d, at the convention of the General Council at
Philadelphia, October 25, 1917, all of the Augustana representatives had
cast their votes for the new organization. At her last convention, June
8, 1918, however, the Synod, in spite of the most strenuous efforts on
the part of the delegates of the General Council to draw her into the
union, passed the resolution: "_Resolved_, That the Augustana Synod does
not at this time see its way clear to enter the proposed merger of the
United Lutheran Church in America, but declares itself in favor of a
federation of Lutheran church-bodies in North America." A subsequent
resolution severed her connection with the Council. The reasons advanced
by the Augustana Synod for her action were not of a doctrinal or
confessional nature, but rather pertained to the interest of her
peculiar work among the Swedish population of our country. Yet the
course chosen by the Augustana Synod was, at least part, the result also
of the secret fear that the new body would rapidly sink to the level of
the doctrinal and practical laxism of the General Synod. Warning against
the Merger, the _Lutheran Companion_, of the Augustana Synod, wrote: "We
must hold ourselves aloof from spiritual fellowship with such churches
or denominations, some of whose factors advocate and defend lodgism,
dancing as a pastime for the young people under the auspices and
sanction of the church, etc." (_L. u. W._, 1917, 522.) Disappointed on
account of the withdrawal of the Augustana Synod, the _Lutheran_, of the
General Council, commented: "The Augustana Synod has subordinated unity
of faith to unity of race. This is as un-American as it is un-Lutheran,
and the day of its real Lutheran union is thereby indefinitely postponed.
. . . We are persuaded that this separation was willed by man and not by
God, though we also believe that He will, in the end, overrule it for
good. . . . The Augustana Synod has missed its opportunity; it has
limited the sphere of its influence; it has placed synodical and social
interests as a clog in the wheel of the Lutheran Church's progress as a
whole, and set the Church back a generation or more to start afresh on
the pathway to its ultimate goal. . . . Lutherans are now to be fenced
off into social groups to be known as the Swedish, the Norwegian, the
German, and the English divisions of the Lutheran forces in this
country." (_L. u. W._, 1917, 522; 1918, 329 ff.)

4. Attitude of the Ohio Synod.--Though r