“Every generation must fight their own [version of the] Downgrade [controversy]” – Dr. James White
Very relevant to where the evangelical church is these days, in every age really. Excerpt from Spurgeon and the Down-Grade Controversy by John MacArthur, excerpted from The Sword and the Trowel.
[At the end of the Puritan age] by some means or other, first the ministers, then the Churches, got on “the down grade,” and in some cases, the descent was rapid, and in all, very disastrous. In proportion as the ministers seceded from the old Puritan godliness of life, and the old Calvinistic form of doctrine, they commonly became less earnest and less simple in their preaching, more speculative and less spiritual in the matter of their discourses, and dwelt more on the moral teachings of the New Testament, than on the great central truths of revelation. Natural theology frequently took the place which the great truths of the gospel ought to have held, and the sermons became more and more Christless. Corresponding results in the character and life, first of the preachers and then of the people, were only too plainly apparent.
The Sword and the Trowel – C.H. Spurgeon