Balogh, Ferencz

BALOGH, FERENCZ: Hungarian Reformed; b. at Nagy Várad (140 m. s.e. of Budapest) Mar. 28, 1836. He was educated at the gymnasium of his native city and at the Reformed theological seminary of Debreczin (1854-58), where he remained nine years in various capacities. He visited Paris, London, and Edinburgh for the purpose of further study in 1863-65, and in 1866 was appointed professor of church history in the Reformed theological seminary of Debreczin, where he has since remained and of which he has been rector five times. He has been an elder in the session of the Reformed Church since 1860, and an ecclesiastical councilor for life in the Transtibiscan superintendency of the same religious denomination since 1883. He was a delegate of the Hungarian Reformed Church to the general councils of the Presbyterian Alliance at Edinburgh (1877) and London (1888), and was a member of the national synod of Debreczin in 1881-82. He has been a member of the committee of the Hungarian Protestant Literary Society since 1890, and an honorary member of the British and Foreign Bible Society since 1904. In theology he is a strict adherent of the Helvetic Confession. His numerous works include the following in Hungarian: “Peter Melius, the Hungarian Calvin" (Debreczin, 1866); “History of the Hungarian Protestant Church" (1872); “General Church History to the Present Time" (5 vols., 1872-90); “History of Dogma up to the Reformation" (1877); “Principal Points of Modern Theology" (1877), a polemic against the German Evangelical Union; “Literature of Hungarian Protestant Church History" (1879); “Specific Illustrations of the most Recent Unitarian History" (1892); “Phenomena of the History of Dogma in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (1894); and “History of the Reformed College of Debreczin" (1905). He likewise wrote in English History of the Creeds, which appeared in the Report of the Proceedings of the Presbyterian Alliance (Philadelphia, 1880), and is the author of numerous minor contributions in Hungarian, French, and German, while in 1875 he founded at Debreczin the Hungarian weekly “Evangelical Protestant Gazette,” which he conducted for three years in a successful crusade against the Budapest “Protestant Union.”