Were Charles Haddon Spurgeon's sermons on the "downgrade" the first attempt to dumb down Christianity?

You know I had never really linked the two, but you do make a good point. I still think you really would need to go even further back into puritanism probably and realize that puritans have always lacked intellect and are even afraid of it.

They usually sought to advance their ideas through dictatorial and theocratic means and they attempted to suppress any thought that was not their own. Think, for instance of the Puritan revolt. It was until Charles II recaptured the throne and issued the English Royal Patent that puritans were set down.

Modern puritans known as fundamentalists are dangerous in our time because some of them in fact many have access to money and also to some people in power. They will be set down again and they certainly have lost power of late because they and their entities of hate are losing favor in the main.

I'll meet you halfway, thus and say that Spurgeon would be the founder of modern anti-intellectualism, how's that?

Spurgeon all in all was hateful and lacked any real intellectual abilities, but like modern fundamentalists, had enough education to sound good to those who are incapable of any real deep thought. Think of these people as Shaw's 700.

He was and still is a pig.