The Rev. C. H. Spurgeon.

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"One thing is plain, that, notwithstanding the claims of the church of Rome and its hierarchical organisation to antiquity in Scotland, she can only claim 400 of the 1800 years that have elapsed since the planting of Christianity in the kingdom, viz., the period between 1150, when David established her, and 1560, when his establishment was overturned by the resuscitation of old Scottish principles at the Remation."

L.

ART IX.-The Rev. C. H. Spurgeon.

Sketch of the Life and Ministry of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, compiled from Original Documents. By GEORGE JOHN STEVENSON

Stevenson, Paternoster Row.

London: J. G.

New Park Street Pulpit: containing Sermons by the Rev. C. H. SPURGEON. London: J. G. Stevenson.

The Metropolitan_Tabernacle Pulpit: containing Sermons by Rev. C. H. SPURGEON, London: Passmore & Alabaster, Paternoster Row.

THE Rev. C. H. Spurgeon is a fact. There can be no dispute about that; he has outlived the nine days' wonder, and earned for himself a place in history. The Metropolitan Tabernacle, too, is a fact, and a pretty large one. There it stands to speak for itself, crowded to suffocation every Sunday. And "The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit" is a fact, a perfect marvel, even in this age, so marvellous for cheap and wide-spread letterpress. Some people were slow to realise the magnitude of these facts. Spurgeon, they said, was a charlatan, a sort of puritanic Punch; he would fret his hour in the stage of popularity, and be heard of no more. He had gone up like a rocket, but he would fall like the stick. These predictions have failed. The preacher has swollen out into the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and the Metropolitan Tabernacle has expanded into a monster balloon, seen from the Land's End to John o' Groat's: and the spectators, as they gaze up, know not which to admire most-the height to which Spurgeon has soared, or the steadiness with which he maintains his position. In these circumstances it will not be thought strange if we, attracted like the rest by the novelty of the spectacle, should devote a little attention to it in the character of reviewers. It may serve, indeed, some valuable purposes, if we survey Mr Spurgeon in the four aspects in which he appears before the public-as a Man, as a Preacher, as a Divine, and as a Baptist.

CHARLES HATTON SPURGEON, it appears then,* was born in Kelvedon, a country town of Essex, on the 19th of June 1834. The father of our Southwark prodigy is Mr John Spurgeon, who, though occupied as a layman during the week, is the pastor of a small Independent church at Tollesbury in Essex. His grandfather, the Rev. James Spurgeon, still lives, we believe, and continues his ministerial duties as pastor of an Independent church at Stambourne, near Halsted, in the same county. The mother of Mr Spurgeon was the youngest sister of Charles Parker Jarvis, Esq. of Colchester, a lady "remarkable for piety, usefulness, and humility." Here then, we have presumptive evidence of the example of personal and family religion, for at least two generations, operating in favour of our youthful divine. When quite an infant, it seems, he was removed to his grandfather's house; and there, under the affectionate care of a maiden aunt, and under the eye of the venerable pastor, he soon developed into the thoughtful boy, fonder of his picture-book than of his play; for often would he sit for hours gazing with the round eyes of childish horror at the grim figures of "old bloody Bonner," and "Giant Despair," or tracing the adventures of "Christian" and "Robinson Crusoe." The pious precocity of the child soon struck all around him with admiration. He would astonish the grave deacons and matrons who met in his grandfather's house on Sabbath evenings by proposing subjects for conversation and making pertinent remarks upon them. At this early period, too, he gave indications of that decision of character and boldness of address for which he afterwards became so remarkable. When under six years of age, seeing a person who made a profession of religion associating on the street of the village with others known to be bad characters, he made up to the big man, and astounded him by asking, "What doest thou here, Elijah ?" At seven, his mental development was considerably in advance of his years, and his moral character, more especially his truthfulness, was even then conspicuous. There must have been something very striking about the boy, when the good Richard Knill, on hearing him read the chapter before family prayers, was so impressed, that, calling him to his side and laying his venerable hand on his head, he said, "Never did I hear a little boy read so before; I believe God will raise him up for some remarkable work. I hope he will one day fill Rowland Hill's pulpit." And

* We take our facts chiefly from Mr Stevenson's brochure, which, though one-sided in its judgments, bears evidences of honesty and authenticity in its

statements.

when scarcely in his teens, we learn that he would often be found in the hayrack or the manger, reading aloud, talking, and even preaching to his little brothers and sisters. This is just what we might have expected from "the boy preacher." Of his education and subsequent history we have less definite information; nor indeed has the time yet come for furnishing it. He appears to have had the advantage of a good education; to have acquired, in a respectable school, the elements of Latin, Greek, and French, and in every branch of knowledge to which he devoted attention, he became a proficient; and yet, strange to say, though residing in Cambridge, and urged by his father to complete his course of study at college, he steadily refused. Hitherto, Mr Spurgeon had been brought up among the Independents; and, judging from the experience of as good and great men as himself, he might probably have continued so to this day, but for one of those circumstances which so often decide, almost unconsciously, a change of religious profession. In his sixteenth year he became usher in a school at Newmarket, under the care of one Mr Swindell. Here, his biographer remarks, very simply but significantly, "Mr Swindell was a Baptist." During this period, the youthful usher passed through what he afterwards called his "mad voyage" over the ocean of infidelity; after which, faith came to the aid of bewildered reason, and brought back the wanderer "safe to land."

After some correspondence with his father on the subject (a form of filial deference and respect seldom observed in similar cases), he adjoined himself to the communion generally known, we believe, as Calvinistic or General Baptists. On one of his visits to his home, his excellent mother told him that she had prayed for him as a servant of Christ and a preacher of righteousness, but added that she had never prayed for him as a Baptist. "Then, mother," replied her ready-witted son, "God has answered your prayer, and, like his bounty, has given you more than you asked." Again he declined the offer of his father to send him to college, assigning as his reason, the marks of Divine approval which accompanied his early ministrations. After a successful noviciate in a small Baptist chapel at Waterbeach, near Cambridge, where the pulpit gifts of the boy-preacher excited equal admiration and surprise, he was, in 1853, when only nineteen years of age, called to supply the chapel in New Park Street, London, formerly occupied by the well-known Benjamin Keach and Dr Gill, but which had declined from its ancient popularity; and in the following year he was called to be the pastor of a church numbering forty members. Here the extreme juvenility, the singular style, and com

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manding powers of the preacher, soon attracted crowded audiences. "It was a remarkable sight," writes a member of the Society of Friends, "to see this round-faced country youth placed in a position of such solemn and arduous responsibility, yet addressing himself to the fulfilment of his duties with a gravity, self-possession, and vigour, that proved him well fitted to the task he had assumed." In a few weeks, the pews, which had been so long tenantless, were filled; and ere many months had elapsed, the astonished deacons, some of whom had shaken their heads at the proposal of calling such a raw stripling from the provinces, found their chaped besieged by clamorous crowds, rendering it imperatively necessary to furnish larger accommodation. This was followed by an adjournment to Exeter Hall, which, in its turn, was filled to overflowing. His subsequent career in Surrey Gardens, and afterwards in his magnificent Tabernacle, where he still labours, is too well known to be recapitulated.

During the earlier days of his popularity, nothing is more remarkable than the amount of labour undergone by the preacher. We hear of him preaching, not only every day, but twice or thrice a day; and that with undiminished force and unflagging zeal. For the achievement of such herculean tasks, he has doubtless been largely indebted to an excellent constitution, and to his simple habits of living, which have resulted in securing a healthy condition of both mind and body. "He knew not what illness was," says Mr Stevenson, "till 'the Surrey Gardens' calamity, joined with the wicked calumnies of a portion of the press, laid prostrate even the strong man." In private life, so far as we have seen or heard of him, Mr Spurgeon is the happiest and the heartiest of men. Brimming with bonhommie, throwing himself on the tide of social intercourse, with the freedom of one who has no tricks to exhibit, and no failings to conceal, he is said to be the most pleasant of companions. In short, he is decidedly a natural character; pious, without anything of the slang of piety; temperate, without a touch of asceticism; and devout, with none, perhaps too little, of the solemnity of the devotee.

Turning from the personal history of Mr Spurgeon, to view him in his character as a preacher, we feel somewhat at a loss how to classify him with any of the ancient or modern types of pulpit oratory. He has doubtless made the older puritans of England his special model, and drawn from them much of their inspiration. Yet we look in vain through Spurgeon's lively orations, for any thing resembling the long

winded periods, the quaint and far-fetched similitudes, or the narrow and dreary passages through which these excellent men sought too often to guide their hearers to the truth. Mr Spurgeon is not only popular; he represents the popularity of his time. He is as unlike the popular preacher of the past, as his Tabernacle, with its stage, pit, and galleries, is unlike Westminster Abbey. He is "The Times" of modern evangelism. Many of his sermons would make good leading articles, and in the power, the profusion, and the rapidity with which they were poured forth, we are reminded of the steam press, and the electric telegraph. And not the less is he emblematic of the times, that in his case the pulpit is stripped of all its common accessories. It is doubtful if the squat and somewhat round figure of the preacher would admit of improvement by gown and cassock. In an age, impatient of all kinds of pretence, he is anything but a clerical fop. There is no cant or whining about him; he is natural as the day; and were it not for time and place, few would suppose from look, tone, or style, that they listened to a sermon. It is difficult, indeed, at first, to account for Mr Spurgeon's popularity; he has neither the polish of Robert Hall, nor the momentum of Chalmers, nor the picturesqueness of Guthrie; he neither thunders like Irving, nor weeps like Whitfield. Wherein, then, lies the

secret of his success?

It would be vain to fix on any one feature of the preacher in answer to this question. A combination of gifts as rare as startling, must account for his success in a career which, in the absence of any one of these gifts, might have proved a failure. There is the logical faculty appearing in the lucidus ordo of his discourses, combined with a fancy which brings up images at will, and scatters around the plainest subject a copiousness of illustration with the dexterity of the juggler, who brings, out of an old hat, an endless shower of flowers, feathers, and all sorts of unexpected things. Then there is the marvellous memory of the man, which, like some nimble servitor, seems to be always ready to supply him with the stores of his reading as they are needed; the sonorous voice, ringing like a church bell; the terse Saxon English of his style, the volubility of his elocution, joined with that perfect self-control, which prevents it from degenerating into declamation, and imparts to it something like the measured tramp of military precision. The whole structure of his sermons is conversational, but then it is conversation through a speaking-trumpet. The speaker is on fire throughout, but it is not in occasional flashes of flame that the fire appears, but in the sustained white-heat