A convinced Calvinist, staunchly adhering till the day of his death to  every point in the system of theology in which he had been educated, Spurgeon was resolved to sacrifice nothing in the way of doctrine, even in the interests of peace among Christian churches. In 1864 he invited a    controversy with the evangelical party in the church of England. In a powerful sermon on baptismal regeneration which he preached in that year he showed that that doctrine, to which he was strenuously hostile, was accepted in the church of England prayer-book, and he reproached    evangelical churchmen, who in principle were equally antagonistic to the doctrine, with adhering to an organisation which taught it. The attack occasioned much ferment. Three hundred thousand copies of Spurgeon's  sermon were sold; and while high churchmen were elated by Spurgeon's admission that a doctrine, which they openly avowed, found a place in the prayer-book, low-churchmen were proportionately irritated. Numberless pamphlets set forth the views of the various parties. The most effective reply to Spurgeon was made by Baptist Wriothesley Noel, then a baptist minister. In his 'Evangelical Clergy Defended,' Noel censured Spurgeon for introducing needless divisions among men of like faith. But Spurgeon remained obdurate, and emphasized his attitude by withdrawing from the  Evangelical Alliance, which was largely supported by the low-church party of the church of England.

      Spurgeon's strenuous and unbending faith in Calvinism loosened in course of time the bonds of sympathy between him and a large section of his own denomination. He long watched with misgivings the growth among baptists of what he regarded as indifference to orthodoxy. He thought they laid too    little stress on Christ's divine nature, and that the Arminian views which  were spreading among them tended to Arianism. He keenly resented what he       called the 'down grade' developments of modern biblical criticism, and the  conviction grew on him that faith was decaying in all Christian churches.

      Consequently on 26 Oct. 1887 he announced his withdrawal from the Baptist Union, the central association of baptist ministers, which declined to       adopt the serious view that he took of the situation. Opposition to the  rationlising tendency of modern biblical criticism brought him in his later days into sympathy with many churchmen. It was perhaps on that  account that he withdrew from the Liberation Society, of which he had been previously a vigorous supporter.