able support to such aspirations.
The splitting of this mass in half, necessitating petty local schisms
with all their debilitating and demoralizing consequences, may have
helped secure the country from a serious political and social danger.

So, then, the German church in America at the close of the colonial era
exists, outside of the petty primeval sects, in three main divisions:
the Lutheran, the Reformed, and the Moravian. There is free opportunity
for Christians of this language to sort themselves according to their
elective affinities. That American ideal of edifying harmony is well
attained, according to which men of partial or one-sided views of truth
shall be associated exclusively in church relations with others of like
precious defects. Muehlenberg seems to have been sensible of the nature
of the division he was making in the body of Christ, when, after
severing successfully between the strict Lutherans in a certain
congregation and those of Moravian sympathies, he finds it "hard to
decide on which side of the controversy the greater justice lay. The
greater part of those on the Lutheran side, he feared, was composed of
unconverted men," while the Moravian party seemed open to the reproach
of enthusiasm. So he concluded that each sort of Christians would be
better off without the other. Time proved his diagnosis to be better
than his treatment. In the course of a generation the Lutheran body,
carefully weeded of pietistic admixtures, sank perilously deep in cold
rationalism, and the Moravian church was quite carried away for a time
on a flood of sentimentalism. What might have been the course of this
part of church history if Muehlenberg and Schlatter had shared more
deeply with Zinzendorf in the spirit of apostolic and catholic
Christianity, and if all three had conspired to draw together into one
the various temperaments and tendencies of the German Americans in the
unity of the Spirit with the bond of peace, may seem like an idle
historical conjecture, but the question is not without practical
interest to-day. Perhaps the Moravians would have been the better for
being ballasted with the weighty theologies and the conservative temper
of the state churches; it is very certain that these would have gained
by the infusion of something of that warmth of Christian love and zeal
that pervaded to a wonderful degree the whole Moravian fellowship. But
the hand and the foot were quite agreed that they had no need of e