Baptists have had age-old hostility to authoritative creeds. Baptists stand for liberty, the right of each individual to receive the truth from the Lord. They know creeds often have been barriers to the free development of personality and have been used as instruments of persecution. Creeds have not secured uniformity of belief but have tended toward division and hypocrisy. While at the beginning Spurgeon asked for a simple declaration of what the Baptist Union taught, some of his later utterances