but the king did not confirm any of its decisions. After 1876 the general synod comprised 200 synodals, 50 laymen parishioners, 50 pastors, 50 deputies of the Protestant theological university faculties as ex officio members, and 50 synodals appointed by the king. The Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces had substructures, called ecclesiastical province (; see ecclesiastical province of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia), in the nine pre-1866 political provinces of Prussia, to wit in the Province of East Prussia (homonymous ecclesiastical province), in Berlin, which had become a separate Prussian administrative unit in 1881, and the Province of Brandenburg (Ecclesiastical Province of the March of Brandenburg for both), in the Province of Pomerania (homonymous), in the Province of Posen (homonymous), in the Rhine Province and since 1899 in the Province of Hohenzollern (Ecclesiastical Province of the Rhineland), in the Province of Saxony (homonymous), in the Province of Silesia (homonymous), in the Province of Westphalia (homonymous), and in the Province of West Prussia (homonymous). Every ecclesiastical province had a provincial synod representing the provincial parishioners and clergy, and one or more consistories led by general superintendents. The ecclesiastical provinces of Pomerania and Silesia had two (after 1922), those of Saxony and the March of Brandenburg, three – from 1911 to 1933 the latter even four – general superintendents, annually alternating in the leadership of the respective consistory. The two western provinces, Rhineland and Westphalia, had the strongest Calvinist background, since they included the territories of the former Duchies of Berg, Cleves, and Juliers and the Counties of Mark, Tecklenburg, the Siegerland, and the Principality of Wittgenstein, all of which had Calvinist traditions. Already in 1835, the provincial church constitutions () provided for a general superintendent and congregations in both ecclesiastical provinces with presbyteries of elected presbyters. While this level of parishioners' democracy emerged in the other Prussian provinces only in 1874, when Otto von Bismarck, in his second term as Prussian Minister-President (9 November 1873 – 20 March 1890), gained the parliamentary support of the National Liberals in the Prussian State Diet (). Prussia's then minister of education and religious affairs, Adalbert Falk, put the bill through, which extended the combined Rhenish and Westphalian presbyterial and consistorial church constitution to all the Evangelical State Church in Prussia. Therefore, the terminology is differing: In the Rhineland and Westphalia a presbytery is called in , a member thereof is a