Among Parker's biting words were the following. When people ask me what I think of Spurgeon, I always ask, which Spurgeon? The head or the heart? The Spurgeon of the tabernacle or the Spurgeon of the orphanage? The kind of Calvinism which the wand occasionally represents I simply hate, as I hate selfishness and blasphemy. It is that leering, slavering, fly-winking Calvinism that says, Bless the Lord, we are all right, booked straight through to heaven's first class. But when I turn to the orphanage, all is changed. All is beauty. All is love. Scarcely could enmity to the truth go lower than this caricature of the grace of God wrapped in the language of partial admiration for its spokesman. In the light of the above, it is not surprising that newspapers outside the non-conformist circle also regarded the downgrade as an unavailing protest by Spurgeon at the passing of Calvinism. From the Anglican side, the Church Review for April 12, 1889 contained an article, The Revolt Against Calvinism, and after The dead set against the Westminster Confession seems to grow apace. Even the redoubtable Dr. Parker's fiercest attacks on the creed-bound church are but veiled protests against the document by which he, like so many of his brethren, is bound. As to the Westminster Confession, of course it is unnecessary for us to say that we have not the smallest sympathy with it. That gloomy epitome of Calvinism was framed expressly against the Church in troublous times. And like most weapons directed against her, it is now, nearly 300 years after, beginning to recoil against those who have hitherto held to its provisions. With regard to the recoil from Calvinism, we see nothing but cause for congratulation. The general view was ably summarized by the Unitarian Herald on November 11, 1887. The writer concurred with the judgment that Spurgeon's withdrawal from the Baptist Union was due to his insistence on Calvinism. He continued, There can be no doubt whatever as to the direction in which the broad stream is flowing. The thoughts which people entertain about the character of God and the destinies of man in the world to come, have of late years been undergoing a vast transformation. What is preached and believed at the present time is greatly in advance of what our pious grandparents were wont to listen to as the word of God. Mr. Spurgeon and his friends form a mere back current, or eddy, in the stream of religious progress. One might be tempted to say, looking at the immense personal following Mr. Spurgeon has, their numbers and the energy of their faith, why, this man has got the people with him. But that would be a grievously incorrect conclusion to arrive at. The breaking up of orthodoxy is not affected without some struggling survivals in an age that is surely leaving it behind. There can be no doubt about the issue. The authorities of the Baptist denomination are perfectly well aware of what is taking place, and powerful as the name of Mr. Spurgeon has always been among them, they know they must not take his side against the younger men who have the spirit of the age with them. The big man must go. The big man is nothing before the march of the spirit of the age. Many were thus united in asserting that Spurgeon's theology was unsuited to the needs and the spirit of modern times. Yet, despite the confidence engendered amongst themselves by the strength of their numbers, these critics were not unaware that the history and continuing unparalleled influence of the metropolitan tabernacle gave too much weight to the rejoinder that it was they who did not know how to help men. In the light of the effects of Spurgeon's ministry, could his doctrine be as antiquated and as unhelpful as they wished to represent it? The credibility of the critics' case therefore depended, as they frequently realized, on a demonstration that Spurgeon's success could not be related to the Calvinism which he preached. Sometimes the demonstration consisted of proof that other preachers who fed on the Puritans were utter failures. A Baptist minister, eager to persuade his colleagues not to be misled, took up this subject in the course of an address to a meeting of the Midland Baptist Union. One of his fellow students at Bristol, he told them, had given four hours a day to Puritanic theology. After this surfeit, doubts arose in his mind as to the value of such studies. In his perplexity, he consulted an eminent minister, C. H. Spurgeon, who reassured him by a postcard on which was written, By all means, read the Puritans. They are worth more than all the modern stuff put together. So for four years the student proceeded to saturate himself in Puritan literature, and, the speaker claimed, with disastrous results. No congregation would look at him, and he had serious thoughts of resuming his secular calling. In his despair a happy thought occurred. In desperation he sold every bit of Puritan paper he possessed, and with the proceeds bought Stomford Brook, Robertson and a few others of the same school, and in a few weeks he got a church. For such words of wisdom, the Speaker was voted a unanimous vote of thanks by the large number of Baptist ministers who were present. In a letter to the Christian World, September 22, 1887, W. Copeland Bowie resorted to straight assertions in denying any connection between Spurgeon's theology and his influence. Mr. Spurgeon professes to despise or ignore the science and criticism and the progressive life and thought of the present day. He is an orthodox Calvinist and yet people crowd in their thousands to hear him. Are we to conclude then that Calvinism is what the indifferent and the unchurched need and desire Are all the churches and chapels in which the fire and blood theology is plainly and loudly proclaimed quite full? Mr. Spurgeon lives under a delusion in regard to himself. It is his oratory and his fame, his genuine earnestness and goodness, and not his Calvinism, that make it so difficult to obtain a seat at the tabernacle on Sunday. In spite of his own personal success, there is nothing to show that Calvinism is capable of saving the world of today from its sin and its doubt. We turn now to make some general observations on the connection between Calvinism and the downgrade controversy. Some questions immediately present themselves. How was it that evangelicals who were not Calvinists so singularly failed to support Aspergian in the controversy within the Baptist Union Further, why was Spurgeon's church with its distinctly Calvinistic confession ever in the Union if opposition to the old doctrinal outlook was so strong? A glance back is necessary at this point. At the first meeting of the Baptist Union in 1812, Spurgeon's predecessor, John Rippon, was chairman. and a doctrinal declaration was drawn up which, by specifying personal election and particular redemption, limited the association to Calvinistic Baptist churches, then known as Particular Baptists. In the interests of a wider association, this declaration was dropped in 1832, and thereafter, general Baptist churches are many an evangelical gradually entered the Union. In 1863, these General Baptist churches only constituted a third of those in the Union, being considerably outnumbered by those professedly Calvinistic. Ten years after that date, we note in Spurgeon's view that Calvinism was growingly operative, and he therefore saw no reason for concern lest the old theology should disappear in the Baptist Union. In a letter to a correspondent who had drawn his attention to a Baptist minister preaching error, Spurgeon replied on December 29, 1877, There are not above a dozen loose men among us, to my knowledge, but an attack upon one might make a martyr of a party and cause a world of trouble to the many faithful ones among us. Coffee in Heritage Room, Spurgeon's College. It was the downgrade controversy which brought out not only the extent of liberal belief in the Union, but the general wish that the old Calvinistic creeds might be obliterated. By the time that John Clifford A General Baptist had become President of the Baptist Union in the critical years 1888 and 89. The one-time minority had become a powerful majority. If, as he first hoped, Spurgeon had succeeded in uniting all evangelicals within the Union on a basis of those truths which were held in common, some liberals might have been forced to withdraw. Yet even supposing that an association of Baptist evangelical churches had emerged, there is reason to believe that such a union could not have lasted. The old Calvinistic evangelicalism, with its long heritage and distinctive literature, belonged to an ethos too widely different from the anti-credal evangelicalism then in the ascendancy to admit of a lasting union. In one sense it was unfair that both liberals and evangelicals blamed Spurgeon's Calvinism for his withdrawal from the Union, for he was honest in his protest that it was not that standard of doctrine which he sought to have imposed in the Union. In another respect, however, those who differed with Spurgeon were right in regarding his judgments and actions as inseparably bound up with his doctrinal standpoint. Believing, as he did, that Calvinistic Christianity is biblical Christianity, his critics regarded him as inevitably prejudiced in his assessment of the contemporary religious scene. In this, they were right. Spurgeon's theology consistently governed his total outlook. Calvinism means the placing of the eternal God at the head of all things. I look at everything through its relation to God's glory. I see God first and man far down the list. We think too much of God to please this age. Armenian evangelicals tended to see the struggle with higher criticism as a difference over particular doctrines, rather than as a difference in attitude and spirit. The strength of Spurgeon's opposition to liberal thought was not only that he held it to be erroneous, it was fundamentally wrong in spirit. At the heart of the new theology was disbelief in divine revelation, and thus for Spurgeon, its pretensions, its intellectual brilliance and its claim made in the name of progress or science were all nothing more than evidence of the pride of unregenerate man. His charge in a word against the downgrade movement was that it was man-centered. Instead of submission to God's word, it urged accommodation to human wisdom. The new religion practically sets thought above revelation and constitutes man the supreme judge of what ought to be true. The spirit of higher criticism was its condemnation and its teachers, far from possessing superior knowledge, would, if they persisted in unbelief, show that they were not but taught and chosen of God. few Arminian evangelicals at the time of the downgrade cared to endorse such an assessment of the situation. Spurgeon took higher ground. He judged things from their Godward aspect, and there can be little question that it was this theological viewpoint which was primarily responsible for his isolation at the end. Not only, however, did the vague and non-Calvinistic evangelicalism of the 1870s and the 1880s generally fail to make a firm stand against higher criticism. It may even be argued that it served the interest of that movement. Sometimes tacit support was given by professed evangelicals as, for instance, by Dr. John Clifford, who could associate with those who denied the deity of Christ because he believed that evangelicalism and theological liberalism could be combined. Clifford's position clarified in the downgrade. Prior to that, Spurgeon had taken services for Clifford. Once in the latter's vestry before service, Spurgeon had opened his mind. I cannot imagine, Clifford, why you do not come to my way of thinking, he said, referring to his own Calvinistic beliefs. Well, you see, Mr. Spurgeon, came the smart answer. I only see you about once a month, but I read my Bible every day. More often aid to the higher critical movement was given unconsciously by men who at heart had no sympathy with disbelief in scripture. We noted earlier how the ascendant evangelicalism of the 1870s was non-doctrinal in emphasis and disinterested in the historic creeds. Strong in earnestness and faithful in preaching the need of a conversion experience, it was nevertheless especially vulnerable to the old error of deism which the teachers of higher criticism had revived. Namely, that a man can have true Christian experience apart from what he may or may not believe. It was a serious weakness in the ministry of D.L. Moody that he was not sufficiently alive to this danger. His popular type of preaching, replete with anecdotes and notably thin in doctrinal content, suited those who wanted to forward the view that the gospel and the new critical views were not incompatible. Liberals found they could praise Moody and associate with him. Henry Drummond, one of the Evangelists' most prominent supporters in Scotland, reckoned this to Moody's credit. No other living man has done so much to unite man with man, to break down personal grudges and ecclesiastical barriers, bringing into united worship and harmonious cooperation men of diverse views and dispositions. No other evangelist has kept himself so aloof from fads, religious or otherwise, from isms, from special reforms, from running specific doctrines or attacking specific sins, has so concentrated his life upon the one supreme, in devours. Drummond, whose book, The Greatest Thing in the World, was a Victorian bestseller, appears to have departed from all the central doctrines of the faith. Yet at his early death, at the age of forty-five, Moody spoke of him as the most Christ-like man I ever met. Spurgeon commands a criticism of Drummond's book, entitled The Strangest Thing in the World, by Charles Bullock. Mr. Charles Bullock thinks that the strangest thing in the world is the gospel with the gospel omitted. And he rightly judges that the Drummond teaching is precisely that. Mr. Bullock has done grand service by laying bare the device of deleting the atonement of Christ with the idea of promoting the imitation of Jesus. Sword and Trowel, 1891, page 340. This was precisely the attitude which Spurgeon had to fight against in the downgrade. The mood of the age was against creeds of any sort, and evangelicals, with their already diluted faith, succumbed in large numbers to the idea that clear-cut doctrinal positions were unchristian in their tendency. Moody weakened Calvinism, and in so doing he left the churches more exposed to the higher criticism which the non-doctrinal evangelicals were unprepared to combat. The tendency, as we have said, was in the churches before Moody's missions, but it gained rapidly in strength after the 1870s. John Aldiss, Joseph Angus, and Alexander McLaren, all Baptist evangelical leaders taking opposite sides to Spurgeon in 1887 declared, We feel that the imposition of theological tests or a human creed would defeat the objects of the Union. In doing so, they did not intend to shelter liberals, yet that, in effect, was what they did, and subsequently, in scores of churches, higher critical views were to replace the evangelical faith. The decline of Calvinism was thus clearly related to the growth of liberal theology, Arminianism had softened up evangelicals so that higher critical views could permeate the non-conformist denominations with little opposition, for Spurgeon history was repeating itself as his generation re-enacted what 18th century non-conformists had done when the confessions and catechisms of the 17th century had been abandoned. There followed an age of dribbling in which our nonconformity existed, but gradually dwindled down, first into Arminianism, and then into Unitarianism, until it almost ceased to be. Men know that it was so, and yet they would act it all over again. They read history, and yet demand that the old doctrine should again be given up, O fools and slow of heart! Will not history teach them? No, it will not, if the Bible does not. Surely evil men are near, unless the church shall again clasp the truth to her heart. This argument from history was used more fully by Robert Schindler in his articles entitled The Downgrade, which preceded the controversy. See Sword and Trowel, 1887, pages 122-126 and 166-172. As we have said, Spurgeon did not make Calvinism the issue in the downgrade controversy, but neither did he hide his personal commitment to the old faith, which he knew would, in God's time, come back into its own. The doctrine which is now rejected as the effete theory of Puritans and Calvinists will yet conquer human thought and reign supreme. As surely as the sun which sets tonight shall rise tomorrow, at the predestined hour, so shall the truth of God shine forth over the whole earth." Calvinistic material in The Sword and the Trowel at the time of the downgrade included John Bunyan on election and a plea for Calvin. We admire a man who was firm in the faith, say 400 years ago, But such a man today is a nuisance and must be put down. Call him a narrow-minded bigot, or give him a worse name if you can think of one. Yet imagine that in those ages past, Luther, Zwingle, Calvin, and their compeers had said, The world is out of order, but if we try to set it right, we shall only make a great row and get ourselves into disgrace. Let us go to our chambers. put on our nightcaps and sleep over the bad times, and, perhaps when we wake up, things will have grown better. Such conduct on their part would have entailed upon us a heritage of error. Age after age would have gone down into the infernal deeps, and the testiferous bogs of error would have swallowed all. These men loved the faith and the name of Jesus too well to see them trampled on. It is today as it was in the reformers' days. Decision is needed. Here is the day for the man. Where is the man for the day? We who have had the gospel passed to us by martyr hands dare not trifle with it, nor sit by and hear it denied by traitors who pretend to love it. but inwardly abhor every line of it. Look, you sirs, there are ages yet to come. If the Lord does not speedily appear, there will come another generation and another, and all these generations will be tainted and injured if we are not faithful to God and to His truth today. We have come to a turning point in the road. If we turn to the right, mayhap our children and our children's children will go that way. But if we turn to the left, generations yet unborn will curse our names for having been unfaithful to God and to his word. CH Aspergian's Sermons, 1888, 83, and 84. Chapter 9, Though the Heavens Fall. In our last chapter, we sought to show the relationship between Spurgeon's first and last great controversies. The convictions which he held on free grace in the first underlay the final struggle, and because the mood of a declining evangelicalism was against those convictions, Spurgeon stood comparatively alone amongst free church leaders in the downgrade. We turn now finally to ask how the middle controversy, the baptismal regeneration debate fits into this picture and where resurgent Catholicism stands in relation to evangelicalism on the one hand and the liberalism of the higher critical movement on the other. E. B. Pusey, the Anglo-Catholic leader in the establishment, who died in 1882, made the significant forecast that the two final combatants in what he thought to be the coming religious struggle would, on the one hand, be Rome, with a faith claiming to be authoritative and supernatural, and on the other, theological liberalism as held by the rationalistic schools of thought dominant in Continental Protestantism. two systems are now, and probably for the last time, in conflict, the Catholic and Genevan. Quoted from a letter by Pusey to the Archbishop of Canterbury by J. H. Merle de Bain, Discourses and Essays, 1846, 174. Geneva was then a center of the rationalism which Pusey ably opposed. In other words, Evangelical Protestantism was already so weakened in Pusey's view that it was on the point of abandoning the arena and would play no decisive part in determining the Christianity of the future. The extent to which Evangelicalism was eclipsed in the major English denominations before the end of the 19th century was confirmation of this assessment. Yet Pusey was wrong in presenting Catholicism and liberalism as necessarily in permanent opposition. The publication of Lux Mundi, a book written by younger disciples of the Tractarian movement in 1889, indicated that rationalistic thought and a sacramental religion were not as incompatible as Pusey supposed. The two sides did not destroy each other. Indeed, liberals, such as H. E. Ryle, gave support to the move to legalize Romish investments in the establishment. Herbert Edward Ryle, Maurice H. Fitzgerald, 1928, page 164. Herbert Ryle, the son of the great evangelical, is a tragic example of the outworking of the higher critical influence. an early exponent of the new views he is described by his biographer as being one of the company who live to see the heresy of their youth accepted as the orthodoxy of their old age. But the same writer also reveals that in his last illness, when he was dean of Westminster, H. E. Ryle never spoke either to Mrs. Ryle or to his son about the future or about religion. While peri-pasu, Anglo-Catholic bishops sheltered liberals from the charge of heresy. And in the 20th century, despite the theological liberalism of many of the clergy, Anglo-Catholic sympathies have come to permeate the Church of England. Professor Norman Sykes has noted the difference between the Lambeth conferences of 1920 and 1948 in connection with the prevalence of distinctly Anglo-Catholic views on Episcopacy and Sacraments, Old Priest and New Presbyter, 1956, page 243. The 1958 report of the Lambeth Conference gave an explicit affirmation of Tractarian doctrine. It must be recognized as a fact that Anglicans conscientiously hold that the celebrant of the Eucharist should have been ordained by a bishop standing in the historical succession and generally believe it to be their duty to bear witness to this principle by receiving Holy Communion only from those who have thus been ordained. Evangelical weakness in the establishment was revealed in 1964 when vestments associated with the Mass were legalized by a vote of 214 against 30 in the House of Clergy and a unanimous vote of 31 bishops. Was the late Lord Alexander of Hillsborough not right in declaring that no true Protestant bishops were to be found in the Church of England? A direct confrontation never materialized and, in the wider scene, the cooperation of liberals and pro-Catholics in the ecumenical movement gives clear evidence that the final struggle will not be as Pusey anticipated it, nor is there the slightest likelihood that non-conformity in its present condition will provide a final antidote to the resurgent power of Rome. The most striking contrast is observable between the mood which, 70 years ago, brought free churchmen together in the National Free Church Council and the present position of leaders in the non-conformist denominations. Speaking of the above council, Sylvester Horne wrote in 1903, the free churches came together under the shadow of a great common peril Everywhere it was felt and recognized that the maintenance of the sturdy Protestant character of English life and worship rested mainly on them. The words are pathetic in the light of subsequent history. The great characteristic of 20th century nonconformity has been its decline into a state of pernicious anemia. Professor D. W. Brogan wrote in 1943, in the generation that has passed since the great liberal landslide of 1906, one of the greatest changes in the English religious and social landscape has been the decline of non-conformity. And today its leaders are so enfeebled that the claims of episcopacy are not only listened to with docility, but the warrant for any continued existence of non-conforming denominations is openly doubted. Yet the cause of the changed attitude in the free churches to Rome and to Anglo-Catholicism is to be sought before and not after the year 1903 when Horn wrote the above words. Though Horne himself was blind to it, the change was the inevitable outworking of the liberal view of Scripture, which, as the downgrade showed, was rampant in the churches before the end of the 19th century. By 1900, the generality of free churchmen were nonconformist. By the inherited traditions of birth and education, rather than by loyalty to Scripture, And while these traditions may take a long time to die, they have abundantly proved their impotence in the contest with deep-seated convictions, even though those convictions be false and unscriptural. This was precisely what Spurgeon foresaw. He deplored the readiness to cling to the outer shell of nonconformity when the inner kernel, namely loyalty to its basic principles, had been abandoned. Conformity or nonconformity, per se, is nothing. But a new creature is everything, and the truth upon which alone that new creature can live is worth dying a thousand deaths. to conserve. It is not the shell that is so precious, but the kernel which it contains. When the kernel is gone, what is there left that is worth a thought? Our nonconformity is beyond measure, precious as a vital spiritual force, but only while it remains such will it justify its own existence. Today, neither in the major nonconformist denominations nor in the establishment. Is there any bulwark against the pressure from the reunion of all churches in a comprehensive, speciously friendly, but actually resolutely inimical to true Christianity? Interdenominational evangelicalism, likewise, has no backbone against this kind of pressure. Compromise and a diluted theology have reduced evangelical witness to a point where Crusades, which have liberals and Anglo-Catholics sharing in the sponsorship, are not regarded as being any denial of our message. Arminianism, experience-centered rather than truth-centered, has shown itself far more compatible with non-evangelical and non-Protestant traditions than the old reformed evangelicalism, which, because of its definite formulation of the biblical doctrines of sin, grace, and justification, could not be so amalgamated. A striking characteristic of modern thought is that the triumvirate of evils which Spurgeon fought, free will, sacramentalism, and liberalism, are frequently no longer regarded as evils at all. One-time opponents have become camp followers. It is therefore not surprising that many evangelicals today would reject Spurgeon's standpoint as an appalling anachronism. Our own belief is that Spurgeon was led in the three great controversies we have sketched to stand against errors which were to dominate the coming generations. He engaged in his controversies of deliberate purpose with the deep conviction that he was not mistaken in his recognition of the importance of what was in dispute. Many old debates, which once electrified the churches, would not now raise a spark of interest. But this is not true of these three controversies. They are still explosive and that because the errors involved have become so prevalent. Spurgeon's approach to controversy can teach us much. First, there is evident in all the major controversies in which he was involved a pastoral concern for the spiritual welfare of men and women. Thus, in the first great controversy, while accepting the Christian standing of some who could not receive the doctrines of free grace, Spurgeon saw how a general toleration of errors respecting those doctrines injured the prosperity of the Church and the progress of the Gospel. He spoke accordingly. Similarly, in 1864, his fundamental objection to the establishment was its support of a comprehensiveness which confused the difference between the regenerate and the unregenerate. But his pastoral motive came out supremely in the downgrade. He regarded the attitude of current religious thoughts which treated central biblical doctrines as mere opinions or theories and argued that disbelief in dogmas does not affect a person's relationship to Christ as fraught with spiritual peril. For his part, an acceptance of the new views was tantamount to the abandonment of a saving interest in Jesus Christ, and he believed that if liberalism took position of the pulpits in the name of Christianity, then ministers and congregations would go to the judgment seat of Christ, lost and undone. So to him, it was no exaggeration to point to the tremendous destruction of Pompeii under volcanic lava, and to parallel with it the danger of the Church being buried beneath the boiling mud showers of modern heresy. It was because Spurgeon linked salvation with faith in a definite body of biblical truth, and questioned the Christian standing of those who denied that truth, that the downgrade controversy was marked by strong feeling on both sides. For this, Spurgeon has often been blamed, as he failed to recognize, it is said, that an underlying spiritual oneness in Christ may exist along with wide differences of opinion on dogma. According to this viewpoint, both sides were really Christian and it was a tragedy Spurgeon could not see it. Richard Ellsworth Day, an exponent of this attitude, after a brief sketch of the downgrade, concludes, it is tragic to find that one has been fighting an ally, Mr. Divergent Opinions mistaking him for the enemy, Mr. Different Heart. The Shadow of the Broad Brim, the life story of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, heir of the Puritan 1934, page 150. Spurgeon, Day implies, was guilty of careless thinking in failing to realize that true faith need not be identified with any particular set of theological opinions. We mention this because if the criticism were true, Spurgeon's words in the downgrade would reveal the very opposite of a pastoral spirit They could, with justice, be held to be unnecessarily harsh, precisely because the kind of distinction which Day makes has been accepted as a premise Spurgeon has been charged with, falling into bitterness and bigotry in the downgrade controversy. It was intolerable that he should suggest that eminent religious leaders might be adversaries of the Lord. The only way to judge a Spurgeon's spirit is by reference to scripture. Does scripture permit a dichotomy between true spiritual experience and belief in the doctrinal truths of the gospel? Does it give any support to the liberal idea that man may receive grace and truth from God in ways uncharted by Christian theology? that scripture decisively answers these questions, and that the broad definition of a Christian implied in the ideas of the new school was scripturally false. Nevertheless, he was far from supposing that all who did not stand where he did in the downgrade were non-Christians. He would have agreed with the words of one of his favorite Puritan authors, George Hutchison, in his comment on John 12, 42. Nevertheless, among the chief rulers also many believed on him, but because of the Pharisees, they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue. Says Hutcheson, there may be true faith and grace, where yet there is much infirmity to smother and bear it down. And so he continues, we should be charitable and not think men are graceless because they are weak. There was plenty of evidence in the downgrade of Christian ministers who, through weakness, kept silence. Ostracism seems to be dreaded so much that good men and true hold their tongues. This Reformation audio track is a production of Stillwater's Revival Books. SWRB makes thousands of classic Reformation resources available, free and for sale, in audio, video, and printed formats. Our many free resources, as well as our complete mail-order catalog, containing thousands of classic and contemporary Puritan and Reform books, tapes, and videos at great discounts, is on the web at www.swrb.com. We can also be reached by email at swrb at swrb dot com. by phone at 780-450-3730, by fax at 780-468-1096, or by mail at 4710-37A Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6L 3T5. You may also request a free printed catalog And remember that John Calvin, in defending the Reformation's regulative principle of worship, or what is sometimes called the scriptural law of worship, commenting on the words of God, which I commanded them not, neither came into my heart, from his commentary on Jeremiah 731, writes, God here cuts off from men every occasion for making evasions, since he condemns by this one phrase, I have not commanded them, whatever the Jews devised. There is then no other argument needed to condemn superstitions than that they are not commanded by God. For when men allow themselves to worship God according to their own fancies, and attend not to His commands, they pervert true religion. And if this principle was adopted by the papists, all those fictitious modes of worship in which they absurdly exercise themselves would fall to the ground. It is indeed a horrible thing for the Papists to seek to discharge their duties towards God by performing their own superstitions. There is an immense number of them, as it is well known, and as it manifestly appears. Were they to admit this principle, that we cannot rightly worship God except by obeying His word, they would be delivered from their deep abyss of error. The Prophet's words, then, are very important. When he says that God had commanded no such thing, and that it never came to his mind, as though he had said that men assume too much wisdom when they devise what he never required, nay, what he never knew.