Council to take, as such, a definite and unequivocal Lutheran attitude with respect to these questions. Nor was the charge, at least on the part of Missouri, with respect to the "educational method," as advocated and applied from 1867 to 1918 by the Council, directed against this method as such, but against the mutilation of this method by practically eliminating its eventual natural termination, expulsion according to Matt. 18, and against the apparent insincerity in the advocacy, and the lack of seriousness in the application of this method. Indeed, the real grievance was not that weak members of the General Council were lagging behind in Lutheran doctrine and practise, but that many of her prominent leaders and her periodicals occupied an un-Lutheran position and championed un-Lutheran doctrine and practise. AKRON-GALESBURG RULE. 122. Non-Lutherans Admitted Exceptionally.--Regarding the Four Points, especially the question of altar- and pulpit-fellowship, the General Council during its subsequent history never really rose above the Fort Wayne level. In 1868, at Pittsburgh, the Council declared "that no man shall be admitted to our pulpits, whether of the Lutheran name or any other, of whom there is just reason to doubt whether he will preach the pure truth of God's Word as taught in the Confessions of our Church." (208.) As though a sectarian minister could preach in accordance with the Lutheran symbols; or offense and unionism were fully eliminated when the sectarian minister, preaching in a Lutheran pulpit, proclaims none of his errors! The same convention held: "Lutheran ministers may properly preach wherever there is an opening in the pulpit of other churches, unless the circumstances imply, or seem to imply, a fellowship with error or schism, or a restriction on the unreserved expression of the whole counsel of God." (209.) But, apart from other considerations, the fact is that, as a rule, these conditions were not and could not be complied with. Furthermore, the same convention declared: "Heretics and fundamentally false teachers are to be excluded from the Lord's Table." (209.) But the convention at Chicago, in 1870, explained: "Although the General Council holds the distinctive doctrines of our Evangelical Lutheran Church as in such sense fundamental that those who err in them err in fundamental doctrines, nevertheless, in employing the terms '_fundamental errorists_,' in the declaration made at Pittsburgh, it understands not those who are the victims of involuntary mistake, but those who wilfully, wickedly, and persistently desert, in whole or in part, the Christian faith, especially as embodied in the Confessions of the Church Catholic, in the purest form in which it now exists on earth, to wit, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and thus overturn or destroy the _foundation_ in them confessed; and who hold, defend, and extend these errors in the face of the admonitions of the Church, and to the