"We are all at times unconscious prophets." -- Charles Spurgeon
Charles Haddon (C.H.) Spurgeon (June 19, 1834 – January 31, 1892) was a British Particular Baptist preacher who remains highly influential among Christians of different denominations, among whom he is still known as the "Prince of Preachers". This despite the fact that he was a strong figure in the Reformed Baptist tradition, defending the Church in agreement with the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith understanding, against liberalism and pragmatic theological tendencies even in his day.
In his lifetime, Spurgeon preached to around 10,000,000 people, often up to 10 times each week at different places. His sermons have been translated into many languages.Spurgeon was the pastor of the congregation of the New Park Street Chapel (later the Metropolitan Tabernacle) in London for 38 years. He was part of several controversies with the Baptist Union of Great Britain and later had to leave that denomination. In 1857, he started a charity organization called Spurgeon's which now works globally. He also founded Spurgeon's College, which was named after him posthumously.
Spurgeon was a prolific author of many types of works including sermons, an autobiography, a commentary, books on prayer, a devotional, a magazine, poetry, hymnist, and more. Many sermons were transcribed as he spoke and were translated into many languages during his lifetime.
"A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.""A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.""A sinner can no more repent and believe without the Holy Spirit's aid than he can create a world.""A vigorous temper is not altogether an evil. Men who are easy as an old shoe are generally of little worth.""Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.""Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.""By perseverance the snail reached the ark.""Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.""Giving is true having.""Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self.""I believe that nothing happens apart from divine determination and decree. We shall never be able to escape from the doctrine of divine predestination - the doctrine that God has foreordained certain people unto eternal life.""I do not think I should care to go on worshipping a Madonna even if she did wink. One cannot make much out of a wink. We want something more than that from the object of our adoration.""I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.""If any of you should ask me for an epitome of the Christian religion, I should say that it is in one word - prayer. Live and die without prayer, and you will pray long enough when you get to hell.""If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.""It has been said that our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but only empties today of its strength.""It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.""It is not well to make great changes in old age.""It's not the having, it's the getting.""Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.""Must is a hard nut to crack, but it has a sweet kernel.""No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.""No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers.""None are more unjust in their judgments of others than those who have a high opinion of themselves.""Of two evils, choose neither.""Saving faith is an immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, resting upon Him alone, for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of God's grace.""Sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite.""The goose that lays the golden eggs likes to lay where there are eggs already.""The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.""The Lord gets his best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction.""Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.""We have come to a turning point in the road. If we turn to the right mayhap our children and our children's children will go that way; but if we turn to the left, generations yet unborn will curse our names for having been unfaithful to God and to His Word.""Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.""You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.""You might not always get what you want, but you always get what you expect."
Born in Kelvedon, Essex, Spurgeon's conversion to Christianity came on January 6, 1850, at age fifteen. On his way to a scheduled appointment, a snow storm forced him to cut short his intended journey and to turn into a Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester where "God opened his heart to the salvation message." The text that moved him was Isaiah 45:22 - "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else."
Later that year, on April 4, 1850, he was admitted to the church at Newmarket. His baptism followed on May 3 in the river Lark, at Isleham. Later that same year he moved to Cambridge. He preached his first sermon in the winter of 1850-51 in a cottage at Teversham, Cambridge; from the beginning of his ministry his style and ability were considered to be far above average. In the same year, he was installed as pastor of the small Baptist church at Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, where he published his first literary work: a Gospel tract written in 1853.
In April 1854, after preaching three months on probation and just four years after his conversion, Spurgeon, then only 19, was called to the pastorate of London's famed New Park Street Chapel, Southwark (formerly pastored by the Particular Baptist Benjamin Keach, theologian John Gill, and John Rippon). This was the largest Baptist congregation in London at the time, although it had dwindled in numbers for several years. Spurgeon found friends in London among his fellow pastors, such as William Garrett Lewis of Westbourne Grove Church, an older man who along with Spurgeon went on to found the London Baptist Association. Within a few months of Spurgeon's arrival at Park Street, his ability as a preacher made him famous. The following year the first of his sermons in the "New Park Street Pulpit" was published. Spurgeon's sermons were published in printed form every week and had a high circulation. By the time of his death in 1892, he had preached nearly 3,600 sermons and published forty-nine volumes of commentaries, sayings, anecdotes, illustrations, and devotions.
Immediately following his fame was controversy. The first attack in the Press appeared in the Earthen Vessel in January 1855. His preaching, although not revolutionary in substance, was a plain-spoken and direct appeal to the people, using the Bible to provoke them to consider the claims of Jesus Christ. Critical attacks from the media persisted throughout his life.
The congregation quickly outgrew their building; it moved to Exeter Hall, then to Surrey Music Hall. In these venues Spurgeon frequently preached to audiences numbering more than 10,000. At twenty-two, Spurgeon was the most popular preacher of the day.
On January 8, 1856, Spurgeon married Susannah, daughter of Robert Thompson of Falcon Square, London, by whom he had twin sons, Charles and Thomas born on September 20, 1856. At the end of that year, tragedy struck on October 19, 1856, as Spurgeon was preaching at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall for the first time. Someone in the crowd yelled, "Fire!" The ensuing panic and stampede left several dead. Spurgeon was emotionally devastated by the event and it had a sobering influence on his life. He struggled against depression for many years and spoke of being moved to tears for no reason known to himself.
Walter Thornbury later wrote in "Old and New London" (1897) describing a subsequent meeting at Surrey:
Still the work went on. A Pastors' College was founded in 1857 by Spurgeon and was renamed Spurgeon's College in 1923 when it moved to its present building in South Norwood Hill, London;[1]. At the Fast Day, October 7, 1857, he preached to the largest crowd ever — 23,654 people — at The Crystal Palace in London. Spurgeon noted:
On March 18, 1861, the congregation moved permanently to the newly constructed purpose-built Metropolitan Tabernacle at Elephant and Castle, Southwark, seating five thousand people with standing room for another one thousand. The Metropolitan Tabernacle was the largest church edifice of its day and can be considered a precursor to the modern "megachurch". Spurgeon continued to preach there several times per week until his death 31 years later. He never gave altar calls at the conclusion of his sermons, but he always extended the invitation that if anyone was moved to seek an interest in Christ by his preaching on a Sunday, they could meet with him at his vestry on Monday morning. Without fail, there was always someone at his door the next day. He wrote his sermons out fully before he preached, but what he carried up to the pulpit was a note card with an outline sketch. Stenographers would take down the sermon as it was delivered; Spurgeon would then have opportunity to make revisions to the transcripts the following day for immediate publication. His weekly sermons, which sold for a penny each, were widely circulated and still remain one of the all-time best selling series of writings published in history.
Besides sermons, Spurgeon also wrote several hymns and published a new collection of worship songs in 1866 called "Our Own Hymn Book". It was mostly a compilation of Isaac Watts' Psalms and Hymns that had been originally selected by John Rippon, a Baptist predecessor to Spurgeon. Singing in the congregation was exclusively a cappella under his pastorate. Thousands heard the preaching and were led in the singing without any amplification of sound that exists today. Hymns were a subject that he took seriously. While Spurgeon was still preaching at New Park Street, a hymn book called "The Rivulet" was published. Spurgeon's first controversy arose because of his critique of its theology, which was largely deistic. At the end of his review, Spurgeon warned:
On June 5, 1862, Spurgeon also challenged the Church of England when he preached against baptismal regeneration. However, Spurgeon taught across denominational lines as well. It was during this period at the new Tabernacle that Spurgeon found a friend in James Hudson Taylor, the founder of the inter-denominational China Inland Mission. Spurgeon supported the work of the mission financially and directed many missionary candidates to apply for service with Taylor. He also aided in the work of cross-cultural evangelism by promoting "The Wordless Book", a teaching tool that he described in a message given on January 11, 1866, regarding Psalm 51:7: "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." This "book" has been and is still used to teach uncounted thousands of illiterate people — young and old — around the globe about the Gospel message.
Following the example of George Müller, Spurgeon founded the Stockwell Orphanage, which opened for boys in 1867 and for girls in 1879, and which continued in London until it was bombed in the Second World War.[2] [3] [4] This orphanage became Spurgeon's Child Care which still exists today.
On the death of missionary David Livingstone in 1873, a discolored and much-used copy of one of Spurgeon's printed sermons, "Accidents, Not Punishments," was found among his few possessions much later, along with the handwritten comment at the top of the first page: "Very good, D.L." He had carried it with him throughout his travels in Africa. It was returned to Spurgeon and treasured by him.
A controversy among the Baptists flared in 1887 with Spurgeon's first "Down-grade" article, published in The Sword & the Trowel. In the ensuing "Downgrade Controversy," the Metropolitan Tabernacle became disaffiliated from the Baptist Union, effectuating Spurgeon's congregation as the world's largest self-standing church. Contextually the Downgrade Controversy was British Baptists' equivalent of hermeneutic tensions which were starting to sunder Protestant fellowships in general. The Controversy took its name from Spurgeon's use of the term "Downgrade" to describe certain other Baptists' outlook toward the Bible (i.e., they had "downgraded" the Bible and the principle of sola scriptura). Spurgeon alleged that an incremental creeping of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis , Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and other concepts was weakening the Baptist Union and reciprocally explaining the success of his own evangelistic efforts. In the standoff, which even split his pupils trained at the College, each side accused the other of raising issues which did not need to be raised.
Often Spurgeon's wife was too ill to leave home to hear him preach. C.H. Spurgeon too suffered ill health toward the end of his life, afflicted by a combination of rheumatism, gout, and Bright's disease. He often recuperated at Menton, near Nice, France, where he eventually died on 1892 January 31. Spurgeon's wife and sons outlived him. His remains were buried at West Norwood Cemetery in London, where the tomb is still visited by admirers.
Image:Charles Haddon Spurgeon.jpg|Spurgeon near the end of his life.File:TSCSH.JPG|The tomb of Charles Haddon Spurgeon
William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri purchased Spurgeon's 5,103-volume library collection for £500 ($2500) in 1906. The collection was purchased by Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary [5]in Kansas City, Missouri in 2006 for $400,000 and is currently undergoing restoration.A special collection of Spurgeon's handwritten sermon notes and galley proofs from 1879—1891 resides at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.[6]Spurgeon's College in London also has a small number of notes and proofs.
2200 Quotations from the Writings of Charles H. Spurgeon
Able To The Uttermost
According To Promise
All of Grace : ISBN 1-60206-436-9
An All Round Ministry
Around the Wicket Gate
Barbed Arrows
C. H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography : ISBN 0-85151-076-0
Chequebook of the Bank of Faith : ISBN 1-85792-221-2
Christ’s Incarnation
Come Ye Children
Commenting and Commentaries
The Dawn of Revival, (Prayer Speedily Answered)
Down Grade Controversy, The
Eccentric Preachers
Feathers For Arrows
Flashes Of Thought
Gleanings Among The Sheaves
God Promises You : ISBN 0-88368-459-4
Good Start, A
Greatest Fight In The World, The
Home Worship And The Use of the Bible in the Home
Interpreter, The or Scripture for Family Worship
John Ploughman’s Pictures
John Ploughman’s Talks
Lectures to My Students : ISBN 0-310-32911-6
Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, The
Miracles and Parables of Our Lord
Morning & Evening : ISBN 1-84550-014-8
New Park Street Pulpit, The
Only A Prayer Meeting
Our Own Hymn Book
Pictures From Pilgrim’s Progress
Power in Prayer : ISBN 0-88368-441-1
The Preachers Power and the Conditions of Obtaining it
Saint And His Saviour, The
Sermons In Candles
Sermons On Unusual Occasions
Soul Winner, The : ISBN 1-60206-770-8
Speeches At Home And Abroad
Spurgeon's Commentary on Great Chapters of the Bible
Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening
Spurgeon's Sermon Notes : ISBN 0-8254-3768-7
Sword and The Trowel, The
Till He Come
The Salt Cellar
Treasury of David, The : ISBN 0-8254-3683-4
We Endeavour
The Wordless Book
Word and Spirit : ISBN 0-85234-545-3
Words Of Advice
Words Of Cheer
Words Of Counsel
Spurgeon's works have been translated into many languages, including: Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Castilian (for the Argentine Republic), Chinese, Kongo, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, Gaelic, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kaffir, Karen, Lettish, Maori, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Syriac, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and Welsh, with a few sermons in Moon's and Braille type for the blind. He also wrote many volumes of commentaries, sayings, and other types of literature.