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• Christians in the mid 19th century experienced a twofold attack—first, the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, and second, the rise of higher criticism and rationalism.
• Illustration: A quote from Charles Spurgeon on the danger of higher criticism, and its incompatibility with Scripture as the Word of God.
• Spurgeon was officially censured because of his resistance to tolerance and rationalism, became physically drained by the fight, and died at the age of 57.
• The influence and effectiveness of the Baptist Church in Britain has spiraled downward ever since it embraced a higher critical view of Scripture.
• Big Idea: Whether we live or die lies in our dedication to the infallible Word of God.

• Illustration: Criswell compares the decline of an institution with the fall of a great tree after rotting from the inside out
• The University of Chicago was originally founded by the Baptist Church, and was intended to reach the Midwest for Christ.
• Then the corruption of a higher critical approach to the gospel began to work, and the University has steadily moved away from it's roots in favor of secularism.
• Illustration: John Wesley wrote: "I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power.
• Those who take a higher critical approach to Scripture live off the labor and sacrifice of those who paid the price of devoted service before them.

• Crawford H. Toy came to the Southern Seminary in 1869 as the pride and joy of the faculty.
• After studying German higher criticism and rationalism, he drifted away from the truth and was released by the seminary president, James P. Boyce.
• Dr. Toy became a professor of Hebrew at Harvard University, briefly attended a Unitarian church, and then no longer attended church at all.
• Illustration: In 1985, an issue of Review and Expositor, the theological journal of Southern Seminary, praised Dr. Toy for being ahead of his time.

• We can experience a great revival, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon our churches, upon our preachers, and upon our mission fields.
• God does not do a great thing and then an increasingly smaller thing; our greatest days are yet to come.
• From Jerusalem to Antioch to Carthage to Gaul to Rome to Iona to Germany to France to England to America, the Spirit has guided the Church.
• Illustration: Families join hands and recover the dead body of a small child that was lost in a Kansas wheat field. The father laments: "Oh, if only we had joined hands before!"