William Augustus Muhlenberg was born in Philadelphia in 1796, into a family whose name already belonged to the country: his great-grandfather Henry Melchior Muhlenberg had organized American Lutheranism, and his grandfather Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg had been the first Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was baptized Lutheran. As a boy he went to Christ Church, Philadelphia, where the old bishop, William White, had made a rule keeping children out of the congregation after some earlier annoyance. That same bishop ordained him deacon at twenty-one, two days after his birthday, and made him his assistant.

He had no seminary. He got his theology by reciting Butler's Analogy to Jackson Kemper, an assistant minister of the Philadelphia churches, and by walking with Kemper on his rounds among the sick and the poor. That is worth holding onto, because everything he built later looks like that walk repeated at larger and larger scale.

His first parish was Lancaster, where he arrived in December 1820 and found fifteen communicants at his first Christmas. Then Flushing, on Long Island, and a school; then a college at College Point, where in 1836 a cornerstone was laid for a permanent building whose walls, Anne Ayres wrote, never rose above the basement story. The college opened two years later in wooden buildings instead, and was ruined in the end by the money panic of that decade. He was capable of failing.

Meanwhile he had written a hymn. In 1829 the General Convention's hymn committee took up an anonymous submission, and one of the members said it was very sweet and pretty, but rather sentimental, and the committee threw it out unanimously. Muhlenberg was sitting there. "Not suspected as the author, I voted against myself." Overnight, Henry Ustick Onderdonk went around to the members and got it restored, "so that to him is due the credit of giving it to the Church." The hymn was "I Would Not Live Alway," and for a century afterwards it was the text Americans said over their dead.

Then New York. His sister, Mary A. Rogers, built the Church of the Holy Communion in fulfilment of her dead husband's wishes, a free church: no rented pews, no better seats for better money, daily prayer and weekly Communion inside a Gothic building by Richard Upjohn that Ayres called Upjohn's best. He was pressed once on how such churches should be paid for and would not let the idea be softened into charity. "I have always repudiated the notion that free churches should be exclusively for the poor. Their fundamental idea is the rich and the poor, meeting together in the house of the Lord."

From that church he kept adding. A sisterhood, the first in the American Episcopal Church, gathered around Anne Ayres. A hospital, St. Luke's, whose cornerstone Bishop Wainwright laid in 1854 and which opened on Ascension Day 1859 for the sick poor; he was its superintendent for the rest of his life and died in one of its rooms. In 1853 he drafted and signed a Memorial to the House of Bishops, asking for a church wide enough to reach "the utter ignorance of the Gospel among so large a portion of the lower classes of our population, making a heathen world in our midst." People said it went off among the bishops like a bomb. He answered his critics without retreating an inch: "Radicalism it is, literally, and of the right kind. It is going to the roots of things; and there verily do we need to go."

He hated slavery, said so from a Philadelphia pulpit in 1820 before it was a political subject, was disgusted by the Fugitive Slave Law, wrote a Republican battle hymn for the election of 1860, and put in his diary on the night the returns came in: "Lincoln elected! huzza! I am glad I share in the victory. I believe it a triumph of humanity."

He never married. He was not making a point of it, and he said so plainly when asked: "If celibacy has been the destiny of my life, it was not its programme. I never advocated the unmarried state as preferable for a clergyman, though in my own case, in the orderings of Providence, it has enabled me to do various works in the church, which otherwise I might not have undertaken or even have thought of."

In December 1864, aged sixty-eight, he wrote two letters describing a village that did not exist, as though a friend had visited it years hence: a plain sloping south, a brook, cottages become "a goodly village, with a pretty rural church in the midst." He put over it the words Your old men shall dream dreams. Its purpose, he wrote, was "to enable certain classes of the industrious poor to exchange their wretched abodes in the city for comfortable rural homes." The next year he bought the farm. St. Johnland got its fields, its printing office, a house for boys, a home for old men, a home for crippled children sent out from St. Luke's, and a church.

Not all of it was public. Ayres printed a single leaf from his private prayer journal, written while he ran a school, in which he prays against exactly the danger his whole life put him in: "may I never expect a mean dependence and servile compliance from those whom I have benefited, or laid under obligations. I know the danger I am in of looking for too much deference from those about me. Preserve me from personal vanity. I would hide myself wholly behind my Saviour."

He kept nothing. When he died there were forty dollars in the house, two gold pieces given him not long before, and he had once said that all he needed to leave was enough to bury him, which he had not managed. He had a name for the opposite habit, the fortunes heaped up and held: living to die rich.

The last illness ran six weeks. On Good Friday, 1877, someone read him the eleventh chapter of St. John, and at the words "Whoso liveth and believeth in Me shall never die" he said, "Yes, those are glorious words. Those are my death words. This is the happiest day of my life." Asked whether he expected to die that day, he said, "No, I feel rather strong." He lived nine days more. On the Friday he managed a faint "Good morning" to the Sister who was nursing him, and after that, Ayres wrote, he never spoke again. He died on Sunday night, 8 April, a little after ten, in the hospital he had built for other people.

They buried him at St. Johnland four days later, by his own instruction: no invitations sent, no sermon preached, the coffin carried by four men of the settlement, St. John's Gospel open at the fourteenth chapter on his breast. Afterwards a granite cross went up over the grave, paid for by about twelve hundred dollars gathered in small gifts from poor people. He had said what he wanted: "I desire to be buried as the poorest of my brethren." What he had said earlier, when he thought the end had already come, stands over all of it: "Praise the Lord, I have had a good time. Thanks, thanks, thanks! I have lived long enough. I am ready."