopted to increase his force and to create in the enemy’s mind
exaggerated estimates of his numbers, bore perfect fruit in the
routing of Marshall, the capture of his camp, the dispersion of his
force, and the emancipation of an important territory from the
control of the rebellion. Coming at the close of a long series of
disasters to the Union arms, Garfield’s victory had an unusual and
extraneous importance, and in the popular judgment elevated the
young commander to the rank of a military hero. With less than two
thousand men in his entire command, with a mobilized force of only
eleven hundred, without cannon, he had met an army of five
thousand and defeated them—driving Marshall’s forces successively
from two strongholds of their own selection, fortified with abundant
artillery. Major-General Buell, commanding the Department of the
Ohio, an experienced and able soldier of the regular army, published
an order of thanks and congratulation on the brilliant result of the
Big Sandy campaign which would have turned the head of a less cool
and sensible man than Garfield. Buell declared that his services had
called into action the highest qualities of a soldier, and President
Lincoln supplemented these words of praise by the more substantial
reward of a brigadier-general’s commission, to bear date from the
day of his decisive victory over Marshall.
The subsequent military career of Garfield fully sustained its
brilliant beginning. With his new commission he was assigned to the
command of a brigade in the Army of the Ohio, and took part in the
second and decisive day’s fight in the great battle of Shiloh. The
remainder of the year 1862 was not especially eventful to Garfield, as
it was not to the armies with which he was serving. His practical
sense was called into exercise in completing the task, assigned him
by General Buell, of reconstructing bridges and re-establishing lines
of railway communication for the army. His occupation in this useful
but not brilliant field was varied by service on courts-martial of
importance, in which department of duty he won a valuable
reputation, attracting the notice and securing the approval of the
able and eminent Judge-Advocate-General of the Army. That of itself
was a warrant to honorable fame; for among the great men who in
those trying days gave themselves, with entire devotion, to the
service of their country, one who brought to that service the ripest
learning, the most fervid eloquence, the most varied attainments,
who labored with modesty and shunned applause, who in the day of
triumph sat reserved and silent and grateful—as Francis Deak in the
hour of Hungary’s deliverance—was Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, who
in his honorable retirement enjoys the respect and veneration of all
who love the Union of the States.
Early in 1863 Garfield was assigned to the highly important and
responsible post of chief of staff to General Rosecrans, then at the
head of the Army of the Cumberland. Perhaps in a great military
campaign no subordinate officer requires sounder judgment and
quicker knowledge of men than the chief of staff to the commanding
general. An indiscreet man in such a position can sow more discord,
breed more jealousy and disseminate more strife than any other
officer in the entire organization. When General Garfield assumed
his new duties he found various troubles already well developed and
seriously affecting the value and efficiency of the Army of
Cumberland. The energy, the impartiality and the tact with which he
sought to allay these dissensions, and to discharge the duties of his
new and trying position, will always remain one of the most striking
proofs of his great versatility. His military duties closed on the
memorable field of Chickamauga, a field which however disastrous
to the Union arms gave to him the occasion of winning imperishable
laurels. The very rare distinction was accorded him of great
promotion for his bravery on a field that was lost. President Lincoln
appointed him a Major-General in the Army of the United States for
gallant and meritorious conduct in the battle of Chickamauga.
The Army of the Cumberland was reorganized under the command
of General Thomas, who promptly offered Garfield one of its
divisions. He was extremely desirous to accept the position, but was
embarrassed by the fact that he had, a year before, been elected to
Congress, and the time when he must take his seat was drawing near.
He preferred to remain in the military service, and had within his
own breast the largest confidence of success in the wider field which
his new rank opened to him. Balancing the arguments on the one
side and the other, anxious to determine what was for the best,
desirous above all things to do his patriotic duty, he was decisively
influenced by the advice of President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton,
both of whom assured him that he could at that time, be of especial
value in the House of Representatives. He resigned his commission
of Major-General on the 5th day of December, 1863, and took his
seat in the House of Representatives on the 7th. He had served two
years and four months in the army, and had just completed his
thirty-second year.
IN CONGRESS.
The Thirty-eighth Congress is pre-eminently entitled in history to

the designation of the War Congress. It was elected while the war
was flagrant, and every member was chosen upon the issues involved
in the continuance of the struggle. The Thirty-seventh Congress had,
indeed, legislated to a large extent on war measures but it was
chosen before any one believed that secession of the States would be
actually attempted. The magnitude of the work which fell upon its
successor was unprecedented, both in respect to the vast sums of
money raised for the support of the Army and Navy, and of the new
and extraordinary powers of legislation which it was forced to
exercise. Only twenty-four States were represented, and one hundred
and eighty-two members were upon its roll. Among these were many
distinguished party leaders on both sides, veterans in the public
service, with established reputations for ability, and with that skill
which comes only from parliamentary experience. Into this
assemblage of men Garfield entered without special preparation, and
it might almost be said unexpectedly. The question of taking
command of a division of troops under General Thomas, or taking
his seat in Congress was kept open till the last moment so late,
indeed, that the resignation of his military commission and his
appearance in the House were almost contemporaneous. He wore
the uniform of a Major-General of the United States Army on
Saturday, and on Monday in civilian’s dress, he answered to the roll
call as a Representative in Congress from the State of Ohio.
He was especially fortunate in the constituency which elected him.
Descended almost entirely from New England stock, the men of the
Ashtabula district were intensely radical on all questions relating to
human rights. Well educated, thrifty, thoroughly intelligent in
affairs, acutely discerning of character, not quick to bestow
confidence, and slow to withdraw it, they were at once the most
helpful and most exacting of supporters. Their tenacious trust in men
in whom they have once confided is illustrated by the unparalleled
fact that Elisha Whittlesey, Joshua R. Giddings, and James A.
Garfield represented the district for fifty-four years.
There is no test of a man’s ability in any department of public life
more severe than service in the House of Representatives; there is no
place where so little deference is paid to reputation previously
acquired or to eminence won outside; no place where so little
consideration is shown for the feelings or failures of beginners. What
a man gains in the House he gains by sheer force of his own
character, and if he loses and falls back he must expect no mercy and
will receive no sympathy. It is a field in which the survival of the
strongest is the recognized rule and where no pretense can deceive
and no glamour can mislead. The real man is discovered, his worth is
impartially weighed, his rank is irreversibly decreed.
With possibly a single exception Garfield was the youngest
member in the House when he entered, and was but seven years
from his college graduation. But he had not been in his seat sixty
days before his ability was recognized and his place conceded. He
stepped to the front with the confidence of one who belonged there.
The House was crowded with strong men of both parties; nineteen of
them have since been transferred to the Senate, and many of them
have served with distinction in the gubernatorial chairs of their
respective States, and on foreign missions of great consequence; but
among them all none grew so rapidly none so firmly as Garfield. As is
said by Trevelyan of his parliamentary hero, Garfield succeeded
“because all the world in concert could not have kept him in the
background, and because when once in the front he played his part
with a prompt intrepidity and a commanding ease that were but the
outward symptoms of the immense reserves of energy, on which it
was in his power to draw.” Indeed the apparently reserved force
which Garfield possessed was one of his great characteristics. He
never did so well but that it seemed he could easily have done better.
He never expended so much strength but that he seemed to be
holding additional power at call. This is one of the happiest and
rarest distinctions of an effective debater, and often counts for as
much in persuading an assembly as the eloquent and elaborate
argument.
The great measure of Garfield’s fame was filled by his service in
the House of Representatives. His military life, illustrated by
honorable performance, and rich in promise, was, as he himself felt,
prematurely terminated, and necessarily incomplete. Speculation as
to what he might have done in a field, where the great prizes are so
few, cannot be profitable. It is sufficient to say that as a soldier he did
his duty bravely; he did it intelligently; he won an enviable fame, and
he retired from the service without blot or breath against him. As a
lawyer, though admirably equipped for the profession, he can
scarcely be said to have entered on its practice. The few efforts he
made at the bar were distinguished by the same high order of talent
which he exhibited on every field where he was put to the test, and if
a man may be accepted as a competent judge of his own capacities
and adaptations, the law was the profession to which Garfield should
have devoted himself. But fate ordained otherwise, and his
reputation in history will rest largely upon his service in the House of
Representatives. That service was exceptionally long. He was nine
times consecutively chosen to the House, an honor enjoyed by not
more than six other Representatives of the more than five thousand
who have been elected from the organization of the government to
this hour.
ORATOR AND DEBATER.
As a parliamentary orator, as a debater on an issue squarely

joined, where the position had been chosen and the ground laid out,
Garfield must be assigned a very high rank. More, perhaps, than any
man with whom he was associated in public life, he gave careful and
systematic study to public questions, and he came to every
discussion in which he took part with elaborate and complete
preparation. He was a steady and indefatigable worker. Those that
imagine that talent or genius can supply the place or achieve the
results of labor will find no encouragement in Garfield’s life. In
preliminary work he was apt, rapid and skillful. He possessed in a
high degree the power of readily absorbing ideas and facts, and, like
Dr. Johnson, had the art of getting from a book all that was of value
in it by a reading apparently so quick and cursory that it seemed like
a mere glance at the table of contents. He was a pre-eminently fair
and candid man in debate, took no petty advantage, stooped to no
unworthy methods, avoided personal allusions, rarely appealed to
prejudice, did not seek to inflame passion. He had a quicker eye for
the strong point of his adversary than for his weak point, and on his
own side he so marshaled his weighty arguments as to make his
hearers forget any possible lack in the complete strength of his
position. He had a habit of stating his opponent’s side with such
amplitude of fairness and such liberality of concession that his
followers often complained that he was giving his cases away. But
never in his prolonged participation in the proceedings of the House
did he give his case away, or fail in the judgment of competent and
impartial listeners to gain the mastery.
These characteristics, which marked Garfield as a great debater,
did not, however, make him a great parliamentary leader. A
parliamentary leader, as that term is understood wherever free
representative government exists, is necessarily and very strictly the
organ of his party. An ardent American defined the instinctive
warmth of patriotism when he offered the toast, “Our country always
right, but right or wrong, our country.” The parliamentary leader
who has a body of followers that will do and dare and die for the
cause, is one who believes his party always right, but right or wrong,
is for his party. No more important or exacting duty devolves upon
him than the selection of the field and the time for contest. He must
know not merely how to strike, but where to strike and when to
strike. He often skillfully avoids the strength of his opponent’s
position and scatters confusion in his ranks by attacking an exposed
point when really the righteousness of the cause and the strength of
logical intrenchment are against him. He conquers often both against
the right and the heavy battalions; as when young Chas. Fox, in the
days of his Toryism, carried the House of Commons against justice,
against its immemorial rights, against his own convictions, if, indeed,
at that period Fox had convictions, and, in the interest of a corrupt
administration, in obedience to a tyrannical sovereign, drove Wilkes
from the seat to which the electors of Middlesex had chosen him and
installed Luttrell in defiance, not merely of law, but of public
decency. For an achievement of that kind Garfield was disqualified—
disqualified by the texture of his mind, by the honesty of his heart, by
his conscience, and by every instinct and aspiration of his nature.
The three most distinguished parliamentary leaders hitherto
developed in this country are Mr. Clay, Mr. Douglas and Mr.
Thaddeus Stevens. Each was a man of consummate ability, of great
earnestness, of intense personality, differing widely each from the
others, and yet with a signal trait in common—the power to
command. In the give and take of daily discussion, in the art of
controlling and consolidating reluctant and refractory followers; in
the skill to overcome all forms of opposition, and to meet with
competency and courage the varying phases of unlooked-for assault
or unsuspected defection, it would be difficult to rank with these a
fourth name in all our Congressional history. But of these Mr. Clay
was the greatest. It would, perhaps, be impossible to find in the
parliamentary annals of the world a parallel to Mr. Clay, in 1841,
when at sixty-four years of age he took the control of the Whig party
from the President who had received their suffrages, against the
power of Webster in the Cabinet, against the eloquence of Choate in
the Senate, against the Herculean efforts of Caleb Cushing and Henry
A. Wise in the House. In unshared leadership, in the pride and
plenitude of power he hurled against John Tyler with deepest scorn
the mass of that conquering column which had swept over the land
in 1840, and drove his administration to seek shelter behind the lines
of his political foes. Mr. Douglas achieved a victory scarcely less
wonderful when, in 1854, against the secret desires of a strong
administration, against the wise counsel of the older chiefs, against
the conservative instincts and even the moral sense of the country,
he forced a reluctant Congress into a repeal of the Missouri
compromise. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, in his contests from 1865 to
1868, actually advanced his parliamentary leadership until Congress
tied the hands of the President and governed the country by its own
will, leaving only perfunctory duties to be discharged by the
Executive. With two hundred millions of patronage in his hands at
the opening of the contest, aided by the active force of Steward in the
Cabinet and the moral power of Chase on the Bench, Andrew
Johnson could not command the support of one-third in either
House against the Parliamentary uprising of which Thaddeus
Stevens was the animating spirit and the unquestioned leader.
From these three great men Garfield differed radically, differed in
the quality of his mind, in temperament, in the form and phase of
ambition. He could not do what they did, but he could do what they
could not, and in the breadth of his Congressional work he left that
which will longer exert a potential influence among men, and which,
measured by the severe test of posthumous criticism, will secure a
more enduring and more enviable fame.
GARFIELD’S INDUSTRY.
Those unfamiliar with Garfield’s industry and ignorant of the

details of his work may, in some degree, measure them by the annals
of Congress. No one of the generation of public men to which he
belonged has contributed so much that will be valuable for future
reference. His speeches are numerous, many of them brilliant, all of
them well studied, carefully phrased and exhaustive of the subject
under consideration. Collected from the scattered pages of ninety
royal octavo volumes of Congressional Record they would present an
invaluable compendium of the political history of the most important
era through which the national government has ever passed. When
the history of this period shall be impartially written, when war
legislation, measures of reconstruction, protection of human rights,
amendments to the constitution, maintenance of public credit, steps
toward specie resumption, true theories of revenue may be reviewed,
unsurrounded by prejudice and disconnected from partisanism, the
speeches of Garfield will be estimated at their true value, and will be
found to comprise a vast magazine of fact and argument, of clear
analysis and sound conclusion. Indeed, if no other authority were
accessible, his speeches in the House of Representatives from
December 1863, to June, 1880, would give a well connected history
and complete defence of the important legislation of the seventeen
eventful years that constitute his Parliamentary life. Far beyond that,
his speeches would be found to forecast many great measures, yet to
be completed—measures which he knew were beyond the public
opinion of the hour, but which he confidently believed would secure
popular approval within the period of his own lifetime, and by the
aid of his own efforts.
Differing, as Garfield does, from the brilliant parliamentary
leaders, it is not easy to find his counterpart anywhere in the record
of American public life. He perhaps more nearly resembles Mr.
Seward in his supreme faith in the all-conquering power of a
principle. He had the love of learning, and the patient industry of
investigation, to which John Quincy Adams owes his prominence
and his Presidency. He had some of those ponderous elements of
mind which distinguished Mr. Webster, and which indeed, in all our
public life, have left the great Massachusetts Senator without an
intellectual peer.
In English parliamentary history, as in our own, the leaders in the
House of Commons present points of essential difference from
Garfield. But some of his methods recall the best features in the
strong, independent course of Sir Robert Peel, and striking
resemblances are discernible in that most promising of modern
conservatives, who died too early for his country and his fame, the
Lord George Bentinck. He had all of Burke’s love for the sublime and
the beautiful, with, possibly, something of his superabundance, and
in his faith and his magnanimity, in his power of statement, in his
subtle analysis, in his faultless logic, in his love of literature, in his
wealth and world of illustration, one is reminded of that great
English statesman of to-day, who, confronted with obstacles that
would daunt any but the dauntless, reviled by those whom he would
relieve as bitterly as by those whose supposed rights he is forced to
invade, still labors with serene courage for the amelioration of
Ireland, and for the honor of the English name.
NOMINATION TO THE PRESIDENCY.
Garfield’s nomination to the Presidency, while not predicted or

anticipated, was not a surprise to the country. His prominence in
Congress, his solid qualities, his wide reputation, strengthened by his
then recent election as Senator from Ohio, kept him in the public eye
as a man occupying the very highest rank among those entitled to be
called statesmen. It was not mere chance that brought him this high
honor. “We must,” says Mr. Emerson, “reckon success a
constitutional trait. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well and
is at the top of his condition, and thirty years old at his departure
from Greenland, he will steer west and his ships will reach New
Foundland. But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man
and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred
miles farther and reach Labrador and New England. There is no
chance in results.”
As a candidate, Garfield steadily grew in popular favor. He was
met with a storm of detraction at the very hour of his nomination,
and it continued with increasing volume and momentum until the
close of his victorious campaign:
No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure ’scape; back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?
Under it all he was calm, and strong, and confident; never lost his
self-possession, did no unwise act, spoke no hasty or ill-considered
word. Indeed nothing in his whole life is more remarkable or more
creditable than his bearing through those five full months of
vituperation—a prolonged agony of trial to a sensitive man, a
constant and cruel draft upon the powers of moral endurance. The
great mass of these unjust imputations passed unnoticed, and, with
the general debris of the campaign, fell into oblivion. But in a few
instances the iron entered his soul and he died with the injury
unforgotten if not unforgiven.
One aspect of Garfield’s candidacy was unprecedented. Never
before in the history of partisan contests in this country had a
successful Presidential candidate spoken freely on passing events
and current issues. To attempt anything of the kind seemed novel,
rash, and even desperate. The older class of voters recalled the
unfortunate Alabama letter, in which Mr. Clay was supposed to have
signed his political death-warrant. They remembered also the hot-
tempered effusion by which General Scott lost a large share of his
popularity before his nomination, and the unfortunate speeches
which rapidly consumed the remainder. The younger voters had seen
Mr. Greeley in a series of vigorous and original addresses, preparing
the pathway for his own defeat. Unmindful of these warnings,
unheeding the advice of friends, Garfield spoke to large crowds as he
journeyed to and from New York in August, to a great multitude in
that city, to delegations and deputations of every kind that called at
Mentor during the summer and autumn. With innumerable critics,
watchful and eager to catch a phrase that might be turned into odium
or ridicule, or a sentence that might be distorted to his own or his
party’s injury, Garfield did not trip or halt in any one of his seventy
speeches. This seems all the more remarkable when it is remembered
that he did not write what he said, and yet spoke with such logical
consecutiveness of thought and such admirable precision of phrase
as to defy the accident of misreport and the malignity of
misrepresentation.
AS PRESIDENT.
In the beginning of his Presidential life Garfield’s experience did

not yield him pleasure or satisfaction. The duties that engross so
large a portion of the President’s time were distasteful to him, and
were unfavorably contrasted with his legislative work. “I have been
dealing all these years with ideas,” he impatiently exclaimed one day,
“and here I am dealing only with persons. I have been heretofore
treating of the fundamental principles of government, and here I am
considering all day whether A or B shall be appointed to this or that
office.” He was earnestly seeking some practical way of correcting the
evils arising from the distribution of overgrown and unwieldy
patronage—evils always appreciated and often discussed by him, but
whose magnitude had been more deeply impressed upon his mind
since his accession to the Presidency. Had he lived, a comprehensive
improvement in the mode of appointment and in the tenure of office
would have been proposed by him, and with the aid of Congress no
doubt perfected.
But, while many of the Executive duties were not grateful to him,
he was assiduous and conscientious in their discharge. From the very
outset he exhibited administrative talent of a high order. He grasped
the helm of office with the hand of a master. In this respect, indeed,
he constantly surprised many who were most intimately associated
with him in the government, and especially those who had feared

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The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century

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A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/bsch

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kish, G. Alexander (George Alexander)

Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

I On the Historiography of the Baptist Movement Among the

II Pioneers and Pilgrims: The First Attempt to Establish a

IV Wandering Apostles and Prophets: The Establishment of a

The Origins of the Magyar Mission ................................................... 321

V Concluding Thoughts on the Establishment of a Lasting

Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 469

BFBS British and Foreign Bible Society

ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE BAPTIST MOVEMENT

When reading a contemporary history of the Baptist movement, one will

an argument about the origins of the Hungarian Baptist movement.6 In

Finding sources to get the perspective of outsiders was difffĳicult, and is

who wanted independent Hungarian churches. The third chapter gives

of the Hungarian Baptist movement.17 It is this periodization that I will

around the same time as Rottmayer, is described. My goal in this section

especially as the millennium celebration of the Hungarian tribes’ entrance

Hon. James G. Blaine’s Oration on President Garfield.

THE GRAND MORAL OF HIS CAREER.

An Elaborate, Polished and Scholarly Tribute by an Accomplished

From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth till the uprising

HIS EARLY DAYS.

Garfield’s army life was begun with no other military knowledge

The Thirty-eighth Congress is pre-eminently entitled in history to

ORATOR AND DEBATER.

As a parliamentary orator, as a debater on an issue squarely

Those unfamiliar with Garfield’s industry and ignorant of the

NOMINATION TO THE PRESIDENCY.

Garfield’s nomination to the Presidency, while not predicted or

In the beginning of his Presidential life Garfield’s experience did

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