The Organization of the Congregation in the Early Lutheran Churches in America | Page 9

by which it had been produced, and of the European Lutheran constitutions which then and afterwards formed the basis on which it rested. We go on to describe the gradual formation, under Muehlenberg and the Halle Missionaries, of the constitution, afterwards accepted generally by the American congregations.

HENRY MELCHIOR MUEHLENBERG.
In 1742 H. M. Muehlenberg arrived in Pennsylvania, where he not only ministered to several congregations, but soon became virtual superintendent of all the congregations. He brought the troubled affairs of his own pastorate into order. He gradually guided and was guided to a complete organization of his congregations. He prepared and introduced the well ordered constitutions by which their affairs have been regulated ever since, and which now forms the Order of Government throughout the body of older congregations. His labors and counsels were sought for, in ever-widening districts, until his oversight extended from the middle of New York to Georgia. He gathered the pastors and representatives of the congregations together and formed the United Evangelical Lutheran Ministry, of which union he became Senior; and he prepared the Order of Worship used throughout the churches. Whether authority from the Fathers at Halle and London at the beginning formally charged him with the oversight of the churches, I do not know; but the common consent of all concerned, and their urgent demand of such labor from him, actually made him Senior of the Ministry and Superintendent of the Churches, as well as missionary in chief to the scattered Lutherans in this land. He was called of God to this high office, and the call came through the churches, formally perhaps, certainly really.
And he was admirably fitted for this great work by natural talents and character, by liberal culture with severe formative trials in the attainment of it, and also by the peculiar circumstances and influences which surrounded him before coming to America.
His large mental powers, his force and energy of purpose, his self-forgetfulness and power of endurance, his consuming zeal and devotion of his whole faculties to his work, his tender sympathy and ardent love of souls, together with his admirable judgment and prudence, made him a born ruler of men.
There is one characteristic of the Patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America which is of such importance to his own times and which, after a century has passed, continues to have so great significance, that it claims attention; it is his fidelity to the confessions of the Lutheran Church. The foundations of the organization of that church here were firmly placed upon those confessions in their entirety and in their true meaning. The relation of Muehlenberg to the confessions was in his own lifetime openly questioned by some of his co-laborers in Pennsylvania, like Stoever and Wagner, who affirmed that the Halle Pietists were not sound Lutherans; the same hue and cry was raised in New York by Berkenmeyer and Sommer, who were representatives here of the orthodoxy, which in Germany contended against Pietism; other good men, like Gerock and Bager, who had not been sent from Halle, sympathized with this feeling, and finally, with some encouragement from Gerock, Lucas Raus, in whom personal enmity toward Muehlenberg had been rankling for years, brought direct charges of want of fidelity to the confessions against him before the ministerium and offered to support them with evidence in writing. There have been those in these later years, who having themselves departed from the old confessions of our church, have affirmed that Muehlenberg had allowed himself the same liberty, and that he and his coadjutors had not themselves maintained, nor required of ministers and congregations an absolute, unconditional and complete acceptance of the confessions. The charges of his contemporaries were based on their general impression concerning the Halle school of pietism, and were entirely unsustained by any evidence furnished by Muehlenberg. The falsity of the charges, by whomsoever made, will be shown by the facts that in the ordination of ministers, in the reception of congregations into the union, and in the constitutions which they prepared for congregations, they required acknowledgement of the confessions and adherence to them in the most absolute terms. If we take Kurtz's ordination as a test, the evidence concerning which is full, we find among the questions to which he must furnish a satisfactory written answer, this one: "Ob unsere Evan. Luth. Lehre die allein gerecht-und seligmachende, und wo sie in Gottes Wortgegruendet sey?" Is our Evangelical Lutheran doctrine the only justifying and saving doctrine, and on what proofs of Holy Scripture does it rest? To this his answer is: "Ja und amen ist dieses solches, solches beweise ich, etc." "Yea and amen is it such, and I prove it thus, etc." In the revers which he was required to subscribe before ordination were contained the conditions on which he