"They were all the same, weren't they? Hell-fire preaching, that's what you got in those days. Frightened the living daylights out of people."

Wrong. Spurgeon certainly believed in hell and often said so, but the sermons which he got out of his Bible were never designed to scare people into religious ways. They were invitations, not threats.

"Only cared about people's souls, didn't they? Not a thought for their bodies. For all those Victorian preachers cared, you could work day and night for a pittance and be left to starve when you couldn't work and longer."

Wrong. The Almshouses Spurgeon built are evidence of a lively social conscience at the Tabernacle. He also built a large orphanage and cared enough about the body to see that his orphan boys had their own swimming pool.

"Like film stars, they were. Hero-worshipped. People would come for miles just to listen to a sermon. And it went on for a full hour."

Correct. The Tabernacle was packed whenever Spurgeon was to preach. In fact, it wasn't big enough. He filled the largest halls London had to offer. At places like the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, Exeter Hall, the Royal Agricultural Hall — in places like these and the Crystal Palace, he spoke to congregations of 12,000 to 25,000 people.

But he started humbly enough. From his birth in the Essex village of Kelvedon to his arrival as a London preacher is the story of just nineteen and a half years. Those few years made him what he was, so we'll concentrate on those...

— Narrator: Kelvedon children of today aren't tough enough to enjoy themselves in bad weather, but the huge Spurgeon family, children of a Congregational minister, followed a more Puritan path. Most of these children not only come from smaller families and will enjoy more comforts, their religious training will be less stern, too. They will hear more about the goodness of God than about his severity.

With young Charles it seems to have been the other way around.  Indeed, there are hints in Spurgeon's sermons that he may have come to think his early religious instruction too severe. Christian teaching nowadays is expected to make children feel secure and happy, free to play and please themselves. It didn't have that effect on young Charles. Hell-fire teaching was something he did know about from the receiving end.

— Spurgeon: I know a dear Christian woman who loved her little ones and sought their salvation. When she prayed for them, she thought it right to use the best means she could to arrest their attention and win their minds. I hope you all do likewise. The means, however, which she thought best calculated for her object was the terrors of the Lord. She used to read to her children chapter after chapter of "Alleine's Alarm to the Unconverted" [written by Joseph Alleine, currently published by The Banner of Truth under the title A SURE GUIDE TO HEAVEN]. Oh, that book! how many dreams it gave her boy at night about the devouring flames and the everlasting burnings. But the boy's heart grew hardened, as if it were annealed rather then melted by the furnace of fear.

But I know that the words of my father with me alone, when he prayed for me, and bade me pray for myself — not to use any form of prayer, but to pray just as I felt, and to ask from God what I felt that I really wanted — left an impression on my mind that will never be erased. If there be anything I know, anything that I am quite assured of beyond all question, it is that praying breath is never spent in vain.

When the Athenian senate, upon one occasion, found it most convenient to meet together in the open air, a sparrow, pursued by a hawk, flew in the direction of the Senate. Being hard pressed by the bird of prey, it sought shelter in the bosom of one of the senators. He, being a man of rough and vulgar mould, took the bird from his bosom, dashed it on the ground and so killed it. Whereupon the whole senate rose in uproar, and without one single dissenting voice, condemned him to die, as being unworthy of a seat in the senate with them, or to be called an Athenian, if he did not render succour to a creature that confided in him.

Can we suppose that the God of Heaven, whose nature is love, could tear out of His bosom the poor fluttering dove that flies from the eagle of justice into the bosom of His mercy; let us not think so hardly of the God of Heaven.

— Narrator: When Spurgeon was 2 & 1/2 years old, the family left Kelvedon for Colchester and he was sent away to live with his grandparents. If it were to happen to one of these children [(in the film) local London children at a playground], the child psychiatrist might look on anxiously, but then the young are more watched over and protected these days. At any case, he was going to another Manse beside a Congregational chapel. Grandfather Spurgeon's church has been rebuilt recently, but the setting is much as the little boy knew it. The old man's grave is still here, and you can still try to see this bit of Cambridgeshire through the little boy's eyes. Years later, he could preach about the fields as the back of the house and garden, with its long yew-hedge:

— Spurgeon: In my grandfather's garden there was a fine old hedge of yew of considerable length, which was clipped and trimmed till it made quite a wall of verdue. Behind it was a wide grass walk, which looked upon the fields. The grass was kept mown, so as to make pleasant walking. My grandfather was wont to use it as his study.

Up and down it he would walk when preparing his sermons, and always when it was fair, he had half an hour there before preaching. To me it seemed a perfect paradise, and being forbidden to stay there when grandfather was meditating, I viewed it with no small degree of awe. But I was shocked and even horrified by hearing a farming man remark, "It'ud grow a good many 'taturs if it wor ploughed up."

I remember — I was but a child of some ten years of age or less — Mr. Richard Knill, an earnest worker for Christ, felt moved, I know not why, to take me on his knee, at my grandfather's house, and to utter words like these, which were treasured up by the family, and by myself especially. "This child," said he, "will preach the gospel, and he will preach it to the largest congregations of our times." He spoke very solemnly and called upon all present to witness that he had said. Then he gave me a sixpence as a reward if I would learn the hymn —

"God moves in a mysterious way; His wonders to perform."

I was made to promise that when I preached in Rowland Hill's Chapel that hymn should be sung. Think of that as a promise from a child! I believed the prophecy, and my standing here today is partly occasioned by such belief.

— Narrator: Richard Knill proved to be a true prophet, if an alarming one; but the old Stambourne meeting-house as Charles himself drew it at the age of twelve was a homely place. He loved it, as well as reverencing it. Today the holy is no longer fenced off from the life of the world, and yet it's not easy for us to recover the child's wonder at a raindrop or a twig, his feeling for a patch of grass as holy ground. At grandfather Spurgeon's grave, though, anyone can understand the sense of less that comes with parting, even though death may not be the cause of it.

— Spurgeon: I recollect when first I left my grandfather, with whom I had been brought up as a little child, how grieved I was to part from him; it was the first great sorrow of my little life. Grandfather seemed very sorry too, and we had a cry together; he did not quite know what to say to me, but he said, "Now child, tonight, when the moon shines, and you look at it, don't forget that it is the same moon your grandfather will be looking at," and for years as a child, I used to love the moon because I thought that my grandfather's eyes and my own somehow met there on the moon.

Mark you, this dear old man was a Calvinist, an out-and-out preacher of free grace. I am as firm a believer in the doctrines of grace as any man living, and a true Calvinist after the order of John Calvin himself; but I will imitate my Lord and his apostles, who, though they taught that salvation is of grace, and grace alone, feared not to speak to men as rational beings and responsible agents, and bid them "strive to enter in at the strait gate."

"Ah!" says one, "but I have such a little faith." Bless God that you have even a little! Have I not often told you that, if you have only starlight, you should bless God for it, and He will give you moonlight; and if you have moonlight, and bless God for it, He will give you daylight? Be thankful for any genuine faith that you possess. It is not the strength of your faith that saves you, but the strength of Him upon whom you rely.

"Ah!" says another, "but I have not the experience that I have read about in others. I have read of some people being dreadfully cut up, distressed, and alarmed under a sense of sin, but I have not been like that." Who ever said that you should be? Listen to the text, "Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37). Does Christ say anything about experience, and law-work, and all that sort of thing? "Him that cometh to me" — not one special sort of "him" or any other sort, but any "him" who comes, whoever he may be — "I will in no wise cast out."

— Narrator: But in Colchester Spurgeon did have an experience which meant a great deal to him. He was fifteen at the time, and already at work helping with the teaching at a school in New Market. But on Sunday, January 6, 1850, he had spent the night under his parents' roof. He was troubled, as always, by a sense of his own sinfulness and helplessness, unlike the typical teenager of today. Walking to church along Barrack Street, he felt despondent. It was snowing and it seemed a long way to the Congregational Church to which his mother had told him to go. He turned down this side street instead, one in which he could see what was then a Primitive Methodist Chapel. The youth of today tends to look out at the world rather than in at himself; but Spurgeon's attitude was more inward and personal. Where a sensitive modern youth might seek the cure for a guilty society, wasteful and greedy, he sought the cure for a guilty soul, sinful and distressed, and he found it.

— Spurgeon: It was about twenty-six years ago — twenty-six years exactly last Thursday — that I looked unto the Lord, and found salvation, through this text: "Look Unto Me, and Be Ye Saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else" (Isaiah 45:22). You have often heard me tell how I had been wandering about, seeking rest, and finding none, till a plain, unlettered, lay preacher among the Primitive Methodists stood up and gave out his passage as his text. He had not much to say, thank God, for that compelled him to keep on repeating his text, and there was nothing needed, by me at any rate, except his text.

I remember how he said: "It is Christ that speaks. I am in the garden in an agony, pouring out my soul unto death; I am on the tree, dying for sinners; look unto Me! Look unto Me! that is all you have to do. A child can look. One who is almost an idiot can look. However weak, or however poor, a man may be, he can look; and if he looks the promise is that he shall live."

Then stopping, he pointed to where I was sitting under the gallery, and he said, "That young man there looks very miserable." I expect I did, for that is how I felt. Then he said, "There is no hope for you, young man, or any chance of getting rid of your sin, but by Looking to Jesus;" and he shouted, as I think only a Primitive Methodist can: "Look! young man! Look now!"

AND I DID LOOK... and when they sang a hallelujah before they went home, in their own earnest way, I am sure I joined in it. It happened to be a day when the snow was lying deep, and more was falling; so, as I went home, those words of David kept ringing through my heart, "Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow" (Psalm 51:7); and it seemed as if all nature was in accord with that blessed deliverance from sin which I had found in a single moment by looking to Jesus.

— Narrator: The young Spurgeon spent most of his days in modest churches among small houses or in flat low-lying country. Perhaps the pulpit commanded his attention because the word preached was the most exalted thing in his experience. But he did his own interpreting of what he heard.

He had been baptized as a child. The churches he had been brought up in did not practice baptism by immersion and nor did the Methodists who converted him, but Spurgeon felt that that was what was called for now and he was baptized at Isleham where there was then a ferry service at the River Lark.

— Spurgeon: I walked unto open river, on a cold May day, to be baptized into the name of Jesus as timid and timorous a youth as you might well see; but when I rose from that water the fear of man was gone from my mind.

I had to walk about 8 miles, from Newmarket to Isleham, where I was to be baptized in the river. It was many years ago, but the remembrance of it is very vivid at this moment, and it seems to me as though it only happened yesterday. I rose very early in the morning so that I might have a long time in private prayer, and I think that the blessing I received that day resulted largely from that season of solitary supplication, and my meditation, as I walked along the country roads and lanes.

— Narrator: It was not raining that day and the cold wind did not deter a large crowd from following him along these roads and lanes besides the dikes. Yet it was a lonely path. His parents understood and sympathised, but it was not their way. It was May 3rd, his mother's birthday. Two other candidates were to be baptized, and congregation was gathering on both banks of the River Lark. There were more people in the ferry and in other boats out there in the cold wind.  Spurgeon was glad they were there, but it wasn't to them that he gave his attention.

— Spurgeon: It did not matter to me how many spectators looked on me that day, nor whether they were angels, men or devils. I wanted them all to witness that henceforth I was Christ's servant — that I bare in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus, the watermark which could never be taken out.

— Narrator: His first sermon was preached in a cottage at Teversham, near Cambridge. He went there, not knowing he was expected to preach, but before the closing hymn an old lady cried out, "Bless your heart, how old are you?" Young Charles Spurgeon replied primly, "You must wait till the service is over before making any such enquiries."

Actually, the answer was 16.  He was still 16 when he became the pastor of the Baptist congregation in a little thatched chapel at Waterbeach. Waterbeach looks innocent enough now. Perhaps to our eyes it would have done so then. Perhaps the real difference between us and the Victorian preacher is in what we expect. We expect at the moral level a bit of ordinary human decency and kindness, at the religious level a modicum of quiet devotion. Spurgeon's expectations were on a larger and more heroic scale. So were his results:

— Spurgeon: I knew a village once that was perhaps one of the worst villages in England for many things. There went a lad into the village, and but a lad, and one who had no scholarship, but was rough, and sometimes vulgar. He began to preach there, and it pleased God to turn that village upside down, and in a short time the little thatched chapel was crammed, and the biggest vagabonds of the village were weeping floods of tears, and those who had been the curse of the parish became its blessing, and where there had been robberies and villainies of every kind all around the neighborhood, there were none, because the men who did the mischief were themselves in the house of God, rejoicing to hear of Jesus crucified."

— Narrator: Within two years he was in a London church, and very soon that was too small for his congregation. He had arrived. He was even photographed in his pulpit. But it's easier to understand the sudden popularity of a boy preacher that it is to explain how he commanded so much attention for another 38 years. If anyone knows what made him different from a hundred other preachers it should be England's ERIC HAYDEN who is a former pastor of the Tabernacle [1956 thru 1961].

— HAYDEN: A former graduate of this college — Spurgeon's College — Dr. Gilbert Laws, said that Spurgeon brought a blood-transfusion to the English pulpit. He certainly injected it with a great many things. For instance, simplicity and humour. The both of these were governed by his voice. It was in days before tape recorders or public address systems yet his voice was described as a "silver bell." He could preach to thousands of people; in the open-air it would be hard over a mile away.

He didn't like what was called "the Sunday voice," and he always taught his students not to say, "He that hath ears to hear," as "He that hath yors to yor, let him yor." Well, in this simple voice, using Anglo-Saxon, down-to-earth English — not Latinized — he preached the five points of Calvinism; NOT in the very harsh, hyper-Calvinism of his day, where he made a God a sort of wrathful tyrant condemning people to Hell — he spoke with a wooing note, and he brought humour in.  For instance, when he was talking of Election, he would pray, "Lord, save your elect — and then elect some more." Or, he said, "Now, when I go to Heaven, on the outside of the Gates, it will say, 'Whosoever will may come;' when I get in Heaven and look around, over the Gate it will say, 'Elect before the foundation of the world.' "

And I believe it was this Calvinism which gave people a great personal sense of security in their salvation that was one of the secrets of his ministry. If you look at an Index to the many sermons that he published, they are like a Body of Divinity. He preached from every book in the Bible, on every Bible doctrine, and yet so simply that the common people heard him gladly as they listened to Jesus Christ. Costermongers, people who worked in warehouses roundabout the Tabernacle, shopkeepers, and yet high-up people in society — Queen Victorial, the Princess Royal, Ruskin, the Prime Minister — they all listened to him because they could understand him and they enjoyed his preaching. He used to say that he was like Bunyan:  prick him anywhere and he bled the Bible. And he preached the Bible, but most of all — as is printed on the front of all 63 volumes of his sermons — "We Preach Jesus Christ, and Him Crucified."

But I think the real secret is this — and I'm sure Spurgeon would agree — it wasn't just means and methods; many tried that; there became many miniature "Spurgeons" — they preached the same message, but they didn't see the same results. I believe the real secret is that the Holy Spirit was upon Spurgeon in a very definite way, and he would say himself that it was the Sovereignty of God — He chose him (if you like) to be His instrument for that particular period of non-conformist history."

— Narrator: It certainly wasn't all voice and delivery; his sermons became literature. He would go into the pulpit with a single page of notes and preach for an hour. His words were taken down and sent to the printer; then he worked over the gallery proofs and sent the results out into the world. This started when he was quite young, but the demand continued through the years and the flow of sermons and books of sermons increased with it. When he was still only half-way through his ministry, he himself commented on the phenomenon:

— Spurgeon: This discourse, when it shall be printed, will make fifteen hundred of my sermons which have been published regularly week by week. This is certainly a remarkable fact. I do not know of any instance in modern times in which fifteen hundred sermons have thus followed each other from the press from one person, and have continued to command a large circle of readers. I desire to utter most hearty thanksgiving to God for divine help in thinking out and uttering these sermons — sermons which have not merely been printed, but have been read with eagerness, and have also been translated into foreign tongues; sermons which are publicly read on this very Sabbath day in hundreds of places where a minister cannot be found; sermons which God has blessed to the conversion of multitudes of souls.

I thought the best way in which I could express my thankfulness would be to preach Jesus Christ again, and set Him forth in a sermon in which the simple gospel should be made as clear as a child's alphabet.

A Romish bishop said to one of the early Reformers, when he preached salvation by simple faith, "Oh, Mr. Doctor, open that gap to the people and we are undone." And so indeed they are, for the business and trade of priestcraft are ended forever if men may simply trust Jesus and live. Yet it is even so.

There is life in a look at Jesus; is not this simple enough? Oh, poor soul, if thou canst not see the whole of Christ nor all His beauties, nor all the riches of His grace; yet if thou canst but see Him who was made sin for us thou shalt live. If thou sayest, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief," thy faith will save thee; a little faith will give thee a great Christ, and thou shalt find eternal life in Him.

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LAST MODIFIED  July 31 - 2004