The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth

1910–1915

Twelve volumes of essays by conservative Protestant writers from Britain and North America, paid for by two laymen and sent free to ministers and church workers throughout the English-speaking world.

The volumes carry the line “Compliments of Two Christian Laymen” and do not name them on the title page or in the foreword. Each contains essays by different authors on doctrines the editors held to be basic: the first has pieces on the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the Holy Spirit and the higher criticism of the Bible.

A statement by the two laymen in the twelfth volume tells how the series was made. A. C. Dixon, then pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago, organised the Testimony Publishing Company in the autumn of 1909 and edited the first five volumes; Louis Meyer edited the next five and died in 1913; R. A. Torrey edited the eleventh and twelfth. The same statement gives the number of copies printed as nearly three million. The title pages are undated. The Internet Archive catalogues the first volume under 1910, and the last announces a change of the publisher’s address “after May 1, 1915”. See the Fundamentals and the Modernist Controversy.

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