he
identity of their doctrine and near alliance of their Church discipline,
this Consistory will never acknowledge a new erected Lutheran Church
merely English, in places where the members may partake of the Services
of the said Episcopal Church."

From the viewpoint of the ministers in 1797, Lutheranism seems to have
been a matter of language rather than of religion. It was something to
be retained among German-speaking people, but could not be effectively
transmitted except through the medium of the German language.

We have come to the last decade of the 18th century. In the political
world great men were finding themselves and mighty principles were
finding expression in the organization of what was destined to become
one of the great states of the world. Some of our own men were taking a
large part in the making of American history. In the church they were
content with a more restricted outlook. Our people, it is true, were of
humble origin, yet some of them had attained wealth and social standing.
The Van Buskirks, the Grims, the Beekmans, the Wilmerdings and the
Lorillards were men of affairs and influence in the growing town of
30,000 that had begun to extend northward as far as Canal Street and
even beyond. But we look in vain for any positive contribution to the
life of the embryo metropolis of the world.

Our church had lost its roots. The Rhinebeck Resolution indicates the
feeble appreciation of the distinctive confession to which she owed her
existence. The English hymn books and liturgies of this period are
equally destitute of any positive confessional character.

But after all, the church in New York only reflected in a small way the
conditions that existed on the other side of the Atlantic. In the
Fatherland the national life had been declining ever since the Thirty
Years' War. In 1806 Germany reached the nadir of her political life at
the battle of Jena. In the church this was the period of her Babylonian
Captivity. Alien currents of philosophical and theological thought had
devitalized the teaching of the Gospel. The old hymns had been replaced
by pious reflections on subjects of religion and morality. The Lutheran
Liturgy had disappeared leaf by leaf until little but the cover
remained. With such conditions in the homeland what could be expected of
an isolated church on Manhattan Island? Take it all in all, it is not
surprising that only two congregations survived. It is a wonder that
there were