from Dr. Laidlaw, an expert observer of church conditions in this city.
In 1904, in an article in "Federation," on "Oldest New York," he wrote
as follows:

"There are now over fifty Christian bodies in this city, and "Oldest
New York's" history shows the fatuity of expecting that the
heterogeneous population of the present city will all worship in the
same way within the lifetime of its youngest religious worker. Man's
thoughts have not been God's thoughts, nor man's ways God's ways, in the
mingling of races and religions on this island. The Lutheranism that so
sorely struggled for a foothold in the early days is now the second
Protestant communion in numbers, and its recent increment throughout
Greater New York, contributed to by German, Scandinavian, Finnish and
many English Lutheran churches, has exceeded that of any other
Protestant body."

The causes which contributed to our progress in the latter part of the
nineteenth century were still effective. The consolidation of Greater
New York, bringing together into one metropolis the scattered boroughs,
marked the advent of a Greater Lutheran Church in New York. The bridges
and the subways, the telephone and the Catskill Aqueduct, public works
of unprecedented magnitude, were among the material foundations of the
new growth of our churches.

We were beginning to reap in the second and third generations the fruits
of the vast immigration of the nineteenth century.

A new era began for the use of the English language. There had been a
demand for English services as early as 1750, but in the eighteenth and
the greater part of the nineteenth centuries it had not been met. Fifty