William Augustus Muhlenberg

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William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796-1877) was an American philanthropist and Protestant Episcopal clergyman, father of the Ritualist movement in Episcopal Church in the United States of America [1], great-grandson of Henry Muhlenberg and grandson of Frederick Muhlenberg, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 16 September 1796.

He graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1815. In 1817 he was ordained a deacon in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and became assistant to Bishop William White (1748-1836) in the rectorship of Christ Church, St. Peters and St. James', Philadelphia.

In 1820 he was ordained priest and until 1826 was rector of St. James' Church, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Largely owing to his efforts, Lancaster was the second public school district created in the state. His interest in church music and hymnody prompted his pamphlet of 1821, A Plea for Christian Hymns; he drew up for the use of his own parish a collection of Church Poetry (1823); and in 1823 be was appointed by the General Convention a member of the committee on psalms and hymns, whose collection, approved in 1826, contained several of Muhlenberg's own compositions, including I would not live alway, Shout the glad tidings, and Saviour, who thy flock art feeding.

From 1826 to 1845 be was rector of St. George's, Flushing, Long Island, where in 1827 he became head of the Flushing Institute, probably the first Protestant Episcopal church school in the United States. He founded a St. Paul's College, to include the institute, but the panic of 1837 and the refusal of a charter by the state legislature brought it to an end; and the property was sold a few years after Muhlenberg left Flushing. The methods of this institute were however copied widely; church schools sprang up everywhere; and St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, and the Groton School in Massachusetts were established in accordance with his ideas.

In 1845 he removed to New York City, where in 1846 he became rector of the Church of the Holy Communion, a free church built by his sister, Mrs. Mary A. Rogers. Here Muhlenberg founded the first American order of Protestant Episcopal deaconesses, the Sisterhood of the Church of the Holy Communion, begun in 1845 and formally organized in 1852. The work of the sisterhood led to Muhlenberg's establishment of St. Luke's Hospital (opened in 1858), for which his congregation made offerings each St. Luke's Day after 1846. In 1866 he founded on Long Island the Church Industrial Community of St. Johnland. He bought 535 acres (mostly wooded), with a shore front of 1 1/2 m. on Long Island Sound, near Kings Park, to be a home for the aged and for young children, especially cripples. The plan was not reformatory nor purely charitable, and a moderate rent was charged for the cottages. In the St. Johnland cemetery is the grave of Dr. Muhlenberg, who died on 8 April 1877 in St. Luke's Hospital, New York City.

His ideal of the church was that it was missionary and evangelical as well as catholic with formal government and ritual; hence he called himself an evangelical Catholic and wrote the Evangelical Catholic Papers, which were collected and published by Anne Ayres in 1875-1877.