By Charles Spurgeon
“We believe that the Baptists are the original Christians. We did not commence our existence at the reformation, we were reformers before Luther or Calvin were born; we never came from the church of Rome, for we were never in it, but we have an unbroken line up to the apostles themselves. We have always existed from the very days of Christ, and our principles, sometimes veiled and forgotten, like a river which may travel underground for a little season, have always had honest and holy adherents. Persecuted alike by Romanists and Protestants of almost every sect, yet there has never existed a government holding Baptist principles which persecuted others; nor, I believe, anybody of Baptists ever held it to be right to put the consciences of others under the control of man.”
—Charles H. Spurgeon, in one of the opening services of his new Metropolitan Tabernacle, April 2, 1861.MPT, Vol. VII, p.225. (Emphasis the Editor’s.)