The Lutheran Confession regards the word of God as the means of grace. The Sacraments also are means of grace, not _ex opere operato_, but because of the word. They are the visible word, or the individualized Gospel. Hence, it is correct to say that the word, in the Lutheran system, is the means of grace. This is doubtless news to many of our brethren of other faiths, who think of us only as extreme sacramentarians, and have looked upon us for centuries as Crypto-Romanists. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was only by an accident that the emphasis of polemical discussion in the sixteenth century was laid upon the sacramental question, where it never belonged. In her doctrine of the means of grace, the Lutheran Church differs _toto coelo_ from Rome. It is not the Church which, through its authority and its institutions, makes the means of grace effective; but it is through the means of grace that the Church is created and made both a product and an instrument of the Holy Ghost. On this doctrine our church differs not only in theory but also in practice from many of our Protestant brethren. In some of their original confessional statements the Reformed churches declared that the Spirit of God required no means of grace, since He worked immediately and directly. They claimed that the corporeal could not carry the spiritual, and that the finite could not be made the bearer of the infinite. Over against these hyperspiritual views our Church believes that through the word and the sacraments the Holy Ghost effectively offers to the sinner the gifts of salvation. There are other marks of our Church, but these are its main characteristics, and they suffice to indicate our general position in relation to Christian thought. If, now, we should be called upon to define in a single sentence the distinctive features of Lutheranism, it might be done in these words of an unknown writer: "Lutheranism is that form of Protestant Christianity which makes Christ the only foundation, faith the only condition, and the word of God the only means of salvation." THEIR STORY In the Seventeenth Century 1648-1700 Under the administration of the Dutch West India Company the Reformed Church was established in New Amsterdam in 1628. The policy of the Company was to maintain the Reformed religion to the exclusion of all other churches. But the cosmopolitan character of the future metropolis was evident even in its earliest history. In 1643 the Jesuit missionary Jogues reports that besides the Calvinists, Lutherans and Anabaptists were to be found in the colony. In 1644 eighteen languages were spoken by its inhabitants.