The Forgotten Spurgeon

WHY ‘THE FORGOTTEN SPURGEON’?

M y first acquaintance with Spurgeon arose out of a visit to a second-hand bookshop in Liverpool in 1950, though for some years after that the acquaintance was small. A few of his books were on my shelves, and being then a young Christian I could appreciate their evangelical warmth, but for the most part I viewed him from afar as a Victorian pulpit-wonder. The opinion of a recent writer who says that in ‘an age of ponderous English sermons’ Spurgeon ‘mouthed rolling periods, piled metaphor upon metaphor’ I would probably at that time have approved. Certainly I thought that there was nothing in his writings differing from the common run of more modern evangelical books unless it was their bulk. Not surprisingly, therefore, the purchases at the Liverpool bookshop were little used and my view of Spurgeon might have been the same to this day if my thinking had not been thoroughly disturbed and then set in another direction while I was studying at Durham. The new impetus to my spiritual life came from old books, dusty volumes of various shapes and sizes, which had a common feature in their adherence to the theology and experimental divinity associated with the Reformation and Puritan ages. The drawing power of these old writers was the way they opened up

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