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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) began his pastoral ministry in a village Baptist chapel in Cambridgeshire but became a national voice in Victorian England through his ministry in London. The huge crowds his preaching attracted necessitated the building of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, at the Elephant and Castle, which accommodated over 5,000 people. ‘By common consent’, says David Bebbington, Spurgeon was ‘the greatest English-speaking preacher of the century’. Spurgeon, like other nineteenth-century ecclesiastical figures, was involved in theological controversies, including the ‘Downgrade Controversy’, in which, in typically robust style, he attacked theological liberalism. In August 1887, he trumpeted: ‘The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture derided, the Holy Spirit degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin turned into a fiction, and the resurrection into a myth …’ The Downgrade controversy has not attracted nearly as much attention as debates provoked in the nineteenth century by Essays and Reviews (1860) and Lux Mundi (1889), perhaps because the latter affected Anglicanism rather than the Free Churches. But since as many people were attending Free Churches as Anglican churches, the issues raised in the Downgrade, as the most serious nineteenth-century Free Church dispute, are of considerable significance.
1 For Spurgeon’s life see Kruppa, P. S., Charles Haddon Spurgeon: a Preacher’s Progress (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.
2 Bebbington, D. W., The Dominance of Evangelicalism (Leicester, 2005), 37.Google Scholar
3 The Sword and the Trowel [hereafter: Spurgeon, The Sword], August 1887, 397.
4 The typical relative coverage can be seen in Parsons, G., ed., Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. 2: Controversies (Manchester, 1988)Google Scholar.
5 Clements, K. W., Lovers of Discord (London, 1988), 11–16 Google Scholar.
6 For the College see Bebbington, D. W., ‘Spurgeon and British Evangelical Theological Education’, in Hart, D. G. and Mohler, R. A. Jr, eds, Theological Education in the Evangelical Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI, 1996), 217–34 Google Scholar; Randall, I. M., A School of the Prophets (London, 2005)Google Scholar.
7 Annual Paper Concerning the Lord’s Work in Connection with the Pastors’ College (London, 1890–1), 3.
8 See esp. Hopkins, M., Nonconformity’s Romantic Generation (Carlisle, 2004), chs 5 and 7.Google Scholar
9 Spurgeon, The Sword, November 1887, 560.
10 Spurgeon, The Sword, January 1888, 44.
11 Freeman, 10 February 1888, 81.
12 Spurgeon, The Sword, June 1888, 336.
13 Thomas Medhurst, 11 February 1888. Responses are held: London, Spurgeon’s College Heritage Room, MS B1.16.
14 John Markham, 13 February 1888.
15 William Sullivan, 11 February 1888.
16 David Chapman, 11 February 1888.
17 William Coombes, 13 February 1888.
18 Jesse Aubrey, 13 February 1888.
19 Henry Bradford, 13 February 1888.
20 Charles Fowler, 14 February 1888.
21 John Cole, 11 February 1888.
22 Walter Hackney, 14 February 1888.
23 George Pope, 13 February 1888.
24 Jabez Dodwell, 22 February 1888.
25 T. Harley, 11 February 1888.
26 R. P. Javan, 13 February 1888.
27 G. W. Tooley, undated letter.
28 Arthur Wood, 15 February 1888.
29 J. Hutchison, 13 February 1888.
30 T. A. Judd, 11 February 1888.
31 Walter Richards, 15 February 1888.
32 Minutes of a Special Meeting of Pastors’ College Trustees, 30 July 1896.
33 Clarence Chambers, 14 February 1888.
34 W. H. Elliott, 11 February 1888.
35 Abraham Mills, 18 February 1888.
36 Henry Dyer, 14 February 1888. Dyer also wrote jointly with five other ministers.
37 Freeman, 17 February 1888, 113.
38 E. G. Gange, 14 February 1988.
39 The Baptist, 17 February 1888, 5.
40 Freeman, 17 February 1888, 101.
41 George Smith, 21 February 1888.
42 Jesse Dupee, 15 February 1888; 21 February 1888.
43 Robert Glendenning, 2 February 1888.
44 Arthur Wood, 23 February 1888.
45 Charles Joseph, 23 February 1888.
46 William Townsend, 22 February 1888.
47 J. W. Ewing, 22 February 1888.
48 Freeman, 17 February 1888, 101.
49 Freeman, 24 February 1888, 129.
50 Ibid.
51 Freeman, 2 March 1888, 137.
52 J. C. Foster, 16 February 1888, 21 February 1888.
53 Minutes of the Executive Committee of Spurgeon’s College Council, 28 November 1946.
54 Freeman, 2 March 1888, 137.
55 Freeman, 16 March 1888, 168.
56 Spurgeon, The Sword, March 1888, 148.
57 Bebbington, D. W., ‘Baptists and Fundamentalism in Inter-War Britain’, in Robbins, K., ed., Protestant Evangelicalism Britain, Ireland, Germany and America, c.1750-c.1950, SCH.S. 7 (Oxford, 1990), 297–326, at 303.Google Scholar
58 Clements, Lovers of Discord, 16, and chs 5 and 8; cf.Randall, I. M., The English Baptists of the Twentieth Century (Didcot, 2005), 99–104, 120–6, 169–75, 365–82.Google Scholar