History Book: Charles Haddon Spurgeon

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, June 17th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book.

One hundred ninety years ago this week, Charles Spurgeon is born into a world at war. Not a battle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers. Here’s WORLD Associate Correspondent Caleb Welde

CALEB WELDE: June 19th, 1834. Newlyweds John and Eliza Spurgeon hold their first baby for the first time.

Charles grows close with his grandfather who is a Puritan minister – immersed in hymns and sermons and drawn to the illustrations in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. His favorite book is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. At twenty, he gives a copy to a girl named Susannah, writing a note in the front wishing her:

SPURGEON: …progress in a blessed pilgrimage.

Ed Phillips there reading from Susannah’s copy. The country preacher has already delivered almost seven-hundred sermons when he accepts a pastorate in London. He continues holding services the same year despite a deadly Cholera epidemic ravishing the city. Even riskier– he seeks out the infected.

The work is costly.

SPURGEON: My friends seemed falling one by one, and I felt or fancied that I was sickening like those around me.

He remembers mournfully walking home after another funeral when he noticed a paper posted in a shoemaker’s window.

SPURGEON: In a good bold handwriting, these words:

“Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”

The effect upon my heart was immediate. I went on with my visitation of the dying, in a calm and peaceful spirit; I felt no fear of evil, and I suffered no harm.

The epidemic passes by the end of the year and Spurgeon marries Susannah.

By now, thousands are flocking to hear the charismatic young pastor in an era before microphones and loud speakers. Besides physical exertion Spurgeon brings spiritual weight to the pulpit.

SPURGEON: I could have wept my very being out of my eyes and carried my whole frame away in a flood of tears if I could but win souls.

He sleeps for twenty-four hours straight after preaching to a crowd of twenty-three thousand.

Seven months after Spurgeon’s wedding a crowd of more than ten thousand packs into a London venue to hear him. Then, someone yells, “fire.” Spurgeon tries to halt the stampede but collapses and has to be carried out. Seven people are trampled to death. Geoff Chang is curator of the Spurgeon Library.

CHANG: He never quite recovered from, I think the word trauma could rightly be used, from the trauma of that event.

The incident sends him into deep depression– the first of many seasons of despondency. 

Spurgeon preaches through the blackness. After a sermon on Psalm twenty-two verse one— “My God, why have you forsaken me?” a man approaches him looking very disheveled. He says it was like Spurgeon was preaching inside his soul.

SPURGEON: By God’s grace I saved that man from suicide, and led him into gospel light and liberty; but I know I could not have done it if I had not myself been confined in the dungeon in which he lay.

At twenty-seven, Spurgeon delivers his first sermon in the London Metropolitan Tabernacle.

He calls it a tabernacle to emphasize the transient nature of a Christian’s journey. Several American visitors want to know the secret of his success.

CHANG: And so he takes them down to the basement of the church, and there's a prayer meeting going on. He's like, here's the secret. Here's the engine room of the church.

Thousands of people show up to pray every Monday night.

At twenty-nine, Spurgeon begins publishing a magazine titled the Sword and the Trowel– “A record of combat with sin … and labor for the Lord.”

CHANG: He takes that image from Nehemiah where they're building up the walls of Jerusalem. They're working on the walls, but they're also carrying swords to defend themselves.

Two years later he breaks ground for an orphanage, inspired by his friend George Müller’s orphan houses. All the while he’s writing sermons, marrying and burying church members, editing the magazine, helping friendly churches, counseling the especially difficult cases and responding to five hundred letters a week.

Spurgeon preaches Sabbath rest while asserting,

SPURGEON: It is our duty and privilege to exhaust our lives for Jesus. We are not to be living specimens of men in fine preservation, but living sacrifices, whose lot is to be consumed. We can only produce life in others by the wear and tear of our own being.

His notoriety intensifies through his thirties and forties.

By the 1880’s, he’s been a central figure in the British Baptist Union for several decades. Then, he sees pastors adopting a new religion!

SPURGEON: Which is no more Christianity than chalk is cheese.

The “Downgrade Controversy” was an attempt to wed nineteenth century rationalism with the Bible. Geoff Chang:

CHANG: You know, trying to update Christianity for its times.

Spurgeon rages, writing,

SPURGEON: The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture is denied, the Holy Spirit is degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin is turned into fiction, and the resurrection into a myth.

He calls on the denomination to denounce the teaching.

CHANG: His denomination refuses, they take no action. And so in response, Spurgeon decides I need to withdraw. He's resigned from the Baptist union.

The Union publicly rebukes him,

CHANG: …writes articles, talking about him being uncharitable, being narrow, bigoted. So his wife says, despite all of his physical ailments, it was the heartache, the broken heart over this controversy that killed him.

On January 31st, 1892, Charles Spurgeon dies from complications relating to his various health conditions. He was fifty-seven. He loved the Church–who he often called “the army of God.”

CHANG: “That was, I think, his favorite image of the church. The church is not a resort, it's not a hotel. It's a place for us to join so that we can engage in this fight against the forces of darkness in this world, in a fight for the gospel.

Spurgeon referred to that “Gospel fight” in the closing sentences of his last sermon– looking to His King and Commander.

SPURGEON: He is the most magnanimous of captains. There never was his like among the choicest of princes. He is always to be found in the thickest part of the battle. When the wind blows cold he always takes the bleak side of the hill. The heaviest end of the cross lies ever on his shoulders. …His service is life, peace, joy. Oh, that you would enter it at once! God help you to enlist under the banner of Jesus even this day!

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Caleb Welde.

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