t a revival, since
such awakenings were also to be desired among Lutherans. During the
revival agitation from 1830 to 1850, the English Lutheran churches
caught the contagion in great numbers. They introduced emotional
preaching, the mourners' bench, protracted meetings, and, vying with the
fanatical sects, denounced as spiritually dead formalists all who
adhered to the old ways of Lutheranism. In its issue of March 21, 1862,
the _Lutheran Observer_ declared that the "Symbolism" of the Old
Lutherans in St. Louis meant the death of the Lutheran Church, which
nothing but revivals were able to save. (_L. u. W_. 1862, 152; 1917,
374.) Muhlenberg's Pietism had helped to prepare the way for this
Methodistic aberration.

MUHLENBERG'S HIERARCHICAL TENDENCIES.

49. Government of and by the Ministers.--A clear conception of the
doctrines of the Church and of the holy ministry was something
Muhlenberg did not possess. Hence his congregations also were not
educated to true independence and to the proper knowledge and exercise
of their priestly rights and duties. Dr. Mann says of Muhlenberg and his
coworkers: "These fathers were very far from giving the Lutheran Church,
as they organized it on this new field of labor, a form and character in
any essential point different from what the Lutheran Church was in the
Old World, and especially in Germany." (Spaeth, _C. P. Krauth_, 1, 317.)
The pastor ruled the elders; the pastor and the elders ruled the
congregation; the synod ruled the pastor, the elders, and the
congregation; the College of Pastors ruled the synod and the local
pastor together with his elders and his congregation; and all of these
were subject to, and ruled by, the authorities in Europe. The local
congregations were taught to view themselves, not as independent, but as
parts of, and subject to, the body of United Congregations and Pastors.
The constitution for congregations simply presupposed that a
congregation was a member of, and subordinate to, Synod. (499.) This
appears also from a document signed by the elders of Tulpehocken and
Northkill (Nordkiel), August 24, 1748, two days before the organization
of the Pennsylvania Synod. In it the elders, in the name of the
congregations, state and promise: "In this it always remains presupposed
that we with the United Congregations constitute one whole Ev. Lutheran
congregation, which acknowledges and respects as her lawful pastors all
the pastors who constitute the Colle