Page:Glimpses of Bohemia by MacDonald (1882).pdf/39

 conscience’ sake left the Romish Church, should be allowed to bring up their children in their own religious convictions. The Government had decided that such children, under pain of compulsion, should be taken to the Romish priest for baptism and for instruction, but the Supreme Court cancelled the order, and declared that, according to Austrian law, parents have the responsibility and the privilege of determining the religious status of their children.

In the year 1864, the late Dr. Duncan, Professor of Hebrew in the New College, Edinburgh, visited Bohemia, and initiated the intercourse between the Reformed Church of Bohemia and the Free Church of Scotland, which has already borne so much fruit. Through his exertions bursaries for Bohemian and Hungarian students of divinity were instituted in the New College, by which twenty-two Bohemians have now been enabled to prosecute their studies in Scotland.

In 1866 seasons of revival were enjoyed by several of the Bohemian congregations, and from that date the Reformed Church has gone on steadily increasing in numbers and in vigour. Several new congregations have been formed. The history of the origin of one such preaching station may be given:—

In the neighbourhood of the town of Koenigratz, where the decisive battle between the Austrian and the Prussian armies took place in the year 1866, is a little town called Horitz, the population of which for the most part consists of quarrymen and stone masons, who work extensive quarries close by. The relatives of Prussians who fell in the great battle desired to raise monuments on the battle-field to the memory of their slain, and some of the masons of Horitz were employed to erect them. The Protestant Prussians in many cases wished a verse of Scripture graved upon these tombstones, and to ensure accurate quotation a German Bible. was sent from Prussia to one of the masons who executed the carving. The man to whom the Bible was thus sent took to reading it, at first mainly from curiosity; but he had not read far when he discovered that the book upon which the Roman Catholic religion is so largely founded contained severe denunciations against much of what is done and taught by that Church. Curiosity and