[Sidenote: The Patriarch of the American Lutheran Church.] Among the heroes of the American Lutheran Church is _Henry Melchior Muhlenberg_ who was born in Germany in 1711 and died in America in 1787. He was educated at the University of Göttingen from which he went to Halle to teach in the Orphanage and to prepare himself for missionary work in India. Instead he accepted a call to become the pastor of the scattered congregations of Lutherans in Pennsylvania. When he arrived in 1742 he found the people without church buildings or schools and at the mercy of imposters who claimed to be clergymen. At once he began to preach and to organize. Travelling from New York to Georgia, doing pastoral work, forming constitutions for churches and for the first American Synod, he filled forty-five years to the brim with valuable work. Of him Doctor Henry E. Jacobs says: “Depth of religious conviction, extraordinary inwardness of character, apostolic zeal for the spiritual welfare of individuals, absorbing devotion to his calling and all its details, were among his most marked characteristics. These were combined with an intuitive penetration and extended width of view, a statesman-like grasp of every situation in which he was placed, an almost prophetic foresight, coolness and discrimination of judgment, and peculiar gifts for organization and discrimination.” Under the ministrations of Doctor Muhlenberg the Lutheran Church in America was firmly established. That his heart turned longingly to the first field of labor which he had selected, we know from his own records. In giving an account of the Third Convention of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, he said that when the delegates gathered for an evening meeting at his house he told them of the Mission among the Malabars and among the Jews. Doubtless he was consoled by the hope that there might go from his American Church those who would do what he had wished to do. [Sidenote: The First Missionary Undertaking.] The missionary consciousness of the new church found its first expression is an unsuccessful effort to evangelize the American Indian. In Georgia a little was accomplished by the pious Salzburgers, but the withdrawal of the Indians from the neighborhood of white settlements and the growing and natural distrust which they felt for the whites soon put an end to missionary work among them. [Sidenote: A Missionary Institute Discussed.] At the first meeting in 1820 of the General Synod, to which belonged the Synods of Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, the Joint Synod of Ohio, and the Synods of Maryland and Virginia, the founding of a missionary institute like those of the Fatherland was suggested and discussed. Before this time congregations had contributed individually to the work of foreign missions through the American Board, an inter-denominational society.