I and others who were present know it to have been as above stated." In his manuscript notes Schmucker says: "It is worthy of constant remembrance that during the first four centuries, under the immediate pupils of the inspired apostles and their successors, the voice of the universal Church under the whole heaven was that nothing more than fundamental agreement should be required for communion in the Christian Church and Christian ministry. Not a single orthodox church practised differently. All required assent only to the several ecumenical confessions, the so-called Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds. . . . No, the practise of binding the conscience of ministers and members to extended creeds, containing minor points, on which men in all churches and all ages have differed and ever will differ, and thus splitting up the Body of Christ without His authority, is, and must be, highly criminal. The fathers who founded the General Synod all considered the recognition of fundamentals as sufficient, and here, in this free country, determined to return to the practise of the earlier and purer centuries of the Church. These fathers were Drs. J. G. Schmucker, George Lochmann, C. Endress, F. W. Geissenhainer, Daniel Kurtz, H. A. Muhlenberg, P. F. Mayer, H. Schaeffer, and D. F. Schaeffer, Rev. Gottl. Shober, and Rev. Peter Schmucker, with their younger colaborers, Drs. Benjamin Kurtz, S. S. Schmucker [Charles Philip Krauth?]. [tr. note: sic] Holding this opinion, they did not introduce any recognition, even of the Augsburg Confession, into their original Constitution in 1820. But at the third meeting, in 1825, they adopted certain resolutions for the foundation of the theological seminary and statutes for its government, and bound its professors to the fundamental doctrines of Scripture as taught in the Augsburg Confession. They thus returned to the principles and practise of the earlier and purer centuries of the Church, when the influence of the Savior and His inspired apostles was more sensibly felt in the Church." (Spaeth, 1, 342. 337. 354.)