Excerpt from Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the First Baptist Church, Middletown, New Jersey, October 30th, 1888 Brethren in Christ, and members of the two hundred Baptist Churches of New Jersey, as Pastor Of this grand Old patriarchal Church, and for my people, I extend to you Christian greeting, and bid you most cordial welcome to the Old, historic spot, to our hospitality, to our hearts and to our homes. We stand on sacred ground, thickly clustered with noble names and grand achievements. They tell us we are the Old Mother Church, from whom eight daughter Churches have gone out, and are now as strong, as able, as ourselves but others tell us She is the mother Of or more Baptist Churches. Be that as it may, we are vividly reminded today of the gathering home of Children and grandchildren on some festive Christmas-tide around the Old homestead. Children and grandchildren are delighted, and the dear Old faces Of grandparents just Simply beam with pleasure and delight over their happy descendants. We are reminded of the gathering of the tribes to Jerusalem of Old, at the great and joyous feasts Of the Lord, when even the desert paths through the valley of Baca were as wells of refreshment for the joy set before them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.