James Robinson Graves: History in the Service of Ecclesiology: Many Baptists in America Revere a Small, Prosaic Booklet That Bears a Captivating Title--"the Trail of Blood".... Following the Christians Down Through the Centuries ... Or the History of Baptist Churches from the Time of Christ, Their Founder, To the Present Day (Biography‪)‬

This 56-page sprint through almost two thousand years of church history comes equipped with a foldout timeline that is generously peppered with red dots, dots that indicate the sufferings and martyrdoms of true Christians (i.e., Baptists) through the ages, usually at the hands of "papal" Rome. On this chart, the author boldly proclaimed his purpose: "To show according to History that Baptists have an unbroken line of churches since Christ" in fulfillment of Matthew 16:18. (1) This diminutive book originated as a set of lectures delivered at the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, by James Milton Carroll (1852-1931), a Texas Baptist educator and brother of Southwestern Baptist Seminary founder, Benajah Harvey Carroll. J. M. Carroll actually died before his lectures came off the press, but his legacy lives on; more than 2.36 million copies of The Trail of" Blood have been printed by the Ashland Avenue church since 1931. An additional fifty thousand reprints since 1998--plus five thousand Spanish copies and two thousand in Ukrainian--by the independent Bryan Station Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, swell the numbers even more. (2)