Nineteenth-Century Baptists

Baptists began the century as a scattering of self-governing congregations and ended it as one of the largest Protestant families in the English-speaking world, without ever agreeing to be governed from anywhere. In London, Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached weekly to thousands at the Metropolitan Tabernacle and published sermons that sold in the millions. Late in life he broke with the Baptist Union over what he called the Down-Grade, convinced his fellow ministers were quietly giving up the doctrines they had been ordained to preach. In America the family split in 1845, when Baptists in the South, refused a slaveholding missionary appointment, formed the Southern Baptist Convention. Running alongside was Landmarkism, which held that only true Baptist congregations were churches at all and traced an unbroken Baptist succession back to the apostles.