a member of the Continental Congress, in 1780–1783 of the Pennsylvania general assembly (then consisting of only one house), and in 1780–1790 of the state constitutional convention. He was president of the Pennsylvania convention which ratified the federal constitution, and was a member in 1789–1797 of the national House of Representatives, of which he was speaker in 1780–1791 and 1793–1795. On the 29th of April 1796, as chairman of the committee of the whole, he cast the deciding vote for the laws necessary to carry out Jay’s treaty.
Another brother, Gotthilf Henry Ernest Muhlenberg (1753–1815), was a prominent Lutheran clergyman, and was pastor of a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from 1779 to his death; but he is best known as a botanist, and published Catalogus plantarum Americae septentrionalis (1813) and Descriptio uberior graminum et plantarum calamariarum Americae septentrionalis indignarum et circurum (1817).
See John M. Maisch, G. H. E. Muhlenberg als Botaniker (1886).
Gotthilf’s son, Henry Augustus Muhlenberg (1782–1844), was pastor of a Lutheran Church in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1802–1828, was a Democratic representative in Congress in 1829–1838, and was United States minister to Austria in 1838–1840.
MUHLENBERG, WILLIAM AUGUSTUS (1796–1877), American philanthropist and Protestant Episcopal clergyman, great-grandson of H. M. Muhlenberg and grandson of F. A. C. Muhlenberg, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 16th of 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 Peter’s and St James’s, Philadelphia. In 1820 he was ordained priest and until 1826 was rector of St James’s 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 he 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 he 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 112 m. on Long Island Sound, near King’s Park, 45 m. from New York City, to be a home for the aged and for young children, especially cripples.[1] 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 the 8th of 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.
See Anne Ayres, Life and Work of William Augustus Muhlenberg (New York, 1880), and W. W. Newton, Dr Muhlenberg (Boston, 1890), in the “American Religious Leaders” series.
MÜHLHAUSEN, a town of Germany, in Prussian Thuringia, on the right bank of the Unstrut, 25 m. N.W. of Gotha by rail. Pop. (1905), 34,359. It consists of a new and an old town, surrounded by five suburbs, and has numerous old churches and towers. The most interesting churches are those of St Mary and of St Blasius, dating respectively from the 14th and the 12th century; the town-hall is also a fine medieval structure. The chief industries are the spinning and weaving of woollen and cotton. Other manufactures include needles, machinery, cigars, soap, hosiery, furniture and shoes. There are also establishments for dyeing, tanning, lime-burning, iron-making, brewing and the preparation of liqueurs.
Mühlhausen is one of the oldest towns in Thuringia, and is said to have been fortified in 925. Its early importance is shown by the grant of privileges made to it by the German King Henry I., and by the diet held here in 1135. During the Reformation period Mühlhausen became notorious as one of the chief seats of the Anabaptists. Thomas Münzer, one of their leaders, was captured in the vicinity and executed in the town. Internal dissensions and injuries received during the Thirty Years’ War and the Seven Years’ War afterwards reduced Mühlhausen to unimportance. In 1802 it lost its independence and passed to Prussia, in 1807 it was attached to the kingdom of Westphalia, but in 1815 it again became Prussian. The Teutonic Order established itself at Mühlhausen in 1200.
See E. Heydenreich, Aus der Geschichte der Reichsstadt Mühlhausen (Halle, 1900); Nebelsieck, Reformationsgeschichte der Stadt Mühlhausen (Magdeburg, 1905); Herquet, Urkundenbuch der ehemaligen freien Reichsstadt Mühlhausen (Halle, 1874); F. Stephan, Verfassungsgeschichte der Reichsstadt Mühlhausen (Sondershausen, 1886); Jordan, Chronik der Stadt Mühlhausen (Mühlhausen, 1900–1906); and Führer durch Mühlhausen und Umgegend (1901).
MUIR, JOHN (1810–1882), Scottish Orientalist, was born on
the 5th of February 1810 in Glasgow, where his father, William
Muir (d. 1821), was a merchant. He was educated at the
grammar school of Irvine, the university of Glasgow, and the
East India Company’s College at Haileybury. He went to India
in 1829, and served with distinction in various offices, as assistant
secretary to the board of revenue, Allahabad, as collector
at Azimgarh, as principal of the Victoria College, Benares, and
as civil and session judge at Fatehpur. He encouraged the study
of Sanskrit, and furthered schemes for the enlightenment and
amelioration of the Hindus. In 1853 he retired and settled in
Edinburgh, where he continued his Indian labours. In 1862 he
endowed the chair of Sanskrit in the university of Edinburgh,
and was the main agent in founding the Shaw fellowship in moral
philosophy. He was a D.C.L. of Oxford, LL.D. of Edinburgh
and Ph.D. of Bonn, and was one of the first to receive the
distinction of C.I.E. He died on the 7th of March 1882.
In 1858 appeared vol. i. of his Original Sanskrit Texts (2nd ed., 1868); it was on the origin of caste, an inquiry intended to show that it did not exist in the Vedic age. Vol. ii. (1st ed., 1860; 2nd, 1871) was concerned with the origin and racial affinities of the Hindus, exhibiting all the then available evidences of their connexion, their linguistic, social and political kinship, with the other branches of the Indo-European stock. Vol. iii. (1st ed., 1861; 2nd, 1868) was on the Vedas, a full inquiry as to the ideas of their origin, authority and inspiration held both by the Vedic and later Indian writers. Vol. iv. (1st ed., 1863; 2nd, 1873) was a comparison of the Vedic with the later representations of the principal Indian deities, an exhibition of the process by which three gods hardly known to the Vedic hymns became the deities of the former Hindu Trimurti. Vol. v. (1870) was on the Vedic mythology. Dr Muir was also the author of a volume of Metrical Translations from the Sanskrit, an anonymous work on Inspiration, several works in Sanskrit, and many essays in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and elsewhere.
- ↑ The Society of St Johnland, incorporated in 1870, has a chapel, the Church of the Testimony of Jesus (1869), St John’s Inn, the home for old men (also built in 1869), Sunset Cottage, a home for twelve aged couples, Muhlenberg House for old women, the Fabbri Home, the Sunbeam Cottage (given by Mr and Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1881) Lawrence House, for babies, a library and village hall, a kindergarten, a school house, and the “mansion,” Dr Muhlenberg’s home at St Johnland and later the home of Sister Anne Ayres, his biographer, during her superintendence of the society.
