FOREWORD

This book has been prepared at the request of a considerable number of Young Peop1e's Societies connected with the German speaking Baptist Churches in our country and Canada. With the flight of years the younger generation in these churches has lost in a greater or less degree the command of the German language which had been the language of their earliest religious and home surroundings, but their loyalty to the churches founded and upheld by their fathers and mothers has kept large numbers of them from transferring their membership to English speaking Baptist churches. These young people rightly demand for themselves the use of the English Language in church services, and this is being accorded them in an ever-increasing number of churches. In fact, a very considerable number of German Baptist churches, notably in the eastern and middle section of our country, have already introduced bilingual church services, while the Sunday schools and the Young People's Societies are being conducted almost entirely in the English Language

This younger generation now wants to study the essential facts of the religious movement with which they became identified by reason of their early environment and training and, obviously, they want to read these facts in the language with which they are most familiar.

There is no book in English, which contains the historical material in a form answering this special purpose. The two outline histories and the historical sketch of the Semi-centennial of the German Department of the Rochester Theological Seminary, prepared and published by the present writer some twenty years ago, were written in German and are now out of print. The numerous shorter articles, scattered through the files of the Baptist Home Missionary Monthly, the larger historical summary published in Dr. Newman's book "A Century of Baptist Achievement," Chapter X, and a number of "Studies" in the "Conquest Missionary Courses," are fragmentary and scarcely accessible. Hence this new book. May it prove helpful and stimulating to that splendid body of young people in our German churches throughout our extended work-field for whom these pages were penned, and whom to have known so long has been the writer's increasing delight. In the words of Saint Luke's preface to his gospel--"it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed."

Rochester, N. Y., October 8, 1923.