Justified True Belief

(●) The Victorian preacher who filled a hall holding six thousand twice on a Sunday for thirty years, and whose sermons are still selling. + Every Monday morning for most of forty years, Charles Spurgeon took a stenographer’s transcript of the sermon he had preached the day before, went through it with a pen, and sent it on to a London printer. By Thursday it was a penny pamphlet on sale in railway bookstalls, and it stayed in print for the next sixty years. Nobody had done anything on that scale before, and nobody has since. The collected series runs to sixty-three volumes and somewhere between twenty and twenty-five million words, which is reckoned the largest set of books by a single author in the history of Christianity. He is on a site about the reasons for Christian belief for a reason that has nothing to do with philosophy. Spurgeon wrote no systematic theology and defended no thesis. What he did was demonstrate, week after week for thirty-eight years in the middle of the largest and most confident industrial city in the world, that the plain preaching of a crucified Jew could hold six thousand ordinary Londoners. He was a Baptist and a Calvinist and never pretended otherwise, and yet Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians who disagree with him about nearly everything organizational still read his lectures on preaching and quote his sentences from their own pulpits. The signature fact, and the one that surprises people who know only the crowds: he suffered from gout, from kidney disease, and from a depression so heavy that he once told his congregation he could weep by the hour like a child and not know what he was weeping for. He preached anyway, and he wrote a lecture telling young ministers that the same thing would probably happen to them.

(●) 1834 AD: Born in Essex into a line of village preachers, and sent away as a small child into a house full of Puritan books. + Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born on 19 June 1834 at Kelvedon in Essex, the eldest of a family that would run to seventeen children, eight of whom lived. Preaching was the family trade, and it was done on top of a working week. His father John was a clerk in a coal merchant’s office who preached on Sundays at an Independent chapel; his grandfather James had been the Independent minister at Stambourne, a thatched Essex village, for more than fifty years. Independents were the English Christians who held that each local congregation governs itself under Christ rather than under a bishop or a national assembly, and they were the direct descendants of the Puritans of two centuries earlier. When Charles was about eighteen months old he was sent to Stambourne to live with his grandparents, apparently because the family at home was struggling, and he stayed until he was six or seven. That accident of poverty shaped him more than any school did. In an upstairs room of the manse, which is simply the house a congregation provides for its minister, he found a shelf of old Puritan divinity, divinity being that century’s ordinary word for theology: heavy folio volumes his grandfather had inherited and rarely opened. He read them as other boys read adventure stories. He came across John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress there at about the age of six and later said he had read it more than a hundred times. His formal education ended early, and the furthest it ever went was a term or two of usher’s work at schools in Newmarket and Cambridge. An usher was the junior assistant in a Victorian school, the young man who drilled the smallest boys through their lessons while carrying on his own. He never attended a university or a theological college, a fact his critics threw at him for the rest of his life and which he cheerfully conceded.

(●) 1850 AD: A snowstorm drove him into a back-street chapel at fifteen, and he walked out a Christian. + For five years he had been under conviction of sin, in the old evangelical phrase, and thoroughly miserable with it. Conviction meant the settled sense that he stood guilty before God and could do nothing whatever about it. He was fifteen that January, so he had been carrying it since he was about ten. He had tried the churches of the district one after another and heard, by his own account, a great deal about the duties of the Christian life and nothing about how a sinner gets in. On Sunday 6 January 1850 he set out for a church in Colchester and was stopped by a blizzard. He turned down Artillery Street into a Primitive Methodist chapel. The Primitive Methodists were the working men’s wing of Methodism, known for open-air preaching and for buildings with nothing in them, and this was a small plain room holding perhaps a dozen or fifteen people that morning. The minister did not arrive, and a thin man Spurgeon guessed to be a shoemaker or a tailor got up and read the text. It was from Isaiah 45:22, read out of the Authorized Version, which is the King James Bible that every English chapel then used, and the words as that version gave them were about as simple as a sentence can be. "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." The man had perhaps ten minutes of sermon in him and he spent it repeating that one word, look. Then he caught sight of the boy under the gallery and did what no trained preacher would have dared. He pointed and said, in substance, that the young man there looked very miserable, and that he would be miserable in life and miserable in death unless he obeyed the text and looked to Christ. Spurgeon said afterwards that he saw at once what he had been missing for five years, that there was nothing whatever for him to do but look, and that he could have leapt for joy. He never learned the man’s name. Four months later, on 3 May 1850, he was baptized by immersion in the River Lark at Isleham Ferry. He had walked several miles to get there. His Autobiography records what his mother, a paedobaptist to her fingertips, said to him about it. A paedobaptist is a Christian who holds that the children of believers are to be baptized as infants rather than left to ask for it themselves years later, which is exactly what her eldest son had just gone and done. She told him that she had often prayed the Lord would make him a Christian, but had never asked that he might become a Baptist. He answered that the Lord had given her exceeding abundantly above what she asked.

(●) 1851 AD: At seventeen he was pastor of a fen village chapel, and by nineteen London had sent for him. + He was tricked into his first sermon. A friend in the Cambridge lay preachers’ association asked him to walk out to the hamlet of Teversham one evening to keep a young man company who was to preach there; on the road it emerged that the young man was Spurgeon, and there was nobody else. He was sixteen, and he preached in a labourer’s cottage. In October 1851 the little Baptist chapel at Waterbeach, a fen village a few miles north of Cambridge, out on the flat drained marshland where the fields lie lower than the ditches that carry the water away, asked him to be its pastor. He was seventeen. The congregation of perhaps forty grew to about a hundred inside the first year and kept growing, and the village changed along with it. Waterbeach had an illicit still in it, an unlicensed apparatus quietly turning out spirits, and the drunkenness and thieving that came with it, and what happened to the place became part of the local legend. The pay was somewhere between twenty-five and fifty pounds a year as the church grew, part of it arriving as potatoes, cabbages and the occasional bit of meat, and he tutored in Cambridge during the week to make up the rest. Then, in late 1853, a deacon of New Park Street Chapel in Southwark heard of him and sent an invitation to preach. A deacon is one of the ordinary members a Baptist congregation elects to look after its money, its building and its business, so this was not a bishop or a committee reaching down to him; it was a layman in London who had heard about a boy in the fens. The chapel was a historic one, the pulpit of Benjamin Keach, of the theologian John Gill, and of John Rippon the hymn book compiler, and it had fallen on hard times: a building for twelve hundred with a congregation of a couple of hundred rattling round in it. The invitation reached Waterbeach and Spurgeon assumed it was a mistake, since London ministers did not send for country boys of nineteen. It was not a mistake. He preached there in December 1853, was invited back, and in April 1854 accepted the pastorate. Inside a year the aisles were full and the chapel was being enlarged; while the builders worked the congregation moved to Exeter Hall on the Strand, and the crowds in the Strand blocked the traffic. From January 1855 the sermon of the previous Sunday began to appear in print every week, taken down in shorthand and revised by Spurgeon himself on the Monday. That weekly pamphlet ran without a break until his death and then continued from his manuscripts until 1917.

(●) 1856 AD: Seven people died in a panic at his own service, and the preacher of twenty-two never fully recovered from it. + 1856 gave him everything and then took the ground out from under him. In January he married Susannah Thompson, a London girl he had first met as a member of his congregation. In September she bore twin sons, Charles and Thomas. On the evening of Sunday 19 October the congregation moved into the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, the largest and most fashionable room in London, because no chapel would hold them. Something like ten thousand people packed in and thousands more stood outside. Shortly after the service began, voices in the galleries shouted that the building was on fire and that the galleries were giving way. There was no fire. In the rush for the stairs seven people were crushed to death and some twenty-eight were seriously injured. Spurgeon, who could not see what was happening and went on trying to calm the hall, was led out of the building in a state of collapse. He was twenty-two years old. For weeks he could not open a Bible without the words swimming, and his friends genuinely feared for his reason. The London press, which had been sneering at him for two years as a vulgar boy performer, now blamed him for the deaths. He was back in his own pulpit at New Park Street on 2 November, a fortnight after the disaster, and back in the Music Hall before that month was out, where he went on preaching on Sunday mornings for three more years. But the wound did not close. Those who have written about his later depressions, and there were a great many of those, trace the beginning of them to that night.

(●) 1861 AD: The Metropolitan Tabernacle opened without a penny of debt, and became the base of a working machine of charities. + The Metropolitan Tabernacle at Newington Butts opened in March 1861. It seated about five thousand with standing room for another thousand, cost in the region of thirty-one thousand pounds, and was paid for before the doors opened, which Spurgeon had insisted on from the start. He preached in it morning and evening for the next thirty years, and for most of that time it was full at both services. Members had to give up their seats periodically so that strangers could get in. What went on around the preaching matters as much as the preaching. He had started taking students into his own home in 1856; that became the Pastors’ College, which trained close to nine hundred men in his lifetime, took those the universities would not look at, and charged them nothing. In 1867 a widow named Anne Hillyard gave him twenty thousand pounds to found an orphanage, and the Stockwell Orphanage took in its first boys two years later, with a girls’ side following in 1879. There was a colportage association, whose colporteurs walked the country lanes with a pack of cheap sound books on their backs and sold them at cottage doors; there were almshouses, the rent-free cottages an English charity kept for the old, in this case for elderly women; and there was a night school, and a clothing fund, and by the end something like sixty-six separate organizations running out of one church. The fighting started early too. On 5 June 1864 he preached "Baptismal Regeneration," a sermon against the baptismal service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which prays over an infant as regenerate, meaning born again and made spiritually alive. He was after more than a phrase in a service book. Evangelical clergymen who read those words over a font every few weeks, while privately holding that they were not true, were saying in church what they did not believe, and he called that dishonest. It cost him friendships across evangelical Anglicanism, and it cost him his seat in the Evangelical Alliance, the body that existed to hold evangelicals of different denominations together, which he resigned. He had warned his publishers beforehand that the sermon would wreck the circulation of the weekly pamphlet, and there he was wrong: it sold something like three hundred and fifty thousand copies, more than anything else he preached. He never withdrew a word of it.

(●) 1887 AD: He left the Baptist Union rather than share its platform, and it censured him for it. + In March and April 1887 his magazine The Sword and the Trowel carried two articles by his friend Robert Shindler under the title "The Down Grade," arguing that English Nonconformity was sliding, congregation by congregation, off the doctrines it had been built on. Nonconformity meant the Protestant churches outside the Church of England, the Baptists and Congregationalists and Methodists and the rest, which is to say Spurgeon’s own half of English Christianity rather than somebody else’s. In August he took the argument up himself in a piece called "Another Word Concerning the Down-Grade," and the fire started. His charge was specific. Ministers within the Baptist Union, he said, no longer believed in the inspiration of Scripture, the fall, substitutionary atonement, or eternal punishment, and yet remained in full standing in a Union that had no doctrinal basis to test them by. Those four short phrases carry a great deal. Inspiration means that Scripture is God’s own word rather than a record of what religious men once thought; the fall is the doctrine that the human race is in a ruined condition it cannot mend by itself; substitutionary atonement is the teaching that on the cross Christ bore, in their place, the punishment sinners had earned; and eternal punishment is the doctrine that the judgment of God is final. He was not asking for a heresy hunt. He was asking the Union to adopt a confession of faith, which is a short written statement of what a body actually believes, so that a man who no longer held these things would at least have to say so. On 28 October 1887 he withdrew from the Baptist Union. He declined to give the names of the men he had in mind, on the ground that he would not act as a prosecutor and that private letters were not his to publish, and that refusal was fatal to his case in the eyes of the Union’s officers: a charge without defendants could not be tried. On 18 January 1888 the Union’s Council, a body of about a hundred men, passed a motion of censure on him, with five voting against. In April the full assembly adopted a compromise declaration of faith of its own making, far looser than the confession he had asked for, by something like two thousand votes to seven. His own brother James, who had been his co-pastor for years, seconded that resolution in the belief that he was salvaging what could be salvaged; Charles thought the Union had been sold, and told him so. Spurgeon was fifty-three and already a sick man. He believed to the end that he had been right and that he had lost, and he told a friend that the fight had cost him dearly. Modern historians of the period, including those with no sympathy for his theology, generally concede that the drift he described was real and that his opponents were not being candid about it.

(●) 1892 AD: He died at fifty-seven in the south of France, and sixty thousand people filed past his coffin. + His body had been failing for twenty years. Gout took hold in his thirties and became agonizing; there was rheumatism and Bright’s disease of the kidneys with it. From 1871 he spent most winters at Mentone on the French Riviera, where the warmth gave him a few working months a year. In those last decades he lost something like a third of his Sundays to illness. Susannah was often not well enough to travel with him either. She had been an invalid herself since 1868, and from her sofa she ran a book fund that sent well over a hundred thousand volumes to ministers too poor to buy them, which is a remarkable output for a woman who could not reliably get out of the house. He preached his last sermon at the Tabernacle on 7 June 1891. He went to Mentone in October and died there on the night of 31 January 1892, aged fifty-seven, with Susannah beside him. The body came home by train, reaching Victoria on 8 February. The coffin lay in the Tabernacle the following day and something in the order of sixty thousand people came through to see it, in an unbroken line from morning until late at night; memorial services then ran one after another over two days for different sets of mourners, the students and the pastors, ministers of every denomination, the Christian workers, the general public. The journey to West Norwood Cemetery, five miles, took the funeral procession a little over two hours, with shops shut and blinds drawn along the route. On the coffin lay his own Bible, open at the text he had been converted by forty-two years earlier.

What He Taught

(T1) God alone saves a soul, and the preacher still pleads with every soul in the room to come. + Two men in a room hear the same sermon and one of them believes. Ask a Calvinist why, and he will tell you the difference was not in the sermon and not in the man; God gave one of them a new heart. Calvinism, named for the sixteenth-century Genevan reformer John Calvin, is the family of teaching that holds salvation to be God’s work from first to last, chosen before the world was made, which is what the word election means, and applied by God’s own initiative, so that no saved person can claim any credit for the difference (Ephesians 2:8–9). Spurgeon believed that with everything in him. Now hear the objection in its usual form, because it is a fair one and he heard it constantly. If God has already settled who will be saved, then pleading with a congregation is theatre. Why beg a man to come, if his coming was decided before he was born? Spurgeon’s answer was not a clever reconciliation. It was a refusal to give up either half. He preached election in the morning and pleaded with sinners in the evening, and when people complained of the inconsistency he answered with a picture: two lines running so close to parallel that no mind can follow them to the place where they meet, though meet they do. God calls, and the calling is God’s free choice; the preacher calls too, and the man who will not come is answerable for not coming. He read the two together in one verse of John’s Gospel: all that the Father gives will come, and whoever comes will not be cast out (John 6:37). He would not soften it in either direction. On his account election made evangelism possible rather than pointless, because a preacher who thought conversion turned on his own persuasive power would either despair or start managing people. And when the pleading was said to betray the Calvinism, he was content to be called inconsistent rather than leave a page of the Bible unpreached.

(Q) "They are two lines that are so nearly parallel, that the mind that shall pursue them farthest, will never discover that they converge; but they do converge, and they will meet somewhere in eternity, close to the throne of God, whence all truth doth spring." + Source: Spurgeon, sermon "Sovereign Grace and Man’s Responsibility," preached 1 August 1858 at the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens (New Park Street Pulpit, vol. 4, no. 207). He is talking about divine predestination and human responsibility, which he has just called two truths that few can see together and that no human anvil will ever weld into one. He was twenty-four when he said it (T1).

(T2) A sermon that has not got Christ in it is not a sermon. + In a sermon of 1859 he passed on a story a Welsh minister had told, and the story has been fastened to Spurgeon’s own name ever since, though the words in it belong to somebody else. A young man preached before an old one and asked afterwards what he thought. A very poor sermon, said the old man. The young man protested: the explanation of the text was sound, the arguments were good. So they were, the old man agreed, but there was no Christ in the sermon. From every town and village and hamlet in England there is a road to London, he told him, and from every text in Scripture there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, which is Christ. Spurgeon repeated the story for the rest of his life because he had made the old man’s rule his own. The instinct behind that is Paul’s, who told a sophisticated Greek city that he had decided to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2), and who admitted the message was an offence to one audience and nonsense to another (1 Corinthians 1:23). Spurgeon read that as a working rule rather than a mood. The cross was not one topic among his topics; it was what he was for. This is worth pausing on, because it explains something odd about him. He preached for thirty-eight years to the same congregation, in an age of enormous intellectual upheaval: Darwin’s Origin of Species came out two years before the Tabernacle opened, biblical criticism was arriving from Germany, which is the academic study that treats the books of the Bible as ordinary ancient documents to be dated, sourced and taken apart, and London was full of lecture halls where clever men explained that religion had been outgrown. Spurgeon read the critics and occasionally answered them. But he did not rebuild his preaching around them, and he told his students not to. His reasoning was that a man who spends his ministry answering the objection of the decade will find his ministry dated in ten years, whereas a man who preaches Christ crucified is preaching what every generation needs and no generation invents.

(Q) "I am never ashamed to avow myself a Calvinist... I do not hesitate to take the name of Baptist... but if I am asked to say what is my creed, I think I must reply: 'It is Jesus Christ.'" + Source: Spurgeon, "The First Sermon in the Tabernacle," preached on the Monday afternoon of 25 March 1861 (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 7, no. 369). Opening his new building, he is saying what will be preached in it for as long as it stands. The sentence comes with the labels still attached and then puts them in their place: he does not withdraw the Calvinism, he subordinates it (T1, T2).

(T3) Fits of depression come over the strongest of God’s servants, and they are not a sign of God’s displeasure. + Eleventh in the first series of his lectures to the students, in among the practical advice about voice production and how to hold a congregation’s attention, there is a chapter that has no real parallel in nineteenth-century pastoral writing. It is called "The Minister’s Fainting Fits," and it is Spurgeon telling a room of young men who want to be preachers that they are going to be crushed, that it will happen for no visible reason, and that they should not conclude from it that God has abandoned them. He gives reasons, and they are strikingly ordinary ones. Ministers are men, and a man in a body gets tired; the work is unusually solitary; a preacher is often exhausted precisely when he is most needed. He notes that the low patch frequently arrives just after a great success, which he had learned the hard way, and just before some new trial, as if it were the trough before a wave. He tells them, with no embarrassment at all, that this is his own experience, and he had told his congregation as much in 1858, back in the pulpit after a week on his couch: his spirits had sunk so low that he could weep by the hour like a child and not know what he wept for ("The Christian’s Heaviness and Rejoicing"). None of this was a concession he made reluctantly. He thought it was in the Bible. Paul told the Corinthians that he had been burdened beyond his strength and had despaired of life itself, and that the point of it was to teach him to rely on God rather than on himself (2 Corinthians 1:8–9). The psalmist asks his own soul why it is cast down, which is a question a man in good spirits does not need to ask (Psalm 42:5). A hundred and fifty years before the modern conversation about mental illness in the church, Spurgeon was telling ministers in print that a black season is not proof of sin and not a disqualification for service, and that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18).

(Q) "Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy." + Source: Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, first series (1875), lecture XI, "The Minister’s Fainting Fits." The lecture opens with David waxing faint in the heat of battle, and then these lines, spoken to men in their twenties preparing for the ministry. He is not describing an unfortunate few; he says most of us, and includes himself (T3).

(T4) Scripture needs preaching more than it needs defending. + He came back more than once to the picture of defending a lion. You do not need to protect a lion. Open the cage and let him out, and he will look after himself. He used it in a speech to the Bible Society in 1875, again from the pulpit in 1886, and most fully in a sermon of January 1888. Taken carelessly, that sounds like a man waving away the whole business of Christian evidences, which was the Victorian name for the reasoned case that the faith is true, and it is worth being clear that it is not. Spurgeon owned and recommended the apologetic literature of his century, the books that set out those reasons; his Commenting and Commentaries, a survey of biblical scholarship written for working pastors, is the book of a man who had read a great deal and judged it carefully, and he was perfectly willing to argue when arguing was the thing to do. The point of the lion is narrower and more useful than a dismissal. It is that Scripture read aloud and pressed home does its own work on a hearer, and that a church which spends its energy proving that the Bible may be trusted, and never gets round to preaching what the Bible says, has kept the animal safely in its cage. Behind that stood a conviction he stated flatly in the Down-Grade articles: doctrine is not decoration. He watched a generation of ministers keep the vocabulary of the gospel while emptying it, and he thought the emptying happened first in the study and only later in the pulpit. Take away the inspiration of Scripture, he said, and there is nothing left to preach from; the man in the pew is then listening to a well-educated person’s opinions. Paul’s instruction to Timothy is three words long and Spurgeon treated it as the whole job description: preach the word (2 Timothy 4:2).

(Q) "The Word of God can take care of itself, and will do so if we preach it, and cease defending it. See you that lion. They have caged him for his preservation; shut him up behind iron bars to secure him from his foes! See how a band of armed men have gathered together to protect the lion. What a clatter they make with their swords and spears! These mighty men are intent upon defending a lion. O fools, and slow of heart! Open that door! Let the lord of the forest come forth free." + Source: Spurgeon, sermon "The Lover of God’s Law Filled with Peace," preached 22 January 1888 on Psalm 119:165 (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 34, no. 2004). The lion is Scripture, the cage is the well-meaning apparatus built around it, and the armed men making a clatter are its defenders. He goes straight on to ask what the lion wants with anyone’s guardian care, and to say that the gospel let loose will clear its own way (T4).

(Q) "These forty years and more have I served him, blessed be his name! and I have had nothing but love from him." + Source: Spurgeon, "The Statute of David for the Sharing of the Spoil," preached 7 June 1891 (Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 37, no. 2208). The last sermon he ever preached at the Tabernacle, though nobody in the building knew it. He is commending his master to anyone in the room who has not yet enlisted, and the whole closing passage reads like a recruiting officer speaking well of his captain.

What Christian Readers Made of Him

(†) The printed sermons went where he could not, and they have never gone out of print. + The weekly penny sermon is the reason a Baptist pastor in Southwark is still a household name in places he never visited. At its height the pamphlet sold in the region of twenty-five thousand copies a week, and the sermons were translated into dozens of languages: Dutch, German, French, Welsh, Swedish, Castilian, Russian, Chinese and more. Settlers in Australia and missionaries in Africa read the sermon of a Sunday they had missed by six weeks. Not every reader was pleased to get one. The American South read them and then burned them: Spurgeon had said he would hold no fellowship of any sort with a slaveholder, and in 1860 his sermons went onto bonfires in Montgomery and across Virginia and the Carolinas. When David Livingstone died in Africa in 1873 a copy of the sermon "Accidents, Not Punishments" was found among his things, with "Very good. D.L." written across the top of the first page. The scale is worth stating plainly, because it is easily lost in the adjectives. The New Park Street and Metropolitan Tabernacle series together run to sixty-three volumes and more than three and a half thousand sermons, published continuously from 1855 to 1917. Nothing else in Christian publishing is of that size from one author. They remain in print, in cheap reprints and free online, and they are still being translated. Nor was print the whole of it. He wrote or compiled around 140 other books; John Ploughman’s Talk, a collection of blunt proverbial advice for working men with barely any theology in it, sold a million copies and was found in cottages that owned no other book but the Bible. All of Grace, his short explanation of the gospel for an anxious reader, has been reprinted and given away more than anything else he wrote.

(†) Preachers who reject nearly everything he believed still go to school on him. + This is the odd and rather cheering part of his reception. A Baptist, a Calvinist and a Victorian ought by now to belong to one shelf of one tradition. Instead he is read across Christendom by people who would argue with him all afternoon. Helmut Thielicke, a German Lutheran theologian who lived through the Third Reich and had no interest whatever in Spurgeon’s church order or his doctrine of election, published a book of extracts in 1961 with an essay recommending him to modern preachers, and told his readers to sell whatever they had and buy Spurgeon. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the Welsh physician turned preacher at Westminster Chapel, treated him as the standard by which nineteenth-century preaching should be measured. Lectures to My Students is still assigned in seminaries of half a dozen denominations, and it is assigned because the advice in it is about human beings rather than about Victorian England: how to hold a congregation, how to choose a text, what to do when the words will not come. The Pastors’ College he founded is still training ministers as Spurgeon’s College. The Stockwell Orphanage continues as the children’s charity Spurgeons. And the sixty-six organizations he left behind make a point his admirers sometimes miss: he did not believe preaching to the poor was a substitute for feeding them, and the orphanage and the almshouses and the night school were run out of the same building and the same collection plate as the sermon.

(†) The Down-Grade became the pattern later conservatives followed, and Christians still read it both ways. + Nothing he did has been argued over as long as his withdrawal from the Baptist Union, and the argument is not really about Spurgeon. It is about what a Christian should do when the body he belongs to stops believing what it says it believes. One reading, and it was the reading of the conservative movements of the following century in Britain and America, is that Spurgeon saw first and clearest. Within forty years of his death the questions he raised, the inspiration of Scripture, the atonement, the reality of judgment, had split denominations on both sides of the Atlantic, and men in those fights quoted him constantly. On this reading he was a prophet who was censured for being early. The other reading is held by Christians who share his theology and still think he handled it badly. He made a public charge and then declined to name anyone, which left the accused unable to answer and the Union unable to investigate; and he withdrew before the Union had voted on anything at all, so that the men he was worried about inherited it without him in it. His brother James stayed. Historians of English Nonconformity broadly grant that the drift he described was real; they divide over whether withdrawal did anything to stop it. Both readings can be held without ill will, and Christians who care about the same things have landed on both sides.

(†) Where a reader parts company with him: he made his system the gospel, and he fought in a way that made his charge untriable. + Two things in his own record are worth saying plainly, and both come from his own words rather than from what anyone later did with them. - Calvinism is not the gospel. In "A Defence of Calvinism," written for his autobiography, Spurgeon gave it as his own private opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and him crucified unless we preach what is nowadays called Calvinism, and added that it is a nickname to call it Calvinism, since Calvinism is the gospel and nothing else. He knew it was a strong sentence and he meant it. But it identifies one account of how salvation works with the saving message itself, and that is a step further than the New Testament takes. Paul faced a church sorting itself into parties by teacher and refused to let the parties stand: Apollos and Paul are servants, and only God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:5–7). Christians who believe every word of the Nicene Creed and are not Calvinists have the gospel, and Spurgeon’s own practice, which was warmer than his polemics, mostly showed that he knew it. A few pages on in that same essay he wrote that if two apostles were to be added to the twelve, he did not believe two fitter men could be found than George Whitefield and John Wesley, whom he had just named the modern prince of Arminians and whose character he said stood beyond all imputation. Arminians, named for the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, are the Christians who hold that God’s saving grace can be resisted and that the free response of the person is a real part of the account, which is precisely the position his own Calvinism was set against. The hymn book he compiled for the Tabernacle carried Charles Wesley, and when the church kept his fiftieth birthday in 1884 the American evangelist D. L. Moody, no Calvinist at all, was invited to speak from his platform. The sentence about Calvinism still says what it says. - A charge without defendants. In the Down-Grade he did something he would not have accepted from an opponent. He accused unnamed ministers of abandoning the faith and then refused to identify them, which is a serious thing to do to men who cannot then clear themselves. His reasons were honourable, that private correspondence was not his to publish and that he would not play prosecutor, but the result was that everyone in the Union was under suspicion and nobody could be tried. Scripture is exacting about accusation for exactly this reason: a charge is established only on the evidence of two or three witnesses, and a charge against an elder is not so much as to be admitted on less (Deuteronomy 19:15; 1 Timothy 5:19). Neither point touches the thing he is chiefly remembered for. He was, on any measure anyone has proposed, the most widely heard and most widely read preacher of the English nineteenth century, and the record of what he preached is more completely preserved than that of any other Christian who ever lived.