in their statistical reports between occasional communicants and actual members of the congregation.  Admission to membership should take place by vote of the congregation or at least of the Church Council.  There should likewise be some rite of initiation.  In the case of adults who come from other congregations it need not and should not be a confirmation service, but it should at least be a public introduction of the candidate into the fellowship of the congregation with which he desires to become identified. (Matthew 10, 32).

Rome’s position was a protest against Montanism.  Without question there is a great truth in Cyprian’s position as developed by Rome, and the Reformers, particularly Melanchthon, guarded it.  How often do we hear in our day the declaration:  “I do not need to go to church.  I can be just as good a Christian without.”  This position Lutheranism rebukes by making preaching and the sacraments the pillars on which the church rests.  Thus is conserved what was best in the institutional theory of the ancient church, so that in spite of her many defects both as a national church and in her transplanted condition, the Lutheran church will remain an important factor in the development of Protestant Christianity.

When our Reformed neighbors charge us with Romanism, it is either because they do not understand our theory and have overlooked the historical development, or because they judge of us by the Romish practice of our own ministers who have thoughtlessly slipped over too far toward the institutional theory.  In the present condition of religious flux we have a mission not only in the field of doctrine, but also in practical theology, on the question of the Church.  For we are still standing between two antagonists.  Catholics on the one hand attract the masses by the definiteness of their external organization.  Over against them we emphasize the essentially spiritual nature of the Church.  There are Protestants on the other hand who, while placing the emphasis on the inner life, ignore the importance of the ordinances.  They maintain public worship, it is true, but do so in combination with secular entertainment or by appealing to the intellectual or esthetic needs of the community.  Others, more spiritually minded, base their hopes on the evangelist and the revival.  But when the evangelist has taken his leave, and the people have to listen to the same voice they have heard so long before, having been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that it is not the Church that makes a man a Christian, that sacraments and ordinances are merely human devices, is it any wonder that many of them ignore the church altogether?

It is here that the Lutheran Church, with her catholic spirit and her evangelical doctrine, has a message for our times.  Her doctrine of baptism, of Christian instruction as its corrollary, of repentance, faith, and the new life, of the Lord’s Supper, of church attendance, of the sanctification of the Lord’s Day, and a practical application of these doctrines to the life in the care of souls, establishes a standard of membership that ought to make our churches sources of spiritual power.