It was initially published quarterly in twelve volumes, then republished in 1917 by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles as a four-volume set.
[1] However, its contents reflect a concern with certain theological innovations related to liberal Christianity, especially biblical higher criticism.
[2] The project was conceived in 1909 by California businessman Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil and a devout Presbyterian and dispensationalist.
It was mailed free of charge to ministers, missionaries, professors of theology, YMCA and YWCA secretaries, Sunday school superintendents, and other Protestant religious workers in the United States and other English-speaking countries.
[3] The volumes defended classical Protestant doctrines and attacked the Roman Catholic Church ("Romanism"), higher criticism, liberal theology, socialism, modernism, atheism, Christian Science, Mormonism, Millennial Dawn (whose members were sometimes known as Russellites, but which later split into another group, adopting the name Jehovah's Witnesses), spiritualism, and what it called evolutionism.