Charles Haddon Spurgeon: Preacher
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CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON: PREACHER
D. M. Whyte
The Times reviewer, in a sympathetic assessment of C. H. Spurgeon’s republished autobiography The Early Years, began his review with this paragraph:
“It is odd that when lists of eminent Victorians are drawn up the name of Spurgeon rarely figures in the first six. Yet he was Victorian if ever there was one, not merely in his life span (1834–92) but also in his outlook and gifts. He was one of the most dramatic and voluble figures of that dramatic and voluble age. He could more consistently command a great audience than Mr. Gladstone. He became a butt for the smart humorists; his fame lingered long after his death. Yet to describe his impact at this remove of time and to discern its effect would defeat any but a most meticulous social historian.”
Spurgeon’s Career
Charles H. Spurgeon was born at Kelvedon, Essex, on June 19, 1834, and died at Mentone in southern France on January 31, 1892. Though but fifty-eight when he died, he had preached for forty years to immense audiences. His sermons were printed from the beginning and read all over the world.
Spurgeon was brought up in Calvinistic circles and from his early years was accustomed to read the Puritans. At Newmarket in a school where he was an usher, Spurgeon declares: “I had the first lessons in theology from an old cook. . . . There are some Chris-tian people who taste, and see, and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.” He preached his first sermon in a cottage at Teversham, near Cambridge, when a boy of sixteen, and a tutor in the school of his former master, Mr. Leeding. Speaking about this period Spurgeon writes, “I was for three years a Cambridge man, though I never entered the University. I could not have obtained a degree, because I was a Nonconformist.” (The Act of Uniformity of 1662 had excluded Nonconformists from the Universities, and this prohibition was not repealed until 1871). He went on—“Moreover, it was a better thing for me to pursue my studies under an admirable scholar and tender friend, and to preach at the same time. I was, by my tutors’ own expressed verdict, considered to be sufficiently proficient in my studies to have taken a good place on the list had the way been open. ‘You could win in a canter’ said he to me.”
He was from 1852 to 1854 pastor of the Baptist congregation at Waterbeach, near Cambridge. From there, to the sorrow of his greatly increased country flock, he was called to the pastorate of the Baptist congregation at New Park Street, Southwark, London. His two years in Waterbeach were amongst the happiest and most fruitful of his ministry. Looking back from the eminence of his latter years he could write: “There are times without number in which I have wished that I could become the pastor of some little country church, with two or three hundred hearers, over whose souls I could watch with incessant care.”
His success at New Park Street was immediate and phenomenal. The place was crowded and an extension to the old building became necessary. While it was being enlarged, he preached in Exeter Hall in the Strand, to vast and overflowing congregations. When this enlargement failed to provide the accommodation necessary—it was in Spurgeon’s own words “attempting to put the sea into a teapot”—the decision was taken to build a new and larger church. The congregation returned to Exeter Hall on Sunday evenings. But when the proprietors of Exeter Hall intimated that they were unable to let that building to one congregation continuously, Spurgeon chose to take the Surrey Music Hall—“a place the Lord prepared for us.” Here he ministered for three years, his congregation numbering at times ten thousand.
Disaster marked the beginning of his ministry in the Surrey Music Hall: a disaster sufficient to have destroyed a lesser man, certainly one who relied upon “the arm of flesh alone.” An unscrupulous group (eyewitnesses indicate that it was a concerted effort) raised the cry of fire during the prayer. In the panic that ensued, which however was kept to the minimum by the masterfulness of Spurgeon, seven people lost their lives, and Spurgeon was led from the pulpit “as one dead.”
For a fortnight he was beside himself with grief and despair, until suddenly while walking in the garden of the house of one of his deacons with his wife Susannah, she tells us, “he turned to me, and with the old sweet light in his eyes said, ‘Dearest, how foolish I have been! Why! what does it matter what becomes of me, if the Lord shall be glorified?’ and he repeated with eagerness and intense earnestness Philippians 2:9–11, ‘Wherefore God has highly exalted Him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ ‘If Christ be exalted,’ he said, and his face glowed with Holy fervour, ‘let Him do as He pleases with me.’ ”
While Spurgeon and his officers were exonerated from blame by the Coroner’s Court, the attacks of the popular press increased, and his wife averred that “he carried the scars of that conflict to his dying day,” and one of his biographers writes: “A depression complex deepened upon him, from which he never recovered.”
In 1861 the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Newington Butts, a site chosen by Spurgeon because of its association with the martyrs of the Reformation, was opened. Here Spurgeon ministered until his death. From the first it was attended by crowds. No fewer than seven thousand persons constituted the normal congregation. A church of more than five thousand members, an orphanage, almshouses, a theological college, and a colportage association were built up, and all the institutions were maintained with full and growing efficiency till the great preacher’s death. Indeed, they exist to this day, and if not to the same extent, still notably contribute to the life and witness of the Church. William Robertson Nicoll, an erudite admirer of Spurgeon, has said of his labors: “There is no doubt that his life was shortened by the tremendous weight of his labors and responsibilities. There have been few men whose death moved so profoundly all sections of the British people.”
In the light of this brief resumé of Spurgeon’s life we may well share the reviewer’s puzzlement at the neglect of Spurgeon, and the apparent eclipse of his influence for the twentieth century.
The Preacher’s Influence
The reviewer himself offers one explanation for this: “Spurgeon was so much the apotheosis of his age that he has failed to retain any significance.” In other words, the Zeitgeist has so changed that Spurgeon can mean nothing to this generation. The reviewer concludes: “The whole of this volume, with its unabating concern for the Bible, for salvation, for Divine judgment in matters great and small, will strike oddly on most minds today.”
Another suggestion offers itself for consideration, all the more forcefully because both in reading Spurgeon’s story and assenting to his theological understanding one must conclude with Scripture that “the natural man,” whether of the nineteenth, first, or twentieth centuries, “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.”
What was Spurgeon? He was first and foremost a preacher of the Gospel. In a letter written in September 1853 to his uncle, who had invited him to preach at Stambourne, he writes “I am yours to serve to the utmost; not on the Sabbath, but all the week. I have a good sphere of labour here, but I want to do more, if possible. There is a great field, and the labourers must work with all their might. I often wish I were in China, India or Africa, so that I might preach, preach, preach all day long. It would be sweet to die preaching.” In a sermon delivered in New Park Street Chapel in August 1855, on the text “For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of, for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16), he was clearly voicing a conviction about his own ministry when he declared: “If a man be truly called of God to the ministry, I will defy him to withhold himself from it. A man who has really within him the inspiration of the Holy Ghost calling him to preach cannot help it. He must preach. . . . He will feel that he must preach among the nations the unsearchable riches of Christ.”
More than one preacher has been denominated “the Prince of Preachers,” but none with more justice than Spurgeon. J. C. Carlile, the biographer of Spurgeon, having listed a number of outstanding preachers of Spurgeon’s day, including Joseph Parker of the City Temple and Liddon of St. Paul’s, concludes: “But there, like a lonely Alpine peak, was Spurgeon, with a glory all his own.”
Herein lies the explanation of the Spurgeon enigma. The preacher’s effect is immediate. To exert an influence upon succeeding generations the preacher must be a theologian as well as a preacher, as was John Calvin; or an ecclesiastical statesman as well as a preacher, as was John Knox. Significantly, we may note that while George Whitefield was immeasurably the greatest preacher of the Evangelical Revival in the eighteenth century, John Wesley, the teacher and organizer, has left more of a mark upon succeeding generations. Equally significantly for our study is the fact that Spurgeon himself declared: “My own model, if I may have such a thing in due subordination to my Lord, is George Whitefield.”
The preaching office is not belittled by this understanding. The Church of God is given, in the Divine Providence, but few formative theologians and ecclesiastical statesmen. She is, however, given an apostolic succession of preachers of the Gospel. The greatest of them, “in due subordination to the Lord,” may be succeeding preachers’ models.
Spurgeon ideally serves the present generation of preachers as a model. The principles of preaching remain unchanged; only the application differs. Spurgeon exemplifies the principles. The Evangelical preacher finds in him one who in the rising flood of liberal theology, in the words of J. C. Carlile, “stood unflinching as a rock against the incoming tide,” and “served the new generation by keeping his feet upon solid foundations.”
Spurgeon’s Conversion
Our profitable task, is, therefore, to consider Charles Haddon Spurgeon the Preacher. The old adage, “preachers are not made but born,” finds support in Spurgeon’s case. His case argues well the fruitfulness of the godly home, and the reality of the covenant assurance that “the promise is to you and to your children.” His father, John, and grandfather, James, with whom he spent his earliest years, were Independent ministers. But he could trace his ancestry back to the beginnings of Dissent, and he writes of one in 1677, “a namesake, and perhaps an ancestor, Job Spurgeon, of Dedborn,” who “had to suffer both in purse and person for the testimony of a good conscience,” and concludes: “There is a sweet fitness in the passing of a holy loyalty from grandsire to father, and from father to son. I like to feel I serve God ‘from my fathers.’ ”
Birth in a godly home was no substitute for the new birth into the Heavenly Father’s kingdom. It is one of the unexplained mysteries of Spurgeon that while he was from birth surrounded by the spiritual care and devotion of godly parents and grandparents, to which he bears glowing testimony in his autobiography, where he writes, “I was privileged with godly parents, watched with jealous eyes, scarcely ever permitted to mingle with questionable associates, warned not to listen to anything profane or licentious, and taught the way of God from my youth up,” it was in a Primitive Methodist Chapel, under the ministry of “a very thin looking man, a shoemaker, or tailor, or something of that sort, who went up into the pulpit to preach because the minister did not come that morning,” that he was converted. The text of life was Isaiah 45:22, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” The decisive challenge was conveyed in the shouted words, “Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! look! look! You have nothing to do but to look and live.” Upon which Spurgeon says, “I saw at once the way of salvation.” The date of this life-changing experience was January 6, 1850.
That he was more than the child of a godly home, and one singularly marked out by temperament and Divine providence for the Lord’s service, is evidenced by the surprising independence and conviction of the young convert. It should be remembered that at this time he was not above sixteen years old, yet he manifests a maturity of spiritual judgment equal to that of men twice his years. His parents and grandparents were Independents. He became a Baptist. He wrote to his father only a matter of weeks after his conversion, “I firmly believe and consider that baptism is a command of Christ, and shall not feel quite comfortable if I do not receive it”; and to his mother a few weeks later: “Conscience has convinced me that it is a duty to be buried with Christ in baptism, although I am sure it constitutes no part of salvation.” To his father again he writes, “I have humbly to beg your consent, as I will not act against your will. . . . I have no doubt of your permission. We are all one in Christ Jesus; forms and ceremonies I trust, will not make us divided.” In the same convinced but tolerant manner he tells his mother, “Grandfather has written to me; he does not blame me for being a baptist, but hopes I shall not be one of the tight-laced, strict communion sort. In that, we are agreed . . . I can, and hope I shall, be charitable to unbaptized Christians, though I think they are mistaken.” In a more humorous vein in reply to his mother’s quip, “Charles, I have often prayed the Lord that you might be converted, but never asked him that you might be a Baptist,” he replied that the Lord had answered her with His usual bounty and had given her more than she asked.
So early Spurgeon displayed that independence of judgment and integrity of spirit which was to be remarked through his long years as a preacher of the Gospel.
There is something more than sentiment in the adage “preachers are born and not made.” Of them it can be said, as Scripture says of Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jer. 1:5), and as Paul the Apostle testifies, the preacher may say, “God separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:15).
Spurgeon’s Gifts
This providential preparing of the preacher’s life is nowhere better seen than in the physical and mental equipment that God provided for his servant Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He was pre-eminently equipped to be a minister of the Gospel of divine grace. In physical appearance, Principal Tulloch tells us, “he is certainly not interesting in face or figure—very fat and podgy; but there is no doubt about the fellow, look as he may.” Another writer says of him, “his figure is awkward, his manners plain, and his face except when illumined by a smile, admittedly heavy.” His biographer J. C. Carlile, describing the appearance of Spurgeon in the pulpit, tells us that “the countenance heavy and uninteresting, became changed, and the dull sleepy eyes lit up until they glowed and burned.” Adding to these accounts the almost constant physical pain he suffered from headaches and rheumatic gout, we see in him a preacher who proved, with the Apostle he so admired, that God’s “grace is sufficient,” and His strength is made perfect in weakness, and that “God has chosen the base things of the world, and things that are despised, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence.”
If there was nothing in the appearance of Spurgeon to draw an audience, there was everything in his voice. It is a unanimous testimony that his voice was both compelling and winsome. One has called it “probably the most wonderful voice God ever made.” In Robertson Nicoll’s judgment, it was “as clear as a silverbell, and as winning as a woman’s. It filled without the slightest effort the largest building in which he preached.” A remarkable story is told of its compelling power by Augustine Birrell, politician, educationalist, and author who, attending the Tabernacle, could find a seat only in the top gallery, between a woman eating an orange and a man sucking a peppermint. Finding the combined odors unbearable, he was about to leave when, he tells us, “I heard a voice, and I forgot all else.” It was Spurgeon giving out the first hymn!
Spurgeon looked upon himself as a steward of God’s gifts, and while endowed with so splendid an instrument for speaking forth the Savior’s glory, he did not neglect the proper cultivation of the gift. All through his life he was learning to preach and thought it essential to practice such little things as emphasis, sibilants, aspirants, and final “g’s.” Lesser men might regard this work as unnecessary or beneath their attention, but not Spurgeon. He testified to the service rendered during the early days of his preaching at the Music Hall by an anonymous correspondent, “who used to send me,” he writes, “a weekly list of my mis-pronunciations and other slips of speech.” Showing a more than human good grace and wisdom he declares: “Possibly some young men might have been discouraged, if not irritated by such severe criticisms; but they would have been very foolish, for, in resenting such correction, they would have been throwing away a valuable aid to progress.”
Mentally, Spurgeon was well endowed. He had a copious and accurate memory, “which furnished him on the instant, with the comparisons, facts and images, best calculated to throw light upon his ideas”; so wrote Dr. Grandpierre of Paris. But this gift too had been trained, and continued to be trained throughout the preacher’s life. He records the early but costly efforts of his grandmother to train his memory. “My grandfather,” he tells us, “was very fond of Dr. Watts’ hymns, and my grandmother, wishing to get me to learn them, promised me a penny for each one that I could say to her perfectly. I found it an easy and pleasant method of earning money, and learned them so fast that grandmother said she must reduce the price to a halfpenny each and afterwards to a farthing, if she did not mean to be quite ruined by her extravagance.” The profit of such an early encouragement he admits when he adds: “No matter on what topic I am preaching, I can even now, in the middle of any sermon, quote some verse of a hymn in harmony with the subject.”
The notebooks to which his wife refers as the constant companions of his expeditions in later years, served to stimulate and stock his memory.
James Douglas, writing about Spurgeon’s intellect, could say: “He did with ease and spontaneously, mental feats which men of name strive in vain to accomplish. He could grasp all the bearings of his subject, hold his theme in hand, and display his thoughts like troops, at the tactical moment.” T. R. Glover, a critical commentator, in a series of articles in The Times in 1932, wrote that Spurgeon’s was an “untrained mind, without discipline of ordered study.” But, as we have seen, it was far from untrained, although denied the formal education of the Universities. We shall have further opportunity in a moment of assessing the range and penetration of his mental powers.
As a young man he had resolved: “I am bound to give myself to reading, and study and prayer, and not to grieve the Spirit by unthought-of effusions.” “He would sit down to five or six large books, and master them at one sitting, and his memory did not fail him on what he read.” In a lecture given to his students he professed his conviction about study. “Unstudied thoughts coming from the mind without previous research, without the subjects in hand having been investigated at all, must be of a very inferior quality, even from the most superior men.”
Dinsdale T. Young’s opinion of Spurgeon’s mental power and profundity is to be preferred to Dr. Glover’s. In a centenary tribute of Spurgeon he said, “I venture to cite his Down-Grade controversy in evidence of his intellectual greatness . . . Charles Haddon Spurgeon showed an intellectual power, a grasp of theology, a reasoning faculty and a luminous insight, in that controversy, which ought not to be overlooked.”
The gifts God gave him were singular, but his success owes as much to his determination to be “a workman that needeth not to be ashamed” as to his gifts. He is a standing evidence of the truth of the proverb, “practice makes perfect.” Men of lesser gifts will have less success than a Spurgeon, or any other equally gifted servant of God, but they need make no less use of the gifts God has given them. This is the practical conclusion to draw from his prodigious ministry.
Spurgeon’s Preparation
Let us turn now to consider the use of these gifts in his preaching ministry. He was a master craftsman. A cursory study of his preparation for the pulpit might suggest that he was of the Psalmist’s conviction, “My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.” Nothing could be further from the truth. He saw no greater danger attending the young preacher than an indolent reliance upon verbal fluency. ‘If you seek these gifts as pillows for an idle head, you will be much mistaken, for the possession of this noble power will involve you in a vast amount of labour in order to increase and retain it.”
His diligence and speed in reading have already been alluded to, but a word must be said here about the range of his reading. His brother remarked, “I kept rabbits, chickens and pigs, and a horse; he kept to books.” At quite an early age he became acquainted with the Puritan divines which constituted a major part of the parental library, and which were so profoundly to influence his life.
His reading, however, was catholic. His sermons and writings abound with evidence of its eclectic range. Devotional classics well known to all, such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, The Holy War, and Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, shared place with lesser known works such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, and the better known but unexpected devotional food of George Herbert’s The Temple.
Ancient philosophy from the works of Plato and other Greek philosophers had not only been read but sufficiently mastered to become part of the mental outlook of Spurgeon, and to appear allusively in the earliest of his preaching: never, perhaps, more clearly than in a youthful and immature, yet great, sermon entitled “The Immutability of God,” preached from Malachi 3:6, “I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.”
Acquaintance with the English School of skeptical philosophers is also evidenced by his references to Bacon and Hume.
The greatest of the poets also served to inform this insatiable reader. Shakespeare’s plays had been thoroughly and many times read: a rather strange fact considering his marked disapproval of the theater! Milton, Tennyson, and a host of other poets were read, mastered, enjoyed, and put to divine service.
Perhaps the best evidence of the range of his theological reading is to be found in his book published for the students of the Pastor’s College, entitled Commenting and Commentaries. He writes in the Preface: “I have toiled, and read much, and passed under review some three or four thousand volumes. From these I have compiled my catalogue, rejecting many yet making a very varied selection.” It is a measure of the care and discriminating judgment of Spurgeon that the catalogue will still serve the student.
His reading was generally innocent of any special objective, homiletical or otherwise. His aim was simply to “fill the cask and keep it full” (so comments Richard Ellsworth Day). It was this, no doubt, which enabled him to preach extemporaneously, as he declares he did regularly at his Monday evening prayer meetings; and with such apparent ease at all times. “When standing up, on such occasions, my mind makes a review, and enquires, ‘What subject has already occupied my thought during the day? What have I met in my reading during the past week? What is most laid upon my heart at this hour?’” But he adds, “It is no use to rise before an assembly and hope to be inspired upon subjects of which one knows nothing. . . . ” However, “the thought of a man who finds himself upon his legs dilating upon a theme with which he is familiar may be very far from his first thoughts; it may be the cream of his meditations warmed by the glow of his heart.”
To the extensive reading of Spurgeon must be added this habit already alluded to, of keeping a record, in notebooks, of interesting sights and experiences which would serve him in his preaching ministry. He read widely in the books of life, as well as in the books of paper and print. Numberless sermons display the fruit of this harvest, perhaps none more notably than one entitled “There Go the Ships,” preached in the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1875 from Psalm 104:26. It begins: “I was walking the other day by the side of the sea, looking out upon the English Channel.” He goes on to describe the becalmed ships, being sent on their way by a change in the wind. “ ‘There go the ships,’ ” he said, “was the exclamation that naturally rose to one’s lips.” He makes this a starting point for a sermon on the Christian’s voyage through life, “to the port of peace.” “The voyage of a ship,” he writes in the course of the sermon, “on the main ocean seems to me to be an admirable picture of the life of faith.”
When he was composing his written work he made great use of research. He occupied his secretaries’ time with numerous visits to libraries and museums, notably the British Museum, in order to bring all into the garner house. Writing in the preface to volume 3 of The Treasury of David, his commentary on the Psalms, a very thesaurus of spiritual quotations, he can say: “I have never flinched from a difficulty, or spared exertion in order to make the work as complete as it lay in my power to render it, either by my own endeavors or the help of others.”
What can only be called, in view of these facts, the final preparation of his pulpit work took place in the early evening of each Saturday. Having entertained friends in the afternoon, he would retire to his study at six to prepare the sermon for Sunday morning. The sermon for Sunday evening would be prepared on Sunday afternoon.
There he would sit. “I confess that I frequently sit hour after hour praying and waiting for a subject, and that this is the main part of any study; much hard labour have I spent in manipulating topics, . . . making skeletons out of verses . . . almost every Saturday of my life I prepare enough outlines of sermons to last me for a month, but I no more dare use them than an honest mariner would run ashore a cargo of contraband goods.”
He writes: “My habit is to look to the Lord for guidance, and when my text comes with power to my soul I take it without hesitation; but I dare not select my own themes.”
The reality and conviction of Spurgeon’s preaching may be traced to this source. He says: “I am always sure to have the most happy day when I get a good text in the morning from my Master . . . ;” for so receiving it (and here surely is the secret) he delivered it, “after meditating on it for my own soul’s comfort—not in the professional style of a regular sermon-maker, but feasting upon it for myself.” It was then “well spoken, because well-known, well-tasted and well felt.”
His wife records a remarkable instance of the preacher’s preparation. Having labored all evening with a text, consulted the commentaries and the authors, he retired to bed, planning to arise early in order to complete his preparations. To his despair he awoke in the morning later than usual and remonstrating with his wife was presented with an outline of the sermon he had been seeking to prepare, which he had delivered in his sleep, and his wife had taken down. The indebtedness of preachers to their wives seems to be without end!
The fruit of this preparation was set out in note form on half a sheet of ordinary note paper, possibly overflowing to the other side of the sheet. An example may be seen in The Early Years.1 “Then,” says Fullerton, “he went to the pulpit with the assurance that he would be able to clothe his ideas appropriately at the moment, many of his illustrations coming to him during the delivery of the sermon.”
That the preparation and preaching of his sermons demanded sweat, blood, and tears is sufficiently illustrated from what has preceded. Preaching was a dual office, one of labor and one of joy. This duality is noted in a comment on the inside back cover of the second volume of his manuscript, sermon outlines, given in facsimile in The Early Years—“Better is the end of life than the beginning. Better the end of labour than the starting. These sketches are so many proofs of the power of faith. By faith I got them. They are evidences of God’s love—for oft have they come just at the moment when had they tarried, I had been undone. Blessed be God—for making men so much his darlings as to let them speak His Word.”
Spurgeon in Action
We must now follow Spurgeon into the pulpit and seek to see the master craftsman, his preparatory labors behind him, present the message he believes the Lord has given him to the assembled thousands. Prayer has not been mentioned as part of that preparation, not because it was neglected but rather because his preparation was the preparation of himself. This was prayer. W. Fullerton tells us that “if we look into the inner life of this man of God, we shall not find Spurgeon often on his knees; and that not because he did not pray, but because he prayed incessantly.” For most men, we imagine, it is in private prayer that they draw nearest to God. Not so Spurgeon, if the testimony of Fullerton is to be believed, for he writes again: “He told me himself that he never got so near to God as on the Tabernacle platform when he prayed.” Perhaps it was because, as his wife tells us, he greatly valued the season of devotion in the half-hour before commencing the service that he stood so close to the throne of God on the Tabernacle platform.
Prayer sustained his ministry and whatever success attended it Spurgeon ascribed to prayer. When asked for an explanation of his phenomenal success, he would frequently reply: “My people pray for me.” He bore testimony to the power of united prayer when he asked, looking back on the days of revival, “Shall we ever forget Park Street, those prayer meetings when I felt compelled to let you go without a word from my lips because the Spirit of God was so awfully present that we felt bowed to the dust?”
So Spurgeon would stand to lead the worship of God’s people, and to set before them the Word of God: a man ready for the task because prepared by labor and prayer for this divinely appointed service.
Reading the varied accounts of his preaching, we may remark upon its outward form and its inner impulse: the former being always kept to the command of the latter.
A report from the Evening Star describes his manner thus: “There never was a popular orator who did not talk more and better with his arms than with his tongue. Mr. Spurgeon knows this instinctively. When he has read his text, he does not fasten his eye on the manuscript, and his hands on a cushion. As soon as he begins to speak, he begins to act.”2 Another report balances that description, when it tells us: “His manner was perfectly unrestrained but not irreverent.”
All, even his detractors, unite in describing his language as simple, plain, and Anglo-Saxon. A scathing critic, J. Ewing Ritchie, at the end of a tirade of denunciation is obliged to confess: “He preaches to the people in a homely style and they like it, for he is always plain and never dull.”
The editor of the sermons, F. W. Robertson, of Brighton, commends the pulpit language of Spurgeon by quoting the letter of a friend who wrote to him: “Mr. Spurgeon and his vulgar slang(!) is a violent reaction from the cold, unfelt conventionalities with which men have grown so familiar, . . . he recognizes the men and women before him as flesh and blood.”
If the preacher’s language was plain and simple, it was not that he was dealing with trivial subjects. He served no slops to his hearers, but good, strong, red meat. But he endeavored to make the message clear in both language and structure. One never goes very far in a Spurgeon sermon without coming to his plan of campaign. The main divisions, very often three, as with Simeon, but not exclusively or even mostly so, were set before his audience, crystallized into a single phrase or sentence. They then knew what he intended, by God’s grace, to teach them in that sermon. This homiletic lesson he learned, he tells us, from a youthful experience of following a fox-hunt with a shopping-basket. When upon reaching home, he found “all the goods amalgamated—tea, mustard and rice in one sorry mess, I understood the necessity of packing my subject in good stout parcels, bound round with the thread of my discourse; and this makes me keep to firstly, secondly, and thirdly, however unfashionable the method may now be.”
The humorous side of Spurgeon, a matter of some comment both from his admirers and detractors, served the same homiletic purpose. His aim was always to hold the attention of his hearers in order that they might pay attention to the Word of God. Thus in the course of a series of lectures, published under the title Eccentric Preachers, he declared: “All these eccentric preachers”—he had discussed Latimer, Hill, John Berridge, and Billy Bray, amongst others—“were in downright earnest, and because they were so their humour sometimes comes to the front.” Humor, like any other manner of speech, was not to be used as an end in itself, but as a means of serving truth. He goes on: “Had these men been triflers with holy things, or jesters upon sacred topics, they would have been worthy of all the censure which has been poured upon them”; but this was not their spirit at all, any more than it was Spurgeon’s own. And when men are in earnest, natural and unforced touches of humor will help to make their words stick in the mind and the conscience. All attractive and memorable forms of speech are in fact grist to the preacher’s mill. For “men are so careless about all matters of their souls that we have not only to preach to them, but to induce them to hear us. A great part of our labour lies in seeking out attractive illustrations, parables, and choice sayings, by which we may coax men to attend to their own interests; and even then we fail unless a higher power intervenes.”
We may not pass from a consideration of Spurgeon’s oratorical techniques without noting his dramatic power. Passages abound in his sermons which display his mastery of living description. It was as if he saw before him the very scene he describes. One passage of Scripture that lends itself to high dramatic presentation, yet is most susceptible to pathos, is the story of Noah and the Flood. But listen, or rather see, in this passage from his sermon “The Sin of Unbelief,” how Spurgeon, trembling on the brink of the ludicrous and melodramatic, still leaves one haunted by a vision of the majesty and the terror of judgment. “Hark, unbeliever, dost thou not hear that rumbling noise? Earth’s bowels have begun to move, her rocking ribs are strained by dire convulsions from within; lo! they break with the enormous strain, and forth from between them torrents rush, unknown since God concealed them in the bosom of our world. Heaven is split in sunder! It rains. Not drops, but clouds descend. A cataract like that of old Niagara, rolls from Heaven with mighty noise. Both firmaments, both deeps—the deep below and the deep above—do clasp their hands. Now unbelievers, where are you now? There is your last remnant. A man—his wife clasping him round the waist—stands on the last summit that is above the water. See him there? The water is up to his loins even now. Hear his last shriek! He is floating—he is drowned. And as Noah looks from the ark he sees nothing. Nothing! It is a void of profound. Sea monsters whelp and stable in the palaces of kings. All is over-thrown, covered, drowned. What hath done it? What brought the flood upon the earth? Unbelief. By faith Noah escaped from the flood. By unbelief the rest were drowned.”
Conviction and Compassion
There were other men in Spurgeon’s day as bountifully provided with oratorical gifts. He had, however, “a glory all his own,” seen not in the form but in the spirit of his preaching. He was a convinced man. He wrote: “Some people have received twenty different ‘gospels’ in as many years, . . . I thank God that he early taught me the Gospel, and I have been so perfectly satisfied with it, that I do not want to know another.”
This conviction breathed in the words he preached. An anonymous writer, in a pamphlet entitled Why So Popular? An Hour with Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, wrote: “If I cannot discover the secret of your popularity in what you preach, can I find it in any peculiarity in your mode of preaching? That is in my judgment, the explanation of the secret. You have strong faith, and, as a result, intense earnestness.”
Bound by his conviction of the truth of his message, he was moved by the compassion he felt for sinners. The two sentiments are found together in these words, taken from a sermon: “It will be the height of my ambition to be clear of the blood of all men. If, like George Fox, I can say in dying, ‘I am clear, I am clear,’ that would be all the heaven I could wish for.”
For Spurgeon, the passion for souls was a mark of a man’s call to preach the Gospel. “Two things are absolutely requisite to make a man a preacher: 1. special gifts; 2. a special call,” he wrote. But we may well ask, how may a man know he is called? His next words answer the implied question. “No college, no bishop, no human ordination, can make a man a minister; but he who can feel as did Bunyan, Whitefield, Berridge, or Rowland Hill, the strugglings of an impassioned longing to win the souls of men, may hear in the air the voice of God saying, ‘Son of Man, I have made thee a watchman.’”
Hear him now pleading and persuading his congregation in a sermon entitled “Return, Return”:
O dear hearts, what can be your hindrance in trusting the Saviour? What is it that keeps some of you away from Christ? I do try to put the Gospel so plainly and simply that all may understand it. I have had it said to me, lately, I dare say a dozen times, by persons in spiritual trouble who have come many a mile to see me. . . . “Nobody has encouraged and helped us as you have by your sermons; you seemed as if you did not want to put any of us back, but as if you longed to bring us all to the Saviour; and that is why we have come to see you.” Well, now I think they would not have said that so often if it had not been true. I do not frighten you away from Christ, at least I do not mean to do so, I would much rather beckon you to come to Him.”
In his autobiography he frankly discloses his passion for souls. “When I first began to preach at Waterbeach my first concern was, Would God save any souls through me? . . . How my heart leaped for joy when I heard tidings of my first convert! . . . A poor labouring man’s wife . . . she was the first seal upon my ministry, and a very precious one.” In the same passage of the autobiography he extols the preacher’s office and the eternal consequences of his work. “I would rather be the means of saving a soul from death than the greatest orator in the world. I would rather bring the poorest woman in the world to the feet of Jesus than I would be made Archbishop of Canterbury. I would sooner pluck one single brand from the burning than explain all mysteries. . . . Oh what bliss it will be to fly to heaven, and to have a multitude of converts before and behind, and, on entering the glory to be able to say, ‘Here am I, Father, and the children thou has given me.’”
The source of this compassion was his deep communion with Christ. Robertson Nicoll says of him: “He is one of the very few English preachers who have been at once popular and at the same time imbued with the very spirit of the mystics.” We would concur with that judgment to the extent that Spurgeon was aware, with the mystics, of a living, all-embracing Deity. But it was “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” in whose presence he lived, and mysticism, either as a world-renouncing system of discipline and devotion which seeks on earth the beatific vision, or as a unifying concept held to underlie the many religions of the world, was completely foreign to Spurgeon’s mind.
Writing in an apologetic work of very great value, Spurgeon dwells on the immanence of God’s transcendence. (Incidentally, how unenlightened, one is almost tempted to use the word illiterate, are those modern theologians who find obstacles to faith in the metaphors of transcendence!) For Spurgeon “God was out there” but was also “a God down here.” He writes: “Trusting in God, we are not exercising a dreamy dependence upon a far away and inactive power.” Later he adds: “The line between things secular and sacred is imaginary and mischievous. We believe God for time as well as for eternity, for earth as well as for heaven, for the body as well as for the soul.” And again: “At home in our Father’s house everything communes with us of his Glory. . . . It was no wonder that a great saint called the birds his “sisters,” for we seem akin to all that comes of our Maker’s hand.” “Nature to him (the Chris-tian) is but a name for an effect whose cause is God. He perceives God everywhere, even the God of Gethsemane and the Cross.
One Spirit—His
Who wore the plaited thorns with bleeding brows
Rules universal nature.
Faith floods the universe with Deity by revealing that
unbounded Presence which is evermore its life, its bliss.
This was to Spurgeon a deeply personalized experience, beginning with the knowledge of Jesus Christ received in conversion and growing in ever increasing reality throughout his Christian life. Hear him again: “I bear witness that never servant had such a Master as I have, never brother had kinsman such as He has been to me; never spouse had such a husband as Christ has been to my soul; never sinner a better Saviour, never Soldier a better Captain; never mourner a better Comforter than Christ hath been to my spirit. I want none beside Him. In life He is my life, and in death He shall be the death of death; in poverty Christ is my riches, in sickness he makes my bed; in darkness He is my star, and in brightness He is my Sun. By faith I understand that the blessed Son of God redeemed my soul by His own heart’s blood, and by sweet experience I know that He raised me up from the pit of dark despair and set my feet on the rock. He died for me. This is the root of every satisfaction I have. He put all my transgressions away.”
We have seen something of Spurgeon the Preacher. In order not to distort the picture it is necessary at least to mention his pastoral concern. He was never content merely to preach. His youthful concern about tract distribution to cottagers in Cambridges; his division of the city into districts each with an elder in charge of its pastoral administration; the provision of the Almshouses, the Orphanage, and the Pastors’ College, each give evidence of his pastoral concern.
His wife tells us that Tuesday evenings were set aside by him for attending the Tabernacle, in order to deal with the numbers of people needing his pastoral counsel and prayer.
A Servant of the Word
It is impossible in a paper of this nature and length to do more than indicate the outstanding features of Spurgeon’s life and ministry. As he aimed at an “All Round Ministry,” even this is an exacting task, and one in which we shall inevitably fail to say all that should be said. We must, however, endeavor in this concluding portion of the paper to say something about the subject-matter of Spurgeon’s preaching.
Spurgeon was a man of many books but a preacher of one book, the Bible. “To find a sure foothold somewhere,” he wrote, “men have tried to rest in an infallible Church, or in their own supposed infallible reason . . . we prefer to cast our anchor once and for all in an infallible revelation.” He is not obscurantist, for he writes, “Between the revelation of God in His Word and that in His works, there can be no actual discrepancy. Between the interpretation of the works and the interpretation of the Word, there may be great differences. We have never held the doctrine of the Infallibility of Scripturists.” But men need knowledge in order to have faith. “However willing a man may be to put his trust in God, his faith must largely depend upon his knowledge. How can knowledge be gained? Can we go from Nature’s God? Perhaps. But it would be a far more effective business if Nature’s God would come down to us and be His own Expositor.” Spurgeon believed that God had done this. In an early sermon he declared: “This volume is the writing of the living God: each letter was penned with an Almighty finger; each word dropped from the everlasting lips, each sentence was dictated by the Holy Spirit.”
It was the preacher’s responsibility, therefore, as Spurgeon advised his students, to ensure that his “sermons should have real teaching in them, and their doctrine should be solid, substantial and abundant.”
This necessarily involves the preacher in expository preaching. In his work Commenting and Commentaries, Spurgeon sanctions other forms of preaching but extols expository preaching and commenting above all. “Since topical preaching, hortatory preaching, experimental preaching, and so on—all exceedingly useful in their way—have almost pushed proper expository preaching out of place, there is more need that we should, when we read passages of Holy Writ, habitually give running comment upon them.”
Spurgeon practiced what he preached. His sermons abound with teaching. He stresses the necessity of presenting the whole counsel of God—but insists that “those truths which are not vital to the soul’s salvation, nor even essential to practical Christianity, are not to be considered upon every occasion of worship. . . . ” “One great master theme is the good news from heaven, tidings of mercy through the atoning death of Jesus, mercy to the chief of sinners upon their believing in Jesus.”
In the later volumes of The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, a textual index is given. Humility and conviction overcomes any preacher reading it; he discovers that while the published sermons of Spurgeon account for only one third of his output, the Index for 1888, for example, reveals that at that time the only book that had not been preached upon, and presumably expounded, was 2 John. Almost every chapter of the Bible had been the subject of a sermon by the time Spurgeon’s ministry ended. The Psalms in the Old Testament, and John’s Gospel in the New Testament, supplied most sermon matter. Isaiah was apparently his favorite prophet, Romans his favorite Epistle, with the Song of Solomon and Hebrews minor favorites.
Eulogy may have appeared to be the purpose of this paper. Such was not our intention; we have simply attempted to recount the facts of Spurgeon’s faith and preaching, and let them speak for themselves. But in any case, let us now redress the balance a little.
Spurgeon often sinned against his own canons of preaching The published sermons manifest a very varied quality and value. In some he has clearly attempted too much, and has had to neglect part of his message. Some, and those among the most favored, may be judged to transgress the rules of homiletics which he himself laid down.
Is the text in John 20:15 which furnished the title of his famous discourse, “Supposing him to be the gardener,” anything more than a pretext in the way in which Spurgeon uses it? He tells us the aim of his sermon thus: “We shall not make a mistake if we now indulge ourselves in a quiet meditation upon our ever-blessed Lord, supposing him to be the gardener.
We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground.”
The same judgment might be passed on the sermon already alluded to, “There Go the Ships,” preached from Psalm 104:26. All that Spurgeon teaches in the sermon is scriptural, no doubt, but it certainly did not come out of that text. It is interesting to note that these two sermons are among those chosen by Spurgeon and revised by him for inclusion in the series, “Preachers of the Age,” under the title Messages for the Multitudes. To commit the very error we have been censuring in Spurgeon, however, we may say of these blemishes, “What are they among so many?”, compared with the great mass of pure and profitable expositions of God’s Word which the published volumes of sermons contain.
Spurgeon’s Puritanism
Now we turn to matters which could, and properly should, serve as single Spurgeon studies in their own right—his Puritanism, controversialism, and Calvinism.
As we saw, Spurgeon grew up in Puritanism. It gave him his first theological reading. Puritan divinity was a life-long love, and source of inspiration. His library, full of Puritan divines, twelve thousand volumes in all, amongst them many first editions, was tragically allowed to be bought and transported to America to the William Jewell College, in Liberty, Missouri, in 1905.
The following opinion of Spurgeon’s Puritanism is given in Fullerton’s biography: “He was the one teacher of the century whose mind was steeped in Puritan ideas, theology and literature. In fact this remarkable man knew more about Puritanism than any of the Puritans themselves. . . . His mind was early surrendered to the Puritan hermeneutics, and all his homiletic power was modified by the impress of the medieval mould.” The writer concludes critically, “He never emancipated his intellect from the fascination exercised over him by Charnock, and Owen, and Coles.”
This is saying more than Spurgeon would allow. He writes, “Believing that the Puritan school embodied more of Gospel truth in it than any other since the days of the Apostles, we continue in the same line of things.” It was to him the Gospel, not the Puritan tradition as such that was authoritative.
He was not a party man. He would as well disagree with Puritan writers as any others if they appeared to be at variance with Scripture. Listen to his judgment on certain Puritans whom he took to be insisting on a title to Faith in Christ, other than the simple command of God to believe, and thereby to be establishing works-righteousness. “Some preachers in the Puritan times, whose shoe latchets I am not worthy to unloose, erred much in this matter. I refer not merely to Alleyne and Baxter, who are far better preachers of the Law than of the Gospel, but I include men far sounder in the faith than they, such as Roger of Dedham, Shepherd, the author of The Sound Believer and especially the American, Thomas Hooker, who has written a book upon qualifications for coming to Christ.” The whole sermon, “The Warrant of Faith,” an early one preached in 1863, shows his independence of mind and integrity of spirit.
Next to the theological content of Spurgeon’s Puritanism, which will be considered when we deal with his Calvinism, we see Puritan influence most markedly in his moral concern. He was a preacher of righteousness. His moral concern shows itself in many sermons. Let us take one at random, “All or Nothing,” or “Compromises Refused,” preached in 1886, from five texts. Here are typical quotations. “Do not imagine the work is accomplished” (he is talking about the relation of conversion to final salvation). “Our blessed Master has to fight for every inch of ground which he wins in the human heart.” Again—“Yes, says the Devil, you must be a Christian, that is evident. . . . But, says he, stop in the world and be a Christian. . . . Trust yourself with Christ and then indulge yourself in whatsoever your heart desires. Do you not know he is a Saviour of Sinners? . . . Oh I charge you, by the living God, never be duped by such a treacherous lie as this, for it is not possible that you can find any rest or salvation while you live in sin.”
Spurgeon opposes antinomianism and perfectionism, preaching progressive sanctification. Without this, he says, one must question the reality of faith. He writes: “While I am fully persuaded that perfection is utterly impossible to any man beneath the sky, I feel equally sure that, to every believer, future perfection is certain beyond a doubt. . . . ‘The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me.’”
Spurgeon the Controversialist
Controversy played a great part in Spurgeon’s ministry. To it he attributed, under the providence of God, the popularity of his early days. It would however be false to suggest that he used controversy for this end. But because he was made the object of bitter attack, the crowds went to hear him, and once hearing him, many returned to hear him again.
Our concern must be with the major controversial issue rather than Spurgeon’s smaller battles such as that over baptismal regeneration. “By the time Spurgeon had reached his early fifties the threat to Evangelicalism could no longer be ignored. He sounded a vigorous alarm; and his so doing marked his entry upon the last and not least important stage of his great career”: so writes E. J. Poole-Connor. Mrs. Spurgeon was of the opinion that this final controversy cost him his life, for he was a sick man when he engaged in it.
Shortly, the story of the controversy begins in 1887, when Dr. Booth, Secretary of the Baptist Union, wrote to Spurgeon to ask his advice about the heterodox preaching and publications of men who belonged to the Union. Then, in Spurgeon’s monthly magazine, The Sword and Trowel, a series of articles appeared lamenting the declension from the faith. The Rev. R. Shindler, of the Pastors’ College, was the author. Next, Spurgeon defended the position taken up, in four articles on “The Down Grade” in August, September, October, and November 1887. The title is taken from a phrase in one of the articles. The “Down Grade” was only the end of a long series of disturbing incidents. The editors of The Early Years can entitle a chapter—“The Down-grade Foreshadowed.”
Spurgeon desired the Union to make a clear-cut statement of faith, in which it would endorse the fundamentals of the Reformed position. He suggested the statement of faith of the Evangelical Alliance might well serve.
But satisfaction could not be gained. Booth refused Spurgeon permission to publish his correspondence in which evidence was given of heterodox opinions. The Council of the Union refused to face the issues raised, burking—as seems to be endemic in decent Protestantism—the question of discipline.
In October 1887 Spurgeon resigned from the Union, writing to Booth, “I do this with the utmost regret but I have no choice. The reasons are set forth in the Sword and Trowel for November and I trust you will excuse me repeating them here. I beg you not to send anyone to me to ask for reconsideration. I fear I have considered too long already.”
From the controversy, when all the facts are known, Spurgeon emerges with his character enhanced. It cannot, however, be said that his reputation as a controversialist was increased. The four articles referred to rather reveal his weakness in this role.
The strength of the heterodox position was its reliance upon a “scientific” literary approach to the Bible. Now Spurgeon refused to meet the challenge on this ground. As early as 1855 he had indicated his position on this matter when preaching on “The Bible.” He asks the unbeliever’s question, “How do you know that God wrote the book?” and says, “That is just what I shall not try to prove to you.” Later in the same paragraph, he says: “there is never any necessity for Christian ministers to make a point of bringing forth infidel arguments in order to answer them. It is the greatest folly in the world.”
Spurgeon no doubt has much on his side in taking the higher ground of the inspiration of Scripture, endorsed by the authority of Christ as his strongest argument. At least it should have carried weight with those who professed to be Christians. But it is surely necessary, even from within the walls of the strong fortress, to be ready to throw down the siege ladders with which the enemy seeks to scale the walls. Such a task was not beyond Spurgeon’s powers, and perhaps if he had been a younger and healthier man he would have undertaken it. In particular instances of biblical interpretation he shows a fine insight which convincingly removes difficulties. But it was only in general apologetic, that he displayed his best controversial powers. Perhaps after all there is something in T. R. Glovers’ opinion that his was “an untrained mind without the discipline of ordered study,” if what is meant is that he lacked that thorough grounding in linguistic and literary studies that Glover himself had, and which is the necessary prerequisite of effective biblical apologetic.
Before leaving our consideration of this matter we should perhaps ask what Spurgeon thought was the right course of action for a Church or Union of Churches to take in the face of heresy.
It seems clear, to start with, that he considered a Confession of Faith to be necessary. He spoke most enthusiastically about the Westminster Confession. He caused the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 to be re-issued in the second year of his ministry at New Park Street, although he safeguarded the well-loved Reformation principle of private judgment in the prefatory words, “This little volume is not issued as an authoritative rule or code of faith, whereby you are to be fettered, but as an assistance to you in controversy, a confirmation in faith, and a means of edification in righteousness.”
He saw strength in independency, in churches withdrawing from fellowship with Unions which, to quote his own words, “begin to look like confederacies of evil.” But this was not to be taken as an occasion for founding new denominations, for, he wrote, “there are denominations enough,” and “thieves and robbers would climb in.”
He confidently hoped for a renaissance of Reformed teaching. “The cause of God goes on in spite of foes, and His truth is sure to conquer in the long run, however influential its opposers.” He prayed for, and seemed to foresee, “a day . . . when in a larger communion than any sect all those who are one in Christ Jesus may be able to blend in manifest unity.” What were the means to this happy end? “This can only come,” he wrote in the last article of the four on the Down-grade, “by the way of growing spiritual life, clearer light upon the one eternal truth and a closer cleaving in all things to Him who is the Head even Christ Jesus.” Can more be said or done?
Spurgeon the Calvinist
The Calvinism of Spurgeon was not book Calvinism, but experimental Calvinism. Reading the Puritans, as he had done from childhood, he was well acquainted with the theology of Calvin, but the decisive experimentally came, he tells us, “one weeknight, when I was sitting in the house of God, not thinking much about the preacher’s sermon, for I did not believe it. The thought struck me, how did you become a Christian? I sought the Lord. But how did you come to seek the Lord? The truth flashed across my mind in a moment—I should not have sought Him unless there had been some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him. I prayed, thought I, but then I asked myself how came I to pray? I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. How came I to read the Scriptures? I did read them, but what led me to do so? Then, in a moment, I saw that God was at the bottom of it all, and that He was the author of my faith, and so the whole doctrine of grace opened up to me, and from that doctrine I have not departed to this day, and I desire to make this my constant confession, ‘I ascribe my change wholly to God.’”
From that moment Calvin cast his spell upon Spurgeon. His boast was, “I am a true Calvinist after the order of John Calvin himself, and probably I have read more of his work than any of my accusers ever did.”
He admired Calvin because he believed that Calvin interpreted aright “the old Gospel.” He urges his students to read Calvin; but note why: “Of all commentators I believe John Calvin to be the most candid. In his expositions he is not always what moderns would call ‘Calvinistic.’ That is to say, where Scripture maintains the doctrine of Predestination and Grace he flinches in no degree, but inasmuch as some Scriptures bear the impress of human free action and responsibility, he does not shun to expound their meaning in all fairness and integrity.”
In two well-documented articles in The Banner of Truth entitled “The Forgotten Spurgeon,” Iain Murray observes that while “his success as an evangelist is remembered, the theology which lay behind it is forgotten.” Murray contends that it was because Arminianism was the prevalent religious outlook “and because Spurgeon stood against this that his arrival in London was looked upon with such disfavour in the religious world.” Murray suggests that there was another major controversy in Spurgeon’s ministry, especially at the beginning, over this matter.
I cannot concur. Not that I deny the opposition of Arminians or the prevalence of an Arminian religious outlook, although Spurgeon’s own testimony was that Calvinism was very prevalent in London. Writing to his father in 1853 he affirmed: “It is Calvinism they want in London, and any Arminian preaching will not be endured.” Again in 1855 he wrote, “the people are Calvinistic, and they could not get on with anything else.” But in fact most of the open opposition to Spurgeon, as Murray admits, came from those most devoted to Calvinism as a system, the Hyper-Calvinists, of whom James Wells was the acknowledged leader; and Spurgeon’s early battles were as much against those who made too much of Calvinism as those who denied it outright. It appears to me that the explanation of the opposition to Spurgeon in the early years is to be found not in the theological field, but rather in the moral field. It sprang chiefly from a ministerial sin which is as old as the New Testament, the tragic fault characterized by Shakespeare as “the green-eyed monster, jealousy.”
If Spurgeon’s Calvinism was experimental, bound up with his vision “that God was at the bottom of it all,” he also held it as an intellectual system. In his sermon on “The Bible” in 1855 he points to the fundamental and vital truths of the Gospel epitomized in the well-known five points of Calvinism. “Election, according to the foreknowledge of God, the natural depravity and sinfulness of man, particular redemption by the blood of Christ, effectual calling by the power of the Spirit, and ultimate perseverance by the efforts of God’s might.”
Calvinism has two major difficulties for most people: one, the apparent denial of human free-will, and the other, the arbitrary choice of the elect. How does Spurgeon deal with these issues? He does not deny the doctrines, but he does not go beyond them and say more than the Scripture reveals. He denies human free-will but he asserts human responsibility. He writes, “I see, in one place, God in Providence presiding over all, and yet I see, and I cannot help seeing, that man acts as he pleases, and that God has left his actions in a great measure, to his own free-will. Now, if I were to declare that man was so free to act that there was no control of God over his actions, I would be driven very near to atheism; and if, on the other hand, I should declare that God so overrules all things that man is not free enough to be responsible I should be driven at once into Antinominism or Fatalism. That God predestines, and yet that man is responsible, are two facts that few can see clearly. They are believed to be inconsistent and contradictory, but they are not; the fault is in our weak judgement.”
He preaches the sovereignty of God in the election of His Saints, but in almost every sermon appeals to all who hear him to come to the Savior. The story is surely apocryphal, but it seems to accord with Spurgeon’s attitude that, as Fullerton affirms, he should on one occasion have prayed, “Lord, hasten to bring in all thine elect—and then elect some more.”
Hear him again in the sermon entitled, “The Old Gospel for the New Age,” marrying together the two facts of particular election and a universal invitation, as he preaches on the text, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Be it also remembered that when Christ gave this promise, he knew the number of those who were comprehended in that word ‘All.’ Though to us that ‘All’ included the multitude that no man can number, yet. ‘The Lord knoweth them that are his’; and when he said, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,’ he did not speak without knowing that there are tens of thousands, and millions, and hundreds of millions, that labour and are heavy laden, and he meant to speak to all that vast throng when he said, ‘Come ye to me, and I will give you rest.’”
At the end of one of his early sermons in New Park Street he cries, “Whosoever believeth in the Name of Jesus shall be saved.”
For him, Calvinism was a term used for shortness, a useful abbreviation for the essential gospel. “That doctrine which is called Calvinism did not spring from Calvinism. We believe that it sprang from the great Founder of all truth.” He would preach it and defend it for this reason: but, as he wrote to his uncle in 1855, “I wish to live in unity with every believer, whether Calvinist, Arminian (if not impossible), Churchman, Independent, or Wesleyan.” In this Spurgeon is expressing not only a proper attitude for 1855 but the proper attitude for the Christians of every generation.
The question is prompted, “What would Spurgeon do if he were alive today?” An answer, I believe, can be given. He would hold to the old Faith. He was above all a man of consistency and integrity. Where his soul first cast anchor, there he would remain. We may be equally sure, however, that he would be seeking ever new and more effective ways of commending that old Faith to this new generation. His purpose as in his own life-time, would still be the exaltation of Jesus Christ. He would still exhaust his powers in extolling the glory of the Christ Who came to save. As on a previous occasion at the end of an impassioned message, he would still cry: “Let my name perish, but let Christ’s name last forever, Jesus—Jesus—Jesus—Crown Him Lord of all!” And he would surely still be able to say at the end, as he did in his last words from the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle on June 7th, 1891, “Jesus Christ is the most magnanimous of Captains. There never was his like among the choicest of princes. The heaviest end of the Cross lies ever on His shoulders. If there is anything that is gracious, generous, kind, and tender, yea, lavish and superabundant in love, you always find it in Him! His service is life, peace, joy. Oh, that you would enter it at once! God help you to enlist under the Banner of Jesus Christ.”