BIOGRAPHY PAGE
	****************** WALKS and TALKS with CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON ******************
by Wayland Hoyt
.
Published in 1892 by the American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia PA. *******************************************************************************************

It has been my own good fortune to come into quite familiar intercourse with Mr. Spurgeon. Often he has treated me with singular kindness and consideration. I have been at his house, and he has been good enough now and then to detach himself for a day from his multitudinous and pressing duties, and allow me the privilege of spending such day with Him.

Nothing can help life like life. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig tree looking on a fig tree becometh fruitful." Diogenes was right when he went about searching with a lighted candle for a true man. To get into contact with a great soul is to receive high treasure. There is so much suggestion in such contact, impulse, reinforcement for everything that is best in you and noblest. To display in some sort what Mr. Spurgeon taught me in these most precious opportunities of familiar speech with him is my object in this booklet.

It think the first thing which would strike one brought for a little into personal contact with Mr. Spurgeon would be the thorough and healthful religious sanity of the man. With Mr. Spurgeon religion was never anything in the least put on. It was always a steady and pervasive influence and color, flushing everything. I never met a man who was so absolutely free from cant. I never met a man whose tongue so thoroughly refused to run over the routine of usual religious phrases. In everything he said and in everything he did there was the completest naturalness.

I was walking with him in the woods one day just outside of London, and as we strolled under the shadow of the summer foliage we came upon a log lying athwart the path. "Come," said he, as naturally as one would say it were he hungry and bread were put before him, "Come, let us pray." And kneeling beside the log he lifted his soul to the Lord Jesus in the most loving, outpouring and yet reverent prayer. Then rising from his knees as naturally, we went strolling on talking about this and that. The prayer was no parenthesis interjected. It was something that belonged as much as the habit of his mind as breathing did to the habit of his body.

So there was always with Mr. Spurgeon the most constant and loving recognition of God. More than to any man I ever met, God seemed to him palpable. One could not help feeling that what the Scripture says of Abraham could have been without the least straining said of Mr. Spurgeon — the friend of God. Every slightest thing he saw — the birds, the leaves scattering along the way, the glint of the sunlight between the shadows of the arching trees, the flower nestling amid the tree roots, the canopy of the sky above, the white encampment of the clouds — everything he had, his home, his friends, the blessings of his daily life, the chance for the telling of his Lord's gospel, were to him as real and direct gifts of God as any gifts a human friend might have put within his hand. I do not mean that he was always talking in a specifically religious way or about specifically religious things. He was the openest man to all the variant influences streaming in on one I ever knew. I mean that somehow every least and lowliest thing got such religious tinge, that a day's speech with him made you feel as though you had been through all its hours in a kind of worship. The atmosphere he diffused was so strongly and yet so naturally a religious atmosphere, that every nobler impulse in you was stirred to better life; every conception you had ever had of the nearness of God and of his love for you was cleared and greatened.

Once when I was riding with him I happened to mention a rumor which had been running through the papers, that he prayed once for a ring and got it. I asked him if that was true. "Oh, no," he said. "Let me tell you the whole story." And I reproduce it here as accurately as I can remember it, to show the way in which everything in his view came to him from God's hand: Mrs. Spurgeon had been very sick, and for the benefit of the sea air he had taken her to Brighton. Leaving her on Thursday morning, when he must go to London to preach, as his wont was always, in the Tabernacle on the evening of that day, he asked her if he could not bring her something which would relieve a little the tedium of her sickness. At first nothing seemed to come to her. In sportive mood she at last said that she would like an opal ring and a piping goldfinch. Lovingly and yet laughingly he declared it was quite impossible for him to bring her such things as these.

But when he had reached London and the noon mail came in, and he was opening it as he was sitting at his luncheon, in the mail there was a little box, and tearing it open he saw flashing up from it the sheen of an opal ring. Some friend had sent it with a most kindly note, asking Mrs. Spurgeon's acceptance of it, with the hope that its lustre might fling a little light into the gloom of her sick chamber.

"What I thought," he said, "when that ring flashed on me, of God's care and goodness, it would be impossible for me to tell."

Carefully it was laid away in his pocket, that its brightness might flash pleasure to Mrs. Spurgeon when he should have chance to carry it to her. That very afternoon, as he went on to tell me, he was obliged to visit a gentleman who was very sick — so sick that it was utterly impossible for him to speak aloud, and with whom communication could be had only by writing on a slate. The visit was over, and the prayer offered, and then as Mr. Spurgeon rose to leave, the wife of a gentleman said to him:

"Mr. Spurgeon, for some years I have made a pet of a piping goldfinch. The only person in the world to whom I would give it is yourself. But the bird makes too much noise for my husband in his weak state, and won't you accept it?"

Mr. Spurgeon said he preached that night in the Tabernacle with the ring in his pocket and the little bird sleeping with its head beneath its wing in a room of the Tabernacle; and the next morning Mrs. Spurgeon had her opal ring and her piping goldfinch. Through the weary hours of that long sickness both were a great delight to her. The bird would sit upon her finger and sing its heart out. When she recovered, the little creature finished its ministry and died.

It struck me as a most wonderful story, but afterward when I thought about it, it did not seem so wonderful, after all. I looked back along my own life and saw many a time when God had given me, and as unexpectedly, what was quite equivalent to an opal ring and a piping goldfinch. But the trouble with me had been that in their giving I had failed to recognize the hand of the heavenly Father.

But Mr. Spurgeon was not so stupid. What came to him of brightness and of pleasure, came, to his thinking, straight from the hand of God. It might come through channels intermediate, but always to him God was the initial giver. And so always upon his lips sat praises even for what men would call slight mercies, and the brightness of them was steadily enhanced by his perpetual recognition of the kindness of his heavenly Father.

Another thing most delightful about Mr. Spurgeon was his evident childlike faith. That God should do great things for him and through him, seemed to him to be as much expected as that a mother should meet the necessities of her child. He had been telling me once about the amount of money he must disburse in order to sustain his various enterprises. We stopped talking for a little, and I sat looking at him. He was as unconcerned as is a little child holding its mother's hand. There were no lines upon his brow, there was no shadow of anxiety upon his face, only the large, good-natured English smile.

.

I was thinking of the orphans he must feed, the old Christian women he must care for, the professors' salaries in his Pastors' College he must pay, the students he must supply with teaching, many of them with bread and clothing, since there were too poor to buy these for themselves. I said to him, in a kind of wonder, "How can you be so easy-minded? Do not these responsibilities come upon you sometimes with a kind of crushing weight?"

He looked at me with a sort of holy amazement, and answered, "No; the Lord is a good banker, I trust him. He has never failed me. Why should I be anxious?"

He once said to me, "The building of the Tabernacle taught me to swim." And then he went on to tell me how, when the enterprise was in progress, a point was reached when, because of some peculiarity in English laws of land tenure, it was necessary that the trustees of his society should assume personal obligations for a very large amount, and sign their names to certain papers bonding them. His people were poor, he said, especially in those earlier days, and they replied to him that it was impossible for them to put their names upon such a bond, for altogether they were not worth the amount needed. "That was true," said Mr. Spurgeon, "but I knew the Lord would help me."

About that time he was riding with a friend on the fringes of London, and a man, driving in a buggy, approached. When the two vehicles reached each other, this man stopped his buggy, and calling over to Mr. Spurgeon in the other carriage, said, "Are not you Mr. Spurgeon?" "Yes," was the reply. "Please ride with me in my buggy, and you will hear something to your advantage," said he to Mr. Spurgeon. Turning to his friend with whom he was driving, Mr. Spurgeon said, "I do not know that man. I think I have seen his face in the crowd. Perhaps I had better accept his invitation."

And getting into the man's buggy, they drove on. Said this man, "You are building a Tabernacle?" "Yes," said Mr. Spurgeon. "You are troubled about certain papers?" "Yes," Spurgeon replied. "I have determined," the man said, "to give myself twenty-five pounds for the building of the Tabernacle." Mr. Spurgeon thanked him. "But," he said, "what you want now is money. Come to my house tomorrow morning, and I will put into you hands twenty-thousand pounds' worth of securities. I want you to take them to dispose of them as you need the money. Sign all papers, and have the enterprise go on. If hereafter you can pay me back the money, well and good; if not, I shall not trouble you."

Next morning the man put these securities into Mr. Spurgeon's hands. There was no difficulty about signing the papers. The Tabernacle went swiftly onward to completion, and subsequently the entire money was repaid to the person making such a strange proposition at this nick of time. Mr. Spurgeon pertinently asked, "How can I help believing in such a Lord?"

So, too, his steady expectancy of spiritual result from his preaching was evidence of his childlike faith. He never preached or printed a sermon that he did not expect great spiritual result from it. It was his surprise, not that the sermon should produce such result, but that it should not.

I remember a characteristic incident of him. Some of his pupils who had graduated from his Pastors' College had returned with the story of their successes, and their failures too. One young man who had been esteemed bright as a student came back sorrowfully to tell only of failure. As far as he could see, no result whatever had issued from his preaching. When he had finished his story, Mr. Spurgeon turned to him in his kindly way, saying, "But you did not expect any result, did you?" "No," answered the young man. "And that is precisely the reason why you have not found result. According to your faith it shall be unto you."

There was never the slightest look of routine in Mr. Spurgeon's services or methods. He never preached simply because he must and to get through with it. He preached having implicit faith in the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, that it would vanquish souls for his Lord and Savior. So there was a jubilant tone and ring in every sermon that he preached. He went forecasting victory, not foreboding defeat. In his thought there was never to be a service rendered for his Lord when should not come a widening of his Lord's kingdom.

I think this is the real reason for his undying enthusiasm in the work of preaching, and his steady hold on men through it. The helmet of salvation was always on his head, and undauntedly he engaged in his Master's battles. It makes great difference whether you go into the Lord's fight expecting vanquishing or vanquishment.

I was greatly interested in Mr. Spurgeon's method of prayer. It seemed to me so different from the struggling, straining, agonizing sort I had read of as the kind which many of the great saints were wont to use themselves. This matter of prayer was a most frequent subject of conversation with him. He seemed especially to delight in detailing specific Divine answers to specific prayers.

"But how do you pray?" I asked him once. "I always find a particular promise over against this need of mine or that," he said, "and then I simply tell the Lord my need and plead the promise and believe he will be true to it."

"But I have read," I answered, "in biographies of the great saints, of night-long agonies of prayer, and I have tried myself to follow their example and even said, I myself will devote the whole night to prayer, and in a sort have tried it, but never could. Sleep vanquished me. Do you pray long?"

"I do not think," he answered, "I have prayed five minutes at a stretch for this thing or that. Prayer is never a long and wearying and difficult thing. I find my promise and plead it, and believe what God has said and that he will honor it. Why should there be any such strain? Why may I not ask God for things confidently, as a child does a father?"

This was our talk substantially, thought I do not reproduce the words exactly. "But," said I, "do you never have a quiver of uncertainty?" "I cannot say I never have it," was his answer, "but I am sure that just in the proportion in which I do have it, I am wrong. I like to find myself shut up to God. When things go prosperously I need the straits, that I may be made to recognize my dependence upon him." I got from Mr. Spurgeon a better idea of what the Scripture means by the prayer of faith than any other man I ever met, or from any book I ever read.

Another thing that made a great impression upon me, as I walked, or rode, or talked with Mr. Spurgeon, was the thorough sanity of his religious methods. Though believing as intensely as he did in the value and validity of prayer, he never in the least fell into the irrational fanaticism of faith-curing. When I was last in London one of his most valued and trusted deacons was desperately sick. I was even startled by the way Mr. Spurgeon summoned his church to prayer for the sick man.

In the presence of his great congregation he spoke again and again of the necessity and power of prayer in such a case, and never offered prayer without mentioning the sick man, and adjured his people to remember him, and appointed special meetings for supplications on his behalf.

I remember that I thought, if the man should not get well will there not result at least a kind of unbelieving disappointment? But all the time the man was under the care of the most skillful of physicians, Mr. Spurgeon's prayer was always sane — never a wild refusal of proper means, but instead a constant dependence upon God's blessing on the use of the most efficient means procurable. The sick man got well, and his recovery was hailed jubilantly as another evidence that God will listen to his children's cry; but by no possibility could the prayer be interpreted as against the sane reasonable use of proper means.

So, too, Mr. Spurgeon prayed steadily for God's prosperity upon all his enterprises — Pastors' College, Orphanage, Homes for Old People, Chapel Building Societies, and what not. But he never sought in the least to cover the fact that as thoroughly and strenuously as possible he put his hand to plying second causes. He asked for contribution and various support as often as he prayed. With him faith was grasp on God, that he would marshal and mass second causes for his help. He believed great things of God, but nonetheless did he himself attempt, and urge others to attempt, great things for God.

A wild faith, which after all is nothing better than fanaticism, a contemptuous flinging aside of second causes, was at the farthest possible remove from both Mr. Spurgeon's mood an method. His business habits, in the carrying on of all his great enterprises, were most exact. He used his magnificent, shrewd, English common sense to the utmost, while he depended more trustfully than any man I ever knew upon the prayer-hearing and prayer-answering God.

So, also, Mr. Spurgeon never forced himself into any of his enterprises. This he especially told me. He was always forced into them. In other words, instead of making a path for himself, he loyally and lovingly followed providential indications. For example, he never thought of an orphanage until some wealthy lady left for such specific purpose a sufficiently large amount of money in her will to begin the building of it. This Mr. Spurgeon accepted as a providential indication, and went on with the enterprise, sure that the Lord would help him. And having begun such enterprise, when difficulties emerged his faith did not fail.

He told me that the original sum of money left for his orphanage was in railroad securities. After he had begun the work and let [committed to] the contracts, these securities became almost completely worthless. There he was with the enterprise on his hands and with no means to finish it. But even then his faith did not fail, nor did he imagine simply because difficulty arose that he had failed properly to interpret providential indications. He betook himself to prayer and to the wisest and most sedulous use of second causes. Slowly but steadily the buildings rose, and Mr. Spurgeon was to the last farthing true to his contracts.

Then, as he told me, these railroad securities recovered their valued beyond the original amount. As Mr. Spurgeon explained it, the Lord wanted him to have some endowment for the orphanage, and when the time approached for such necessity the endowment was ready.

I was greatly interested in Mr. Spurgeon's methods of preparation for his pulpit. He was a man of the most singular ability for self-marshaling and self-control. In this respect he always reminded me of Mr. Beecher, who seemed to be absolutely sure of him for any moment, for any occasion. At once his powers would gather themselves in exact order, and he could call on this or that at will as it was needed.

I once said to Mr. Beecher, "It cannot be called a labor for you to preach." "No," he replied, "it is only a kind of involuntary labor."

The same singular ability of powers at once in hand was evident in Mr. Spurgeon. His pulpit preparations were always just before each service. He once said to me that if he were appointed to preach on some great occasion, six months beforehand, he should not think at all of preparation for it until just as the time struck: he would occupy himself about other things.

"Such swift preparation is best for me," he said. This surprising ability of quick self-control and marshaling of powers gave him a perpetual consciousness of ease. He had never the fear that he would not be equal to the occasion when the moment came. So instead of being strained and anxious, his mind was in a beautiful openness for what might flow in upon it.

And yet, especially in his earlier years, after his preparation had been made, and just as he was about to confront the throngs he knew were gathering to listen to him, he used to have the most fearful nervous anxiety, almost convulsions. He told me once that for years and years in his earlier ministry he never preached but that he had beforehand a most straining time of vomiting. His stomach was able to retain absolutely nothing. In his later years he vanquished this nervous tendency.

I said to him once, "Tell me how you prepare your sermons."

"Well," he said, "Saturday afternoon is with me a kind of reception time. Friends come and see me and I spend the afternoon in pleasant intercourse, but by six o'clock everybody must go. Then, choosing my text, I have laid open on the table all the commentaries of every sort pertaining to the passage. If Mrs. Spurgeon is well enough, she reads the commentaries to me as I sit in my chair. If she cannot, my young men do it for me. I sit and listen, and think, and elaborate, and arrange. By ten o'clock the morning sermon is done, and I think it through again on Sunday morning as I ride to church. Substantially the same process is gone through with Sunday afternoon for the Sunday evening sermon."

Every man to his own way of using his tools. On Saturday night I have sometimes asked Mr. Beecher what he was going to preach about next day, and he has answered me, "I know no more than you do. But do not think I have not been making preparation. I am like a woman who puts a whole any of dough to rise. If she is going to bake a batch of bread she pulls off enough for that; if a lot of biscuit, enough for that. Sunday morning I choose and elaborate my special topic."

Such general sort of preparation was steadily made by Mr. Spurgeon. The specific preparation for the specific occasion, he told me, was made as I have said. I am very sure that no lesser preacher could gather countenance either from Mr. Spurgeon or from Mr. Beecher for the habit of slight preparation for pulpit work. The truth is that the most of us do altogether too little of this general preparation.

Another thing that struck me about Mr. Spurgeon was his intimate familiarity with the works of all the great English Puritan divines. He could repeat pages of them at will. He knew precisely how this man and that man of them analyzed his text and wrought his periods. The reason for his nervous, sinewy, plain, and yet picturesque Saxon is to be found here.

Matthew Henry was his favorite, but he was the last man to despise in any wise the results of learning which have been so affluently gathered into the commentaries upon our English Bible. Yet, as his sermons show, he was never at all a slave to them, but with singular fidelity and surprising quickness made his own what they taught him. I think preachers who sneer at commentaries are like the boatman who would scoff at his oars. It was delightful to see how large was Mr. Spurgeon's knowledge of the results of Christian study of the inspired Word.

Mr. Spurgeon was a BAPTIST. He believed that the New Testament read toward the Baptist faith. He had little patience with the too great irregularity and looseness which play such havoc amid too many churches called Baptist, on the other side of the ocean. While he was not one with us in the practice of strict communion, he was utterly one with us in a persistent demand for immersion as a prerequisite to church membership. Talking with him on, I think, the last day I ever saw him, he said to me that were he a pastor in this country [USA], he should not clash with our practice of restricted communion.

Such, in snatch of vision here and there, was the man himself. No truer, trustfuler, more consecrated soul ever did service for the Lord Christ in this world of ours. He had singular ability, tides of emotion, and exquisite felicity of speech, and these would have done much for him; but the chief thing was, he was a man utterly consecrated to Jesus Christ.

. PILGRIM PUBLICATIONS INTERNET PILGRIM PUBLICATIONS MAGAZINE PILGRIM PUBLICATIONS HOME PAGE PILGRIM SPURGEON BIOGRAPHY PAGE   E-Mail:  CATALOG REQUEST or FEEDBACK

http://www.pilgrimpublications.com/walktalk.htm

http://members.aol.com/pilgrimpub/walktalk.htm

LAST MODIFIED  July 29 - 2004

TOP  OF  PAGE

.