The Forgotten Spurgeon

1 THE PREACHER IN PARK STREET I t is impossible to estimate the significance of the life of C. H. Spurgeon without knowing something of the relig ious condition of the land at the time when his ministry commenced in the middle of the nineteenth century. Protestant Christianity was more or less the national religion; Sunday was strictly observed; the Scriptures were respected; and, apart from the untouched thousands in some of the larger cities, churchgoing was the general custom. These things were all so commonly accepted and apparently entrenched that the spiritual changes that have since swept the nation were as remote to the mid-Victorians as motor cars or aeroplanes. Yet one does not have to look long at the prevailing Christianity of the 1850s to observe some signs that are hardly akin to what we find in the New Testament – it was too fashionable, too respectable, too much at peace with the world. It was as though such texts as ‘the whole world lieth in wickedness’ were no longer correct. The church was not lacking in wealth, nor in men, nor in dignity, but it was sadly lacking in unction and power. There was a general tendency to forget the difference between human learning and the truth revealed by the Spirit of God. There was no scarcity of eloquence and culture in the pulpits, but there was a marked absence of the kind of preaching that broke

21