MUGGLETON, LODOWICK, MUGGLETONIANS:
English sectarian and the followers of him and John Reeve (1608-58); b. in Walnut Tree Yard, off Bishopsgate Street Without, London, July, 1609; d. at London Mar. 14, 1698. Apprenticed as a tailor, he went as a journeyman to his cousin John Reeve (1608-58) in 1631, who converted him to Puritanism, and in 1647 he withdrew from all worship, adopting an agnostic position. In 1650 he was attracted by the declaration of the two so-called prophets, John Robins, a " ranter," and Thomas Taney, a predecessor of the Anglo-Israelites, whose crude pantheism took hold of him; at the same time he read Jacob Boehme (q.v.). He drew also Reeve to his views. The latter in 1652 professed personal communications, appointing him messenger and Muggleton mouthpiece of a new dispensation; and as the two witnesses (Rev. xi. 3) they set forth as prophets of a new system of faith. They gathered a large following and the sect continued till the last century, Joseph Gauder (d. 1868) being reported as the last adherent.
The element of spirituality was contributed by Reeve. He distinguished between faith and reason as respectively the divine and demoniac elements in man (the doctrine of two-seeds), and shared with the Socinians a frank anthropomorphism and a belief that the mortality of the soul is to be remedied by a physical resurrection. The harder outlines, including the rejection of prayer, came from Muggleton. His philosophy is epicurean, holding that
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after the divine being had fixed the machinery of the world and placed a conscience in man, he took no further notice of the world until the revelation to Reeve. The devil is a human being, narratives of miracles are mostly parables, the sun travels around the earth, and heaven is calculated to be six miles off. " Earth and water were not created, but self-originated; the evil one became incarnate in Eve; the Father was the sufferer on the cross, having left Elijah to govern heaven while he came on earth to die " (J. H. Blunt, Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, p. 355, Philadelphia, 1874). In 1853-54 Muggleton and Reeve were tried and imprisoned for denying the Trinity.
Bibliography : Consult the Works of Reeve and Muggleton, ed. J. and I. Frost, London, 1832; idem, A List of Books and General Index to Reeve and Muggleton' s Works, ib. 1846; A Modest Account of the Wicked Life of . L. M., in Harleian Miscellany, vols, i., viii., London, 1808-13; Transactions of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, 1868-70. Muggleton's autobiography is prefixed to his own Acts of the Witnesses, 1699.
MUHLENBERG, WILLIAM AUGUST: Protestant Episcopalian clergyman, poet, and philanthropist; b. in Philadelphia Sept. 16, 1796; d. in New York Apr. 8, 1877. His great-grandfather was Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, his grandfather Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, and his father Henry William Muhlenberg, and he was baptized in the Lutheran communion, but while a little boy made choice of the Episcopal Church. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1814, and at once entered on his theological studies under Bishop White, by whom he was ordained deacon in 1817, and whose assistant he became in Christ Church. On his ordination as priest, 1820, he accepted a call to the rectorship of St. James', Lancaster, Pa., where he remained six years, and where he did much toward the advancement of public education. He occupied himself also at this time in church hymnody; wrote a Plea for Christian Hymns, that was circulated at the special General Convention of 1821, and which, with other measures, resulted in 1826 in the adoption of a collection of hymns prepared by a committee of which he was the chief worker. His own well-known hymn, " I would not live alway," was written in Lancaster in 1824, and first printed in the Philadelphia Episcopal Recorder, in 1826. He declared that a myth had grown up about his famous hymn and that it was not written under the depression of a ruptured engagement of marriage. But, convinced that it was too gloomy, he worked it over and thus enlarged and " evangelized " it (cf. the publication mentioned below).
He championed the Christianizing of education, the union, in some practical form, of the Evangelical bodies of Christendom, and Christian brotherhood as exemplifying itself in institutions of charity and beneficence for the poor and oppressed. On leaving Lancaster in 1826, he became rector of St. George's, Flushing, L. I., N. Y., and there opened a school in 1828, when he relinquished his charge. In 1838 he joined the school to St. Paul's College, of which he was rector till 1846, when he entered on the pastorate of the Free Church of the Holy Communion, New York, the building of which was
erected by his sister, Mrs. Mary A. Rogers. He was the originator of numerous important movements in the Episcopal Church (see Deaconess, III., 2, d. § 2), and the methods he employed in his schools became most popular, being widely applied in other institutions. It was during his ministry in this church that he enunciated most emphatically those " Evangelical Catholic " principles which he believed to be the true theory of the Christian Church, and which are signally expressed in The Muhlenberg Memorial (cf . Evangelical Catholic Papers, New York, 1875). His grandest exemplifications of Christian brotherhood are the institutions of St. Luke's Hospital, New York, opened in 1859, with himself as its first pastor and superintendent; and the Church Village of St. Johnland on Long Island, incorporated in 1870. " The incarnation was the central idea of his theology and the inspiration of his Christian life — brotherhood in Christ, brotherhood through Christ." He never married, and, though born to affluence, did not leave money enough for his funeral. He died in St. Luke's Hospital, and was buried at St. Johnland. His works embrace / would not live alway, and Other Pieces (New York, 1859; reissued with The Story of the Hymn, and a Brief Account of St. Johnland, 1871); Evangelical Sisterhoods; in Two Letters to a Friend (1867); Christ and the Bible; not the Bible and Christ (1869); and his Evangelical Catholic Papers; Compiled by Anne Ayres (1875). Bibliography: Biographies have been written by E. Harwood and G. D. Wildes, New York, 1877; A. Ayres, ib. 18S0, new ed., 1884 (the standard); and W. W. Newton, Boston, 1890. Consult .also E. A. Washburn, Sermons in Memorial of W. A. Muhlenberg, New York, 1877.
MUIR, PEARSON M'ADAM: Church of Scotland; b. at Creetown (32 m. s.w. of Dumfries), Kirkcudbrightshire, Jan. 26, 1846. He was educated at the University of Glasgow, after which he was minister at Catrine, Ayrshire (1870-72), Polmont, Stirlingshire (1872-80), Morningside, Edinburgh (1880-96), and Glasgow Cathedral (since 1896) ; also secretary of the Church Service Society (1888-1907). By appointment of the General Assembly he was lecturer on pastoral theology in the universities of St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh in 1895-97 and 1902-06. He has written Samuel Rutherford (St. Giles Lectures on Scottish Divines; Edinburgh, 1882) ; The Church of Scotland: A Sketch of its History (1890); Religious Writers of England (1901); and Modern Substitutes for Christianity (Baird lecture; 1909); and contributed the section on the monuments and inscriptions in Glasgow Cathedral to G. E. Todd's Book of Glasgow Cathedral, 1898).
MULBERG, JOHANNES: Dominican monk and anticipator of the Reformation; b. at Klein-Basel in the middle of the fourteenth century; d. in Maulbronn in 1414. He was the son of a cobbler and devoted himself up to his twentieth year to his father's handicraft. He then first attended school and soon afterward entered the Dominican order. With fervent zeal he participated in the efforts for the reformation of his order and won many cloisters for the reform movement, especially in South Germany. He soon became one of the most successful and esteemed public speakers. From 1400 he began,
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