45. Unqualified Subscription to Entire Book of Concord.--Like the "Fathers in Halle," Muhlenberg, self-evidently, desired to be a Lutheran and to build a Lutheran Church in America. He himself says, in a manner somewhat touchy: "I defy Satan and every lying spirit to lay at my door anything which contradicts the teaching of our apostles or the Symbolical Books. I have often said and written that I have found neither error, nor mistake, nor any defect in our Evangelical doctrine, based, as it is, on the apostles and prophets, and exhibited in our Symbolical Books." _Dr. Spaeth:_ "The standards of the Lutheran Church of the sixteenth century were accepted and endorsed by Muhlenberg without reservation, and in his whole ministerial work he endeavored to come up to this standard, as he had solemnly pledged himself in his ordination vow before the theological faculty of the university at Leipzig, on August 24, 1739, which committed to him the office of 'teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments according to the rule given in the writings of the prophets and apostles, the sum of which is contained in those three symbols, the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian, in the Augsburg Confession laid before Emperor Charles V, A. D. 1530, in the Apology of the same, in Dr. Luther's Large and Small Catechism, in the Articles subscribed to in the Smalcald Convention, and in the Formula of Concord. He solemnly promised that he would propose to his hearers what would be conformed and consentient to these writings, and that he would never depart from the sense which they give.' (Dr. W. J. Mann's _The Conservatism of Henry Melchior Muehlenberg_, in the _Lutheran Church Review_, January, 1888.) And this was the position not of the patriarch alone, but of his colaborers, of the whole Synod of Pennsylvania, which he organized, and of the sister- or daughter-synod of New York, during the lifetime of Muhlenberg and Kunze. 'Those fathers were very far from giving the Lutheran Church, as they organized it on this new field of labor, a form and character in any essential point different from what the Lutheran Church was in the Old World, and especially in Germany. They retained not only the old doctrinal standards, but also the old traditional elements and forms of worship; the church-year with its great festivals, its Gospel- and Epistle-lessons, the Liturgy, the rite of Confirmation, preparatory service for the Lord's Supper, connected with the confession of sins and absolution. Their doctrinal position was unmistakably Lutheran, in the sense in which Lutheranism is historically known, and is something individual and distinct, and as such stands in opposition to Romanism on the one hand, and to Zwingli, Calvin, and all other so-called Protestant parties on the other. Those fathers were admitted to the ministry on condition of their own declaration that they were in harmony with the Confessio Augustana Invariata, and with all the other Symbolical Books