tions 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 received and could exercise his