Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/46

 and Moravia. Some of these sectaries entertained very singular, and, indeed, outrageous doctrines, so that measures were taken to limit the toleration to the Lutheran, or Evangelical, and Reformed, or Zwinglian Confessions. In 1782 followed the dissolution of all monasteries and convents, which were not engaged either in giving school instruction, or in the care of the sick.

The great majority of the Bohemian and Moravian Protestants belong to the Helvetian Confession, but do not derive their traditions from Zwingle or Calvin, but from the Hussite and other writers of their own country. According to the latest authorities, the number of Lutherans in Bohemia—exclusive of the purely German Inspectorate of Asch, which was established by a peculiar patent in 1775, and now contains 17,000 souls—is 15,685, who are pretty equally divided between the German and Bohemian languages, while the Reformed number no less than 59,343, all recognizing and using in public worship the Bohemian language only. In Moravia, the statistics of which I do not possess to a later date than 1851, there were then 19,433 Lutherans, and 34,932 Reformed; in Galicia, 27,481 Lutherans, and 1,882 Reformed; and in Austrian Silesia, no less than 62,463 Lutherans, most of them speaking the Silesian dialect of the Polish language.

The Gustavus-Adolphus Society—that brightest of bright spots in Protestant Germany—a society which extends its fostering care over all struggling Protestant congregations in non-Protestant countries, arose to a great extent out of circumstances connected with Bohemia. The Protestant inhabitants of the Bohemian village of Fleissen had, since the Patent of Toleration, been ecclesiastically united as one parish with those of the Saxon village of Brambach, enjoying the benefit of the same clergyman, and the same schools.