communicants of a Lutheran Church as apostates in case they join an
English Episcopal Church.

RESOLVED, 2d, That on account of an intimate connection subsisting
between the English Episcopal Church and the Lutheran Church and the
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