The Forgotten Spurgeon

The Preacher in Park Street

and Wesley was admired, but it was little followed. The cut ting edges of evangelical truth had been gradually softened down. Those rugged Methodist doctrines which had shaken the land a century before had not been abandoned – and by a few they were still fervently preached – but the general feeling was that a more refined presentation of the gospel was needed in the Victorian era. With this kind of outlook abroad it was inevitable that the strong and clear-cut Reformed theology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was quite out of favour. The Reformation historian Merle d’Aubigné of Geneva, who visited this country in 1845, says that he was forced to ask himself whether Puritanism ‘still exists in Eng land? Whether it has not fallen under the influence of national developments, and the sneer of novelists? Whether, in fine, it would not be necessary to go back to the seventeenth century in order to meet with it?’ 24 It is nevertheless true that some of the evangelical leaders of the land, particularly the older ones, were deeply concerned about the spiritual condition of the churches. John Angell James, for example, who had been ministering at the famous Congregational church at Carr’s Lane, Birmingham, since 1805, wrote in 1851, ‘The state of religion in our country is low. I do not think I ever preached with less saving results since I was a minister; and this is the case with most others. It is a general complaint.’ If these things were true of the country in general they were particularly true of London, and the Baptist Chapel at New Park Street, situated in a ‘dim and dirty’ region close to the south bank of the Thames in Southwark, was no exception. The congregation had a great history stretching back into the seventeenth century, but now they were left like barges in the nearby mud when the tide was out. For some years they had been in a state of decline and the large and ornate building,

24 Germany, England and Scotland, Recollections of a Swiss Minister, J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, London, 1848, p. 89.

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