Born at Kelvedon, Essex, June 19, 1834: died at Mentone, France, Jan. 31, 1892. An English Baptist preacher. He was educated at Colchester and Maidstone, and became usher in a private school at Cambridge. In 1851 he became pastor of the Baptist church at Waterbeach, five miles from Cambridge, while retaining his place as usher. He accepted a call to the pastorate of the New Park Street Baptist Church in Southwark, London, in 1853, removing with his congregation in 1861 to a new edifice, the Tabernacle, in Newington, London. He was also the founder of a pastors’ college, schools, almshouses, and an orphanage; and edited a monthly magazine, “The Sword and the Trowel.” Among his works are “The Treasury of David: Exposition of the Book of Psalms” (1870–85), “Feathers for Arrows, or Illustrations for Preachers and Teachers” (1870), “Lectures to my Students” (1875–77), “Commenting and Commentaries: together with a Catalogue of Biblical Commentaries and Expositions” (1876), “John Ploughman’s Pictures: More of his Plain Talk” (1880), and many volumes of sermons.

Personal

  Spurgeon’s lecture was well worth hearing, though, from William’s getting us places of honour on the bench close behind Spurgeon, we did not see or hear him to such advantage as the less favoured public in the body of the hall. It was a study in the way of speaking and management of the voice; though his voice is not beautiful as some people call it, nor is his pronunciation quite pure. Still, it is a most striking performance, and reminded me very much of Bright’s. Occasionally there were bits in which he showed unction and real feeling; sometimes he was the mere dissenting Philistine; but he kept up one’s interest and attention for more than an hour and a half, and that is the great thing. I am very glad I have heard him.

  Take him all in all there is no figure since old Simeon’s comparable to Spurgeon as a great middle-class orator, and even Rowland Hill’s and Simeon’s piety and pulpit power rolled together would hardly amount to one Spurgeon! Indeed no one since the world began has ever accomplished the feat habitually performed by Spurgeon without apparent effort—I mean the feat of attracting and retaining a congregation of 6,000 persons twice every Sunday for over thirty years. His simple and unaffected egotism—like that of Oliver Wendell Holmes—had something very frank and winning about it. The head was perhaps deficient in a sense of proportion, but then the heart was so good. He was perfectly unconscious of any inconsistency. No one disliked the Pope’s arrogant assumptions more than Spurgeon, but as a dogmatic teacher the Pope would have to climb down before the great Baptist—and certainly no Pope ever had a more perfect belief in his own infallibility.

  Time did not wear out his reputation; the light shone to the last. He had talent, but he had qualities without which talent is of little avail: he had what athletes would call staying power. He passed through the ordeal of the furore of early fame. A lighter character and a less stable soul might have been ruined by the popularity which met him on the threshold of his manhood. The prosperity of fools destroys them; but Mr. Spurgeon had the instinct of a strong nature. He knew that no man can produce great effects without hard work. He had won a reputation: he did more, he did the much harder thing, he maintained it.

  His success has been accounted for in some degree by natural causes. He certainly had not such attractions as Rowland Hill, in high social connection, imposing presence, and university prestige. At first he had to encounter hostile criticisms, lampoons, caricatures, and malicious inventions. His voice was certainly a great power; so clear, strong, incisive, penetrating without effort the remotest corner of the largest building. His style was attractive—so lucid, yet so strong in its Saxon simplicity, that the best-cultured could not but admire it, while “the common people heard him gladly.” He was easy and natural in his manner; never toiling as he spoke and never fatiguing those who listened. He never hesitated for a word or retracted an utterance…. He never tried to be witty. It grew out of his subject.

  Spurgeon had no creative genius; he has contributed nothing to religion or to ethics, nothing doctrinal or vital or formative. Creeds and dogmas are what they were before his voice was heard. But he has contributed Spurgeon, and it will be many a generation before the echo of those tones which filled the Tabernacle Sunday after Sunday has ceased to vibrate in men’s memories.

  He was a strict vegetarian, and drank only water at his meals. His one cigar per diem he smoked, to use his own words, “to the glory of God.” He spent not one shilling of his salary upon himself. Of the £1,500 received in this way, £1,000 were devoted to his orphanage or clerical college, and £500 as salary to his assistant clergyman. He supported his family, so he told me, from the proceeds of his dairy farm and from the sale of his books.

  I was taken to the chapel and placed not far from the attraction of the day; a short, stout figure, with no personal advantage except the starlike eyes of genius. A hymn was given out, that is read, two lines at a time, or rather “entunéd (Chaucer) through the nose,” to be repeated in song. I felt sorry for the preacher, who bore the not too harmonious result with such sweet patience. The hymns were the only set form of words admitted in worship; even the Lord’s prayer was unheard. Presently Mr. Spurgeon filled the pulpit and his petition went up, drawing the souls of others into a clearer light than our common earthly day. Then he rose to his feet: the “weak bodily presence” became fraught with a passion and intensity that might have been Edmund Kean’s; with a grace in every varying attitude that no sculptor could correct: as he spoke, he became illuminated, eyes, smile, motion, he rose upon you like an indescribable source of light. Setting his Bible on end, he would lean with one arm laid firm above it, or raise heavenward both expressive hands with a perfection of curves and an harmonious turn of the head that passed the most accomplished art. It was unlike any preacher I had ever seen or heard. He was master of all the secrets of speech and motion. He possessed to the uttermost that gift of action so rare in the English-speaking race, and added to it the power, still rarer, of eloquent repose. His voice, like all his talents, was held under a tight rein, or let go, at his absolute will. Never was a syllable dropped too low to penetrate to the most distant corner of space beneath him. It was like a clear peal of musical bells, endless in natural variety. Natural it was, colloquial mostly; but rising and falling at need to every tone of human emotion.

  It became the fashion to hear Mr. Spurgeon, and not to have heard him argued one’s self out of the movement of public life. Great statesmen and Parliamentary orators rushed to listen to him, and public opinion, of course, became greatly divided as to his eloquence. People ran into wild extremes about him. Some insisted that he was the greatest pulpit orator who had ever been heard in England, or, indeed, anywhere else. Others as stoutly argued that he was nothing but a windbag and a loud voiced charlatan. On one point all had to agree—that Spurgeon had a magnificent voice, a fine dramatic gesticulation, and a style which rose from conversational simplicity to an impassioned and thrilling rhetoric. He had come into the pulpit determined to be heard—determined to be heard because, as he said himself, he had a message to deliver, and deliver it he would. He knew perfectly well the importance of getting himself talked about as soon as possible. He once told a friend that he was determined to attract attention, and that if there were no other way of securing his object he would have worn a soldier’s red coat when he got into the pulpit. This, it should be understood, was not in the least because Spurgeon cared for notoriety for its own sake. He had no personal desire to be known by the public. It was because notoriety, even through eccentricity, was of value to him as a means of attracting an audience. All sorts of ridiculous anecdotes, most of them absolutely without foundation, were commonly told of the efforts he made to startle his audiences into attention. He very soon found that he needed nothing but his own eloquence to gather a crowd around him wherever he went.

  Mr. Spurgeon was a very quick reader, but the rapidity of his glance at the page did not interfere with the completeness of his acquaintance of its contents. He could read from cover to cover of a large octavo or folio volume in the course of a very short space of time, and he would thus become perfectly familiar with all that it contained…. At the time of Mr. Spurgeon’s home-going, he possessed at least 12,000 volumes. The number would have been far larger if he had not given so generously to the libraries of the Pastors’ College and many of the ministers trained within its walls, and if he had not also, from his abundant stores, so freely enriched other friends.

General

  In freshness and vigor of thought, in simplicity and purity of language, in grasp of gospel truth, and in tact and force in its presentation, he is perhaps without a peer in the pulpit.

  You might search the whole world and find no one whose mind was more thoroughly under the domination of theological ideas than Spurgeon’s. To a Positivist the reverend gentleman must appear like a survival not of the fittest, but of the unfittest—a painful anachronism to remind good Positivists and advanced thinkers generally of the lowly estate from which they have emerged. Not even reached the metaphysical stage; and yet Mr. Spurgeon has thousands and thousands of excellent men and women who hang on his every word, spoken and written, as if it were the very bread of life.

  Mr. Spurgeon’s chief work as a humourist is “John Ploughman’s Talk.” This proved such a success as a serial that it was afterwards issued as a book, and the fact that 370,000 have been sold of it proves it to be worth reading. This book was followed by “John Ploughman’s Pictures,” of which 130,000 have been issued. If wit be employed merely to gladden sad lives, or to impart velocity to truth, it is not misemployed, for with many people life is terribly dreary and crushing; but when humour is so directed as to make evil absurd and good attractive, it is indeed well employed, and is indeed a moral force of the utmost importance. Of course, like anger, it must be well under control, just as the same fire prepares our food when kept within the kitchen grate, that would be fearful if it were in our pocket. Mr. Spurgeon’s wit is of the kitchen-range order, that is, it is ready to burn up rubbish and make food more palatable and nourishing; it is, indeed, part of his original endowment, and one element of his success.

  It is true that Mr. Spurgeon wrote books. His “John Ploughman’s Talk” has had a circulation of more than half a million. His “Treasury of David” has sold by thousands. We admit it; but it is not as an author that Mr. Spurgeon will be remembered; his works are not in the true sense ventures in literature. They are rather chips from his workshop; and in his workshop not books but sermons were made. These were his true work; the others were but groupings of accumulated material. He was not tempted, as others have been, into really new ventures. Preaching was his trade; and he kept to it. Hoc unum—this one thing he did—whatever he wrote he threw it off in the course of, and not in addition to, his main and much-loved work of preaching. To this, and not to authorship, he devoted his life…. If we were to class Mr. Spurgeon we must place him among the men of action; he belongs more to the type of Luther than to that of Erasmus or Fenelon. He belongs to the class which produces strong leaders rather than strong thinkers—men of action, not men of contemplation.

  Of all his writings, “John Ploughman’s Talk” and “John Ploughman’s Pictures” achieved by far the greatest success, and for the same reason, because they were packed full of pithy, racy sayings. The circulation of his sermons was world-wide. It is interesting to know that his uncompromising denunciation of slavery before the outbreak of the great rebellion destroyed at a stroke the circulation of his sermons in the United States. That denunciation practically cost him in hard cash $3,000 a year, which was the annual profit derived from the sale of his sermons across the Atlantic. A selection of his sermons was translated into Russian, and issued with the imprimatur of the Russian ecclesiastical authorities for use by the orthodox clergy. They could not do better than use them, but the majority never preach at all. To read one of Spurgeon’s sermons is one of the unfailing resources in many a chapel when the supply fails to arrive, and many a time his sermons are laid under contribution, even by the Lord Mayors of London, without always due recognition of the source from which the pulpit thunder was borrowed.

  Perhaps you will allow me to say a word or two about his power as a writer,—his power to express himself in writing. In this democratic age, when sympathy with the masses is on everyone’s lips, it often seems to me wonderful that the power of communicating with the multitude is so rare. We have scores of ministers who are ambitious of writing for the world of the cultivated; but a book frankly and successfully addressing the average man, in language which he can understand, is one of the rarest products of the press. It really requires very exceptional power. It requires knowledge of human nature, and knowledge of life. It requires common sense; it requires wit and humor; and it requires command of simple and powerful Saxon. Whatever the requirements may be, Mr. Spurgeon had them in an unexampled degree. To find his match in this respect, you have, I think, in England, to go back to John Bunyan.

  The productions of no other preacher’s heart and brain ever kept a great printing and publishing firm constantly engaged with the issue of his works alone. I have been through the publisher’s store rooms; these contain many tons of Mr. Spurgeon’s works, which are in constant demand. “John Ploughman’s Pictures” has reached its 140th thousand; and “John Ploughman” is now in its 400th thousand. For a shilling book, dealing with moral and religious matters, this sale is, I believe, absolutely unprecedented. The choice volumes “Morning by Morning” and “Evening by Evening” have enjoyed a sale of over two hundred and ten thousand. These have been amongst the most useful sermon saplings many a preacher has possessed; thousands of sermons have been delivered which were suggested by these charmingly gracious chapters; while of the yearly volumes the Chairman of the London Congregational Union for 1895 said: “No preacher’s library was complete without them.”… The four volumes of Mr. Spurgeon’s “Sermon Notes,” containing in all two hundred and sixty-four outlines of sermons, from which he preached, are by far the most helpful books to preachers in sermon-making which he has published. With each skeleton are given extracts from some of the best authors; and illustrations also, which bear directly on the subject in hand, so that if the preacher feels he would rather treat his subject in his own way—and all surely ought to feel this—he has nevertheless many practical suggestions he may very justly appropriate both for exposition and adornment.

  Charles H. Spurgeon contributed little or nothing to the theological thought of his age; for, intellectually, he lived in the thought-atmosphere of the seventeenth century. But he contributed a great deal to the ethical and spiritual life of his age; for, ethically and spiritually, he lived in the London of the last half of the nineteenth century. He was ambitious, but his ambition was pure and ennobling. “I would rather,” he said, “be the means of saving a soul from death than be the greatest orator on earth.” That was the secret of his unoratorical oratory. “I would rather bring the poorest woman in the world to the feet of Jesus than I would be made Archbishop of Canterbury.” That was the secret which made his church the centre of activities greater, probably, than those of any single cathedral in Great Britain. He lived in the perpetual consciousness of God, a consciousness which pervaded his preaching not more distinctly than it did his personal and daily life…. He had a remarkable power of insight, which enabled him to read the men with whom he dealt in personal and pastoral relations—an insight which amounted almost to genius, and gave him a skill which was better than tact—which is, indeed, the best form of tact. His sense of humor saved him from the follies in which pietism sometimes involves men who have no such sense, and carried him through difficulties in which so energetic and strong-willed a man would have been plunged had he not been well supplied with that lubricating oil…. I heard Spurgeon in his own Tabernacle. The congregation was a depressing, not an inspiring one. The music was heavy and uninteresting. The sermon was at no point what could be called eloquent. The text was an enigmatical passage from Isaiah. But the impression I shall carry with me to my dying day was that of a man who had found life made real, noble, joyous, by his living faith in a living Christ, and who longed to impart to others the life which Christ had imparted to him.

  Spurgeon was a prolific author, writing with the directness and earnestness that distinguished him as a speaker.

  Perhaps, among all Mr. Spurgeon’s published works, the one that gives the best idea of his familiarity with the whole range of expository literature, is his unpretentious half-crown volume, issued under the unattractive title, “Commenting and Commentaries.” The book has long since been accepted as a most reliable standard of appeal, and its commendations and valuations are frequently quoted in catalogues of theological works.