The Forgotten Spurgeon

Why ‘The Forgotten Spurgeon’?

thus helped to read the Puritans I was not much further on in appreciating Spurgeon himself. No doubt I had now an exaggerated enthusiasm for what was generally to be found in old calf and folio; an enthusiasm which overlooked how the Holy Spirit has bestowed differing and distinct gifts upon men in various ages. To the Victorian age I was not drawn, and for the present my view of Spurgeon’s chief value was that he acted as a kind of signpost back to the seventeenth century. How Spurgeon related Puritan theology to his own ministry amongst the common people who had to work in the grind and fog of a commercial city, how he distilled old thoughts into plain English, how he used the solid doctrines of a bygone age to evangelize in a different historical context – these were all questions which I did not consider. So far I had not seen the most valuable of all Spurgeon’s pub lications, his sermons – to be distinguished from the selections and ‘choice extracts’ to be found in volumes of various sizes under his name. My first sight of the faded black binding of a set of The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit and the even more worn New Park Street Pulpit , was in St John’s Free Church, Oxford, where the minister, Sidney Norton, planted thoughts in my mind about Spurgeon which were later to develop. There are various providences which control the bent of our reading. William Robertson Nicoll has described how as a ‘probationer’ minister in an Aberdeenshire village in 1874, where books were scarce, he had access to a set of Spurgeon’s sermons and during six months ‘went through all the volumes’! 1 It was quite a different situation which at length drew me into a serious reading of the sermons. In 1961 I was called to the pulpit of Grove Chapel in Camberwell – an area very familiar to Spurgeon though greatly changed today. Humanly speaking, the prospects in our congregation were not encouraging and I was conscious that no mere repetition

1 Princes of the Church, 1922, p. 49.

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