The Forgotten Spurgeon

the forgotten spurgeon

the Scripture and presented the doctrines of the grace of God with a richness which was new. Some of us will never forget the blessing of our first days in reading the Puritans and we turned to the Bible with greater appreciation than ever before. It was while I was in this process of discovery that another of Spurgeon’s books came into my hands in 1953; this was his Commenting and Commentaries: Two Lectures together with A Catalogue of Biblical Commentaries and Expositions. As those who know it are aware, the Catalogue traverses the whole field of expository works in the English tongue down to 1876, and while covering a wide variety of schools of thought from Anglo-Catholic to Plymouth Brethren, a main purpose was to draw attention to Puritan commentators and their successors. The slender work contains a mine of literary information on seventeenth-century writings which might otherwise have been lost to modern times. Spurgeon was quite unashamed of his objective: he wanted more searching of the Scriptures and he believed Puritan writings were one of the finest inducements to obtain that result. ‘Our Puritan forefa thers were strong men, because they lived on the Scriptures. None stood against them in their day, for they fed on good meat, whereas their degenerate children are far too fond of unwholesome food. The chaff of fiction, and the bran of the Quarterlies, are poor substitutes for the old corn of Scripture.’ It was not that Spurgeon ignored the latest commentaries of his day, but they fell short: ‘Good as this volume is,’ he wrote of F. Godet’s Studies on the New Testament in 1877, ‘it is nothing comparable in weight of thought and depth of instruction to the grand old Puritan writings, which to us at least are ever new and full of suggestiveness.’ If I had not been already on the road to verifying statements like these I might have received Commenting and Commentaries with less interest; as it was, the book became a vade mecum for me until I knew its salient names by heart. Yet though I was

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