“WHO has not seen Naples, has seen nothing,” say the Italians; who has not heard Mr. Spurgeon, has not heard the greatest of living preachers, will say hundreds, not only of Englishmen, but of Americans, who have listened to the burning words of a Beecher, a Liddon, a Punshon, or a Hall. To visit London without seeing the Metropolitan Tabernacle and its preacher, would be like visiting Rome without seeing St. Peter’s, or making the tour of America without beholding Niagara. For this reason and a mixture of others, we left our hotel on a fine Sabbath morning, — the 6th of August, 1871, — and, mounting an omnibus bound for “The Elephant and Castle,” were soon on the Surrey side of the Thames, and presently at our point of destination. The Tabernacle, so noted among churches, we found to be a plain, but massive church of brick, adorned with Corinthian pillars, standing back from the street, and inclosed with an iron fence. Although the gate to the inclosure was not yet open, a crowd of persons had already collected, half an hour before the service began, waiting impatiently for admission. Upon stating that we were an American, a ticket of admission was at once handed to us, and we entered the building just as it was beginning to fill. Glancing around, we were struck with the resemblance of the vast audience-room to that of a large theatre. At the farther end is a stage-like platform, with a moveable table on castors and a few chairs; 82 and just below it, five or six feet above the main floor, there is an orchestra-like inclosure, filled with a large number of bright-looking and neatly-dressed boys. Running round the church are three galleries, one above another, — the whole forming one of the best arrangements for seeing and hearing that could be contrived. Seating ourselves in the lower gallery, at just the right distance from the speaker, we had an excellent opportunity both to see and listen. The regular congregation having been seated, the doors were thrown open to the crowd, when a mighty tide of human beings surged into the aisles, filling every standing place, sitting-place, nook and corner of the building, till it seemed impossible for another man or child to squeeze himself in. Never have we seen an audience more densely packed, — not even when Jenny Lind sang the first night at Tremont Temple in Boson, of the rapt attention of the dense throng on which occasion this strongly reminded us. Even in the uppermost gallery, which is a good way toward heaven, many persons were standing for lack of seats.
The house filled, Mr. Spurgeon at once steps from a back door upon the platform, followed by the elders of the church, who sit just behind him. In his physiognomy and general appearance, there is little to give assurance of a great orator. Short, stout, and muscular, with a somewhat square face, small, sparkling eyes, a well-formed nose, a mouth shaded by a black moustache, and a general air of frankness, straightforwardness, and honesty, he is a good type of the Anglo-Saxon, and no one could possibly mistake him for a native of any other country. Natural, decided, and impressive in his manner, full of force and fire, and speaking in a loud, bell-like voice, at once clear in its 83 articulations and pleasant in its tones, he rivets your attention at the start, though precisely what is the secret of his hold upon you, you are puzzled to tell. He begins his service with prayer; and a prayer it is; a real outpouring of the heart to God, not an oration before the Almighty, or an eloquent soliloquy. He is evidently not one of those preachers who, as South says, “so pray that they do not supplicate, but compliment Almighty God”; he believes, with the same divine, that it is not necessary to beg our bread in blank verse, or to show anything of the poet in our devotions but indigence and want. After the prayer comes the hymn, read in a clear, impressive voice; and without any accompaniment, either of organ or bass-viol, the vast assembly of six thousand or seven thousand sound forth the notes of praise. After the first verse has been sung, Mr. Spurgeon singing with his people, a second verse is read and sung, then another verse, till the entire hymn is gone through with. Before worshipping at the Tabernacle, we had heard the fine music at the royal chapel at Whitehall, and listened with ravished ears to the echoing strains of the trained and gowned singers in St. Paul’s, and to the pealing organ as it swelled the note of praise in “the long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults” of Westminster Abbey; but we were more deeply moved by this simple praise, — this grand, though inartistic song of joy, — welling up from these Christian hearts, than by the most gorgeous music that ever in minster or cathedral had essayed to
“Dissolve us into ecstasies,
And bring all Heaven before our eyes.”
A lesson from the Scriptures is next read, accompanied with a pithy and suggestive running commentary, and the people throughout the house open their Bibles, and follow 84 the pastor in the reading. Another hymn is given out and sung as before; and then comes the sermon. Though fifty or sixty minutes long it is is listened to throughout with the profoundest interest, no one, not even of the listeners who are standing, showing any signs of weariness. The text is 1 Corinthians vi, 19, 20: “Ye are not your own; for you are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” The subject is considered under three heads: I, the blessed fact, “Ye are bought with a price”; II, The plain consequence arising from this fact, namely, that, 1, It is clear as a negative, that “Ye are not your own”; and, 2, It is clear as a positive, that “your body and spirit are God’s.” III, The natural conclusion, “Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit.”
Under the second head the speaker observes: “It is a great privilege not to be one’s own. A vessel is drifting on the Atlantic hither and thither, and its end no man knoweth. It is derelict, deserted by all its crew; it is the property of no man; it is the prey of every storm, and the sport of every wind; rocks, quicksands, and shoals wait to destroy it; the ocean yearns to engulf it. It drifts onward to no man’s land, and no man will mourn its shipwreck. But mark well yonder bark of the Thames, which its owner surveys with pleasure. In its attempt to reach the sea it may run ashore, or come into collision with other vessels, or in a thousand ways suffer damage; but there is no fear, it will pass through the floating forest of ‘the Pool’; it will thread the winding channel, and reach the Nore, because the owner will secure it pilotage, skillful and apt. How thankful you and I should be that we are not derelict to-day! We are not our own, not left on the wild waste 95 of chance to be tossed to and fro by fortuitous circumstances, but there is a hand upon the helm; we have on board a pilot who owns us, and will surely steer us into the Fair Havens of eternal rest.” Under the third head, Mr. Spurgeon says: “Our bodies used to work hard enough for the devil; now they belong to God, we will make them work for Him. Your legs used to carry you to the theater; be not too lazy to come out on a Thursday night to the house of God. Your eyes have often been open on iniquity; keep them open during the sermon, do not drop asleep! Your ears have been sharp enough to catch the words of a lascivious song; let them be quick to observe the word of God. Those hands have often squandered your earnings in sinfulness; let them give freely to the cause of Christ. Your body was a willing horse when it was in the service of the devil; let it not be a sluggish hack now that it draws the chariot of Christ.”
Again: “If you were to go to a cattle-show, and it were said, ‘Such and such a bullock belongs to Her Majesty,’ it may be that it is no better than another, but it would be of interest to thousands as belonging to royalty. See here, then, such and such a man belongs to God; what manner of person ought he to be? If there be any one in this world who will not be criticized, depend upon it, Christian, it is not the Christian; sharp eyes will be upon him, and worldly men will find faults in him which they would not see if he were not a professor. For my part, I am very glad of the lynx eyes of the worldlings. Let them watch, if they will. I have heard of one who was a great caviller at Christian people, and after having annoyed a church a long time, he was about to leave, and, therefore, as a parting jest with the minister, he said, ‘I have no doubt you 86 will be very glad to know that I am going a hundred miles away!’ ‘No,’ said the pastor, ‘I shall be sorry to lose you.’ ‘How? I never did you any good.’ ‘I don’t know that, for I am sure that never one of my flock put half a foot through the hedge but what you began to yelp at him, and so you have been a famous sheep-dog for me.’ I am glad the world observes us. It has a right to do so. If a man says ‘I am God’s,’ he sets himself up for public observation. Ye are lights in the world, and what are lights intended for but to be looked at? A city on a hill cannot be hid.”
These passages, torn from the context, give but a faint idea of the sermon as a whole, which was a masterpiece of its kind, and in many respects peculiar and original. After service, we had a pleasant interview with the preacher, whom we found lying on a sofa in a back room, quite exhausted by his effort. He had but just recovered from a severe sickness, this being his second sermon since he left his bed. It is well known that his exhausting labors and burning enthusiasm have begun to tell upon his physical constitution. The sword has proved too sharp for even the stout scabbard. Ten years ago preaching was almost as easy to him as singing to a bird. To electrify, convince, and persuade audiences was a labor of love. Now every Sunday’s efforts cost him forty-eight hours’ pain. During our interview a gentleman said to him that an American preacher who had heard the sermon observed at its close, “That discourse was composed in this house.” “Did he say so?” exclaimed Mr. Spurgeon. “That is remarkable. The text was given to me by one of my deacons, who died yesterday, and requested in his last moments that I would preach from 87 it. At six this morning I sat down to think out the discourse. I spent an hour upon the text, and could make nothing of it. I never could preach from other people’s texts. I said this, in my despair, to my wife, who told me to try again. I tried again with the same result. ‘Well,’ said Mrs. S., ‘go into the pulpit, and the sermon will come to you.’ I followed the advice, and you know the result.” In this case Mr. Spurgeon must have spent more time than usual in preparation, for it is said that commonly devotes but a half hour to this purpose. Only the heads of the sermon are put on paper; all the rest is left to the pulpit. “If I had a month given me to prepare a sermon,” he once said to a visitor, “I would spend thirty days and twenty-three hours in something else, and in the last hour I would make the sermon.” When asked by the same person if he had ever written a discourse, he replied, “I would rather be hanged.”
Yet if Mr. S. spends but little time in immediate preparation, he spends a vast deal of time in general preparation, for the pulpit. No preacher has drunk deeper draughts from the old English divines, or saturated his mind more thoroughly with the spirit of God’s word. By these means he has become a “a Leyden jar, charged to a plenum,” in Horace Mann’s phrase, and, the moment he comes in contact with his people, gives forth the electric fire. In our conversation with him, we observed that we would not call the sermon eloquent; it was something far better than eloquence. ‘Oh, no,” was the reply, “I have no pretension to that sort of thing. I love to hear eloquent men, you know; as well as anybody, but if I should attempt oratory, I should be sure 88 to fail.” In the same spirit he lately prefaced a lecture by saying that he had never yet succeeded in the art of lecturing, and added, “If any of you have ever seen a goose trying to fly, you may say, ‘That’s like Mr. Spurgeon trying to lecture.’ ” It is reported that a noted fanatic and bore once called to see him, and, being asked by a deacon what name he should announce to Mr. S., replied, “Say that a servant of the Lord wants to see him.” “Tell him,” was the preacher’s reply, “that I am engaged with his Master.” Being asked whether this anecdote was apocryphal, he smilingly admitted its truth. Mr. Spurgeon has a good deal of mother wit, and even when preaching drops from time to time a shrewd, pungent remark, or indulges in an apt, vivid pictorial illustration, that causes the sea of upturned faces to ripple with a smile. In a recent speech in Surrey, at the laying of the foundation stone of a new chapel, he said no money was to be placed in the cavity of the stone, for he could not see the use of burying money, and, moreover, he had known memorial stones to move suddenly during the night when money had been placed in them. He once heard a man say, “If you want to touch my purse, you must touch my heart,” to which he (Mr. S.) replied, “I believe you, because there is where you keep your heart.” Another man once said to him: “I thought you preached for souls and not for money”: and he replied: “So we do, but we can’t live upon souls, and if we could, it would take a large number such as yours to make a single breakfast.” At a recent laying of the corner-stone of a chapel, he told the people how he contrived to secure pure air in a church where the windows were so rarely opened that it was found difficult to raise 89 them. ‘It was so close and hot,” he said, “that I asked every gentleman near a window to smash a pane or two. There was soon a very grand smash, but then the beautiful fresh air streamed in. I paid the bill afterwards like an honest man; but it was much better to do that than bear the cruelty of preaching in such an atmosphere, for forcing people to listen when they were more disposed to sleep.”
What is the secret of Mr. Spurgeon’s power as a preacher? That he is the greatest of living European preachers, if not the first in the world, few will doubt. For twenty years men have gathered in crowds to hear him. Audiences varying from 5,000 to 9,000 have constantly filled the houses where he has preached; men of all classes have hung upon his lips; and yet, though the “fiery soul has o’erinformed” the physical frame, and he speaks almost always with some pain, there is no flagging, no symptom of abatement in the eagerness with which men listen. You must still go early to secure a seat in the Tabernacle. His church numbers some 4,300 members. He has published over a thousand sermons. More then twenty millions of his discourses have been circulated in the English language, and they have been translated into all the languages of Christendom, besides being translated to some extent into remote heathen tongues. There was a time when it was fashionable to speak of him as “vulgar,” and as being a cometary genius, whose splendor would be short-lived. But now even fashionable people feel compelled to hear him, and scholars, barristers, members of parliament, and peers of the realm acknowledge his power. How shall we account for this? Is there anything in his person to solve the mystery? There 90 have been orators who almost by the magnetism of their presence have held their hearers spell-bound. Their lofty and commanding forms, their god-like foreheads, flashing eyes, and general port an bearing, have given weight and electric force to their words. Such was the case with Whitefield, Irving, Chalmers, and other great pulpit orators, who impressed men by their looks as well as by their utterances. But Spurgeon has nothing of this sort to magnetize men or chain their attention. There is no necromancy in his face or figure. Short and chubby in figure, with a round, homely, honest face, though with an expressive eye, he is Saxon intus et in cute; and though you might credit him with strength of will and iron endurance, you would not from his features infer great intellectual power or ability to sway the hearts of men.
Is it his culture that gives Mr. Spurgeon his sway over men? Unquestionably he has done much to remedy his lack of intellectual equipment since he began to storm the hearts of his hearers. He has drunk deep, ox-like draughts from the Scriptures and from the old Puritan divines. He has spent not a little time, we have been told, in the study of Greek and Latin, and has enriched his vocabulary with words drawn from the pure “wells of English undefiled.” He has made incursions, too, into the broad domains of science, not merely for recreation, or to gratify his intellectual curiosity, but for the more definite purpose of supplying his mind with new images and analogies. According to a statement in the London “World,” he has not only given attention to astronomy, chemistry, zoology, ornithology, etc., but field-sports, also, have helped to enrich his fund of illustration. It is not uncommon, we are told, to find him engaged 91 busily over a pile of technical books on fox-hunting or salmon-fishing, deer-stalking or grouse-shooting. He is a strong believer in the theory of ventilating the mind, — of pouring a stream of new ideas constantly through it, — to preserve its freshness, and prevent the stagnation not unfrequently brought about in a strong intellect engrossed in one pursuit. All this explains the fresh and breezy vigor of his preaching, and shows why, in his thousands of sermons, he so rarely repeats himself. But, it must be remembered, he did not begin his career with the advantage of a liberal education. It is doubtful, too, whether, in early life, he had either the taste, the appliances, or the leisure for the scientific and literary excursions he now makes. He is not a scholar, nor a trained theologian, still less one of those bookish men in whom the receptive faculty absorbs the generative, and the scholarship sucks up the manhood; nor is there reason to suppose that, by any amount of application, he could become
“A second Thomas, or at once,
To name them all, another Duns.”
Does Mr. Spurgeon’s voice account for his success? That the quality of the voice has much to do with success in oratory, none can doubt. Cicero held that “for the effectiveness and glory of delivery, the voice, doubtless, holds the first place.” There are voices that electrify, voices that melt, and voices that appal. It is said that Chatham’s lowest whisper was distinctly audible; his middle tone was sweet, rich, and beautifully varied; and when he raises his voice to its high pitch, the house was completely filled with the volume of sound, and the effect was awful, except when he wished to cheer and animate, 92 and then he had a spirit-stirring note which was perfectly irresistible. Henry Clay’s voice had a similar flexibility. Soaring with the grand and descending with the pathetic, it had a marvellous compass, and its trumpet blasts were not more audible or thrilling than its veriest whisper. Burke’s voice, on the other hand, was a loud cry, which tended, even more than the formality of his discourses, to send the M. P.’s to their dinners. Mr. Spurgeon’s voice, marvellous as it is, has little flexibility or compass. It has a loud, bell-like ring, but is a comparatively level voice, with little variety in its modulations, though very pleasing in its tones. Rarely rising to a trumpet tone, it never descends to the lowest notes, and, above all other qualities, it is remarkable for distinctness and force. Were his voice, however, ten times more impressive than it is, and as “musical as Apollo’s lute,” it would not alone account for his success, for it might be vox et preterea nihil, which surely would soon lose its charm.
The real sources of Mr. Spurgeon’s power we believe to be his elocution, his style, and the earnestness that grows out of a profound conviction of the truth of what he teaches. His delivery, though not of the very highest order, is wonderfully natural and impressive. There is no stiffness or affectation in it. He talks, in a free, offhand way, just as a man would talk with his friend. Even when most impassioned, he speaks in colloquial tones, never for a moment falling into what the old Scotch woman, rebuking her son as he read the newspaper, called “the Bible twang.” Again, his language is as simple and unaffected as his manner. It is chiefly plain, nervous, idiomatic Saxon; the vocabulary, not of books, but of the market-place and the fireside, — “not of 93 the university, but of the universe.” “The devil,” he once said, “does not care for your dialectics, and eclectic homiletics, or Germanic objectives and subjectives; but pelt him with Anglo-Saxon in the name of God, and he will shift his quarters.” Mr. Spurgeon’s style, like that of every great speaker, is individual and original, — the outgrowth and exponent of his whole mental character. It is plain, straightforward, luminously transparent, — a perfect mirror of the thought. His winged words have a force and significance which they do not bear in the dictionary, and hasten to their mark with the precision, rapidity, and directness of an arrow. No shade of doubt weakens the dogmatic decisiveness of the idea; no momentary hesitation checks or turns aside the sure and sweeping current of the expression. He has no meaningless expletives to pad out his sentences; but everywhere the mind of the speaker is felt beating and burning beneath his language, stamping every word with the image of a thought.
Besides these peculiarities of Mr. Spurgeon’s style, it is remarkable also for its pictorial power. Few pulpit-orators abound more in illustrations, — especially homely, yet vivid, illustrations drawn from the fireside, the street, the market, the scenes of daily life. Piety with him is not a thing of abstraction, but something visible, in concrete form. “If I am a Christian,” he said, in the sermon we heard, “I have no right to be idle. I saw the other day men using picks in the road in laying down new gas-pipes; they had been resting, and, just as I passed, the clock struck one, and the foreman gave a signal. I think he said, ‘Blow up;’ and straightway each man took his pick or his shovel, and they were all at it in earnest. 94 Close to them stood a fellow with a pipe in his mouth, who did not join in the work, but stood in a free and easy posture. It did not make any difference to him whether it was one o’clock or six. Why not? Because he was his own; the other men were the master’s for the time being. If any of you idle professors can really prove that you belong to yourselves, I have nothing more to say to you; but if you profess to have a share in the redeeming sacrifice of Christ, I am ashamed of you if you do not go to work the very moment the signal is given.” Again, take the following: “The world has a right to expect more from the Christian than from anybody else. Stand in fancy in one of the fights of the old civil war. The Royalists are fighting desperately and are winning apace, but I hear a cry from the other side that Cromwell’s Ironsides are coming. Now we shall see some fighting. Oliver and his men are lions. But lo! I see that the fellows who come up hang fire, and are afraid to rush into the thick of the fight; surely, these are not Cromwell’s Ironsides, and yonder Captain is not old Noll? I do not believe it; it cannot be. Why, if they were what they profess to be, they would have broken the ranks of those perfumed cavaliers long ago, and made them fly before them like chaff before the wind. So when I hear men say, ‘Here is a body of Christians.’ What! Those Christians? Those cowardly people who hardly dare speak a word for Jesus! Those covetous people, who give a few cheese-parings to His cause! Those inconsistent people whom you would not know to be Christian professors if they did not label themselves! What! such beings followers of a crucified Saviour?”
Lastly, men love to hear Mr. Spurgeon, because, as 95 Sheridan said of Rowland Hill, “his ideas come red-hot from the heart.” Wesley once said to his brother Charles, who was drawing him away from a mob, in which some coarse women were vituperating in eloquent billingsgate, “Stop, Charles, and learn how to preach.” The earnestness, courage, and passion which made these fishwomen eloquent in a petty squabble, Wesley thought, if transferred to the pulpit, could not fail powerfully to move the hearts of the people. Mr. Spurgeon is not a sensational preacher, nor a maker of fine phrases, a lettered and polished orator. He is unlike as possible those clerical icicles with whom the artistic air kills everything, and whose greatest fault is that they are absolutely faultless. He is no less unlike those clerical Jehus who take delight in sweeping with their chariot-wheels to the very edge of some precipice of heresy, so as to call forth a shriek from startled orthodox nerves. He has no half beliefs, no sickly sentimentalism, no mental reservations, but a direct, intense, Bunyan-like apprehension of the Gospel of Christ, and he preaches it fully and fervidly, as God has given him ability, to mankind. Believing in the truths of revelation with his whole soul, — tormented with none of those lurking doubts, — that semi-skepticism which so often paralyzes the pulpit in our day, — rejecting utterly what he regards as a Christless Christianity, from which the supernatural element has been eliminated, — he urges those truths home upon his hearers with the whole force of his nature. Supremely indifferent to the modern philosophic statements, the literary refinements of doctrine, — regarding with utter scorn the nice, hair-splitting discriminations between what we may know of a doctrine and what we may not, that leave us in the 96 end with hardly anything to know about it, — he proclaims Sabbath after Sabbath, without abatement, mincing, or softening, those grand old truths, as he regards them, which Calvin, and Augustine and Paul proclaimed before him. And what has been the result? As he himself once said to a lady who observed that the secret of his success was Christ, and Christ only, he is “constantly striking on the old piece of iron, and it is no wonder that it sometimes gets hot.” While those timid preachers of the modern school, who
“Would not in a peremptory tone
Assert the nose on their face their own.”
and who know just how much truth it is prudent to dole out, are left to utter their nicely-turned periods to empty pews, this Puritanic preacher, who comes from what John Foster calls “the morass of Anabaptism,” is listened to with such delight, that even from a church that holds six or seven thousand souls, hundreds go away, Sabbath after Sabbath, unable to find a standing-place. He is a living refutation of the statement, so often and so confidently made, that the preacher of our day who stays in what are called “the old ruts” of theology, and who takes no stock in the modern “progresive ideas,” has lost his hold upon the people; and proves, beyond all gainsaying, that, even in this age of Darwins and Huxleys and Mills, the most popular pulpit orator is not he who panders to their love of excitement, novelty, or rhetoric, but he who thunders forth with ceaseless iteration those grand old truisms, which, even in this day of new theologies, are still the best things left upon the earth.