The Lost Controversy: Spurgeon and the Sovereignty of God

The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 2 of Iain H. Murray’s The Forgotten Spurgeon (pages 46–64).

Mr Spurgeon is a Calvinist, which few of the dissenting ministers in London now are. He preaches salvation, not of man’s free will, but of the Lord’s good will, which few in London, it is to be feared, now do.
John Anderson of Helensburgh
The Early Years, p. 339.

I do not hesitate to say, that next to the doctrine of the crucifixion and the resurrection of our blessed Lord – no doctrine had such prominence in the early Christian Church as the doctrine of the election of grace.
C.H.S., Sermons, 6, 302.

The doctrine of grace has been put by in the lumber chamber. It is acknowledged to be true, for it is confessed in most creeds; it is in the Church of England articles, it is in the confessions of all sorts of Protestant Christians, except those who are avowedly Arminian, but how little is it ever preached! It is put among the relics of the past. It is considered to be a respectable sort of retired officer, who is not expected to see any more active service.
C.H.S., Sermons, 12, 429.

In the previous chapter we sought to recover the image of Spurgeon as he was in the days of his New Park Street ministry. The picture which emerged was not that of a jovial pulpit phenomenon upon whom men lavished their praise but rather of a youth whose arrival amidst the soothing and sleepy religious life of London was about as unwelcome as the Russian cannons which were then thundering in the far-off Crimea. The facts come as somewhat of a jolt to us, for we have more or less become accustomed to look upon Spurgeon as a benign grandfather of modern evangelicalism. When the revival of 1855 and onwards shook Southwark out of its spiritual slumber, the name of the pastor of New Park Street was a symbol of reproach, and blows were rained on him from every direction; the name has since been turned into a symbol of evangelical respectability and we tend to comfort ourselves amidst the prevailing defection from evangelical principles with the thought that the religious world has still some remembrance of a man holding our position whose influence not so many years ago encircled the globe. Yet when we recall the real character of his ministry our comfort may evaporate, for we are faced with the question, not how much we admire Spurgeon, but what would a man like this think of the church today?

We have already spoken of the general characteristics of his early life and they need to be borne in mind as we turn to more detailed aspects of the doctrine he preached. It would be an injustice to the man in any way to separate the truth which he held from the spirit in which he lived. His doctrinal convictions were not formulated in the cool detachment of intellectual study. Rather they were burned into him by the Holy Spirit, irradiated by his love for his Redeemer, and kept fresh in his ministry by communion with God. Spurgeon had little sympathy for men who held an orthodox system which was devoid of the living unction of the Spirit.

One of the first attacks which was made on Spurgeon’s ministry after his settlement in London came from a section of the Baptist community which could at that time be described as ‘Hyper-Calvinist’. The label is not one that Spurgeon liked to use, for he regarded the introduction of the great Reformer’s name as a misnomer: ‘Calvinists, such men may call themselves, but, unlike the Reformer, whose name they adopt, they bring a system of divinity to the Bible to interpret it, instead of making every system, be its merits what they may, yield, and give place to the pure and unadulterated Word of God.’ In the January 1855 issue of The Earthen Vessel, an anonymous writer of this school cast doubt on Spurgeon’s whole position and call to the ministry. Spurgeon’s untraditional phraseology, the crowds which followed him, his general invitations and exhortations to all hearers to repent and believe the gospel, and the ‘broadness’ of his theology were all grounds for suspicion. He was neither narrow enough nor discriminating enough for his critic, who complained: ‘Spurgeon preaches all doctrine and no doctrine; all experience, and therefore no experience.’

For a reason which will later be apparent, the youthful preacher was not concerned to meet this attack; nevertheless he did sometimes pause in the course of a sermon to deal with  the views of the Hyper-Calvinists. Sometimes his reflections are semi-humorous, as the following:

Is there not many a good ‘Hyper’ brother, who has a full knowledge of the doctrines of grace; but when he is reading the Bible, one day, he finds a text that looks rather wide and general, and he says, ‘This cannot mean what it says; I must trim it down and make it fit into Dr Gill’s commentary’?

More often he deals much more sharply with the principles which lead to this kind of practice, for Hyper-Calvinism not only causes personal lopsidedness, but what is more serious, it prevents a full preaching of the gospel.¹‘They have been obliged to cover up such a passage as this, because they could not understand it: “O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wing, but ye would not.” They durst not preach upon such a text as this: “As I live saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, but rather that he should turn unto me and live.” They are ashamed to say to men, “Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?” They dare not come out and preach as Peter did – “Repent ye, and be converted that your sins may be blotted out.”’ Sermons, 6, 302.

I do not believe [he declares in the course of a sermon on the Good Samaritan] in the way in which some people pretend to preach the gospel. They have no gospel for sinners as sinners, but only for those who  are above the dead level of sinnership, and are technically styled sensible sinners.

We must break the quotation for a moment to clarify his terminology: Hyper-Calvinism in its attempt to square all gospel truth with God’s purpose to save the elect, denies there is a universal command to repent and believe, and asserts that we have only warrant to invite to Christ those who are conscious of a sense of sin and need. In other words, it is those who have been spiritually quickened to seek a Saviour and not those who are in the death of unbelief and indifference, to whom the exhortations of the gospel must be addressed.

In this way a scheme was devised for restricting the gospel to those who, there is reason to suppose, are elect. Spurgeon continues:

Like the priest in this parable, they see the poor sinner, and they say ‘He is not conscious of his need, we cannot invite him to Christ’; ‘He is dead,’ they say, ‘it is of no use preaching to dead souls’; so they pass by on the other side, keeping close to the elect and quickened, but having nothing whatever to say to the dead, lest they should make out Christ to be too gracious, and his mercy to be too free . . . I have known ministers say, ‘Well, you know, we ought to describe the sinner’s state, and warn him, but we must not invite him to Christ.’ Yes, gentlemen, you must pass by on the other side, after having looked at him, for on your own confession you have no good news for the poor wretch. I bless my Lord and Master he has given me a gospel which I can take to dead sinners, a gospel which is available for the vilest of the vile.²Sermons, 8, 55.

Spurgeon was urgent upon this issue because he saw that if the sinner’s warrant for receiving the gospel lies in any internal qualifications or feelings, then the unconverted, as such, have no immediate duty to believe on Christ, and they may conclude that because they do not feel any penitence or need, the command to believe on the Son of God is not addressed to them. On the other hand, if the warrant rests not in anything in the sinner but solely in the command and invitations of God, then we have a message for every creature under heaven. Spurgeon did not believe that the fact of election should be concealed from the unconverted, but he held that Hyper-Calvinism, by directing men’s attention away from the centrality of personal faith in Christ, had distorted³‘You have seen those mirrors,’ he says (referring to fair-grounds) ‘you walk up to them and you see your head ten times as large as your body, or you walk away and put yourself in another position, and then your feet are monstrous and the rest of your body is small; this is an ingenious toy, but I am sorry to say that many go to work with God’s truth upon the model of this toy; they magnify one capital truth till it becomes monstrous; they minify and speak little of another truth till it becomes altogether forgotten. 8, 182. For a short summary of Spurgeon’s views on ‘Preaching to Sinners’ see his book of addresses entitled Only A Prayer-Meeting, pp. 301–5.’ the New Testament emphasis and bolstered up complacency in unbelievers. It had alleged that because faith is wrought in man by the power of the Spirit of God, then we cannot command men to believe, but in so doing it by-passed the stark fact that unbelief is always presented to us in Scripture as sin for which we are responsible: ‘If you had not fallen you would come to Christ the moment he was preached to you; but you do not because of your sinfulness.’ Man’s failure to comply with the gospel, instead of being excusable, is the highest expression of his depravity.

It should be clear from this that Hyper-Calvinism is more than a mere theoretical deviation from the gospel, and Spurgeon spoke strongly because he knew by experience that it reduces churches to inactivity or even complete paralysis. ‘I have met with some brethren who have tried to read the Bible the wrong way upwards. They have said, “God has a purpose which is certain to be fulfilled, therefore we will not budge an inch. All power is in the hands of Christ, therefore we will sit still;” but that is not Christ’s way of reading the passage. It is, “All power is given unto me, therefore go ye, and do something.”’⁴42, 234. ‘The lazy-bones of our orthodox churches cry, “God will do His own work”; and then they look out the softest pillow they can find, and put it under their heads, and say, “The eternal purposes will be carried out: God will be glorified.” That is all very fine talk, but it can be used with the most mischievous design. You can make opium out of it, which will lull you into a deep and dreadful slumber, and prevent your being of any kind of use at all.’⁵30, 630.

At no point was Hyper-Calvinism more seriously at fault, in Spurgeon’s eyes, than in its failure to be characterized by zeal for militant and world-wide evangelism. While he knew that not a few Christians of this persuasion were better than their creed, he saw clearly that both the theological and historical evidence indicated that the influence of this teaching never promoted earnest missionary work. If the gospel is only for sensible sinners, how then can the church act under the compulsion of her commission to ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature’? If the warrant to believe only belongs to the penitent, then it does not belong to all men everywhere, for the multitudes of the earth are not in that condition:

I would like to carry one of those who only preach to sensible sinners, and set him down in the capital of the kingdom of Dahomey. There are no sensible sinners there! Look at them, with their mouths stained with human blood, with their bodies smeared all over with the gore of their immolated victims – how will the preacher find any qualification there? I know not what he could say, but I know what my message would be. My word would run thus – ‘Men and brethren, God, who made the heavens and the earth, hath sent His Son Jesus Christ into the world to suffer for our sins, and whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.⁶9, 538, a sermon on ‘The Warrant of Faith’. ‘The command to believe in Christ must be the sinner’s warrant . . . Unless the warrant be a something in which every creature can take a share, there is no such thing as consistently preaching to every creature.’ cf also another sermon on the warrant, May I? (30, 613). Perhaps no last-century Christian leader gave such clear teaching on the question of the warrant as the saintly Professor John Duncan of Edinburgh. With his customary habit of simplifying a problem in a few sentences, he says: ‘If only convinced sinners are warranted to embrace Christ, then I must, ere I can be warranted to embrace Him, be convinced that I am a convinced sinner. But the Holy Spirit is the only source of infallible conviction, and the Holy Spirit is nowhere promised to convince of conviction; He is only promised to convince of sin. True, the convinced sinner is the only capable subject of saving faith, but it is not as a convinced sinner I am called upon to come to Christ . . . None are so unwilling to consider themselves convinced as those who really are . . . The convinced sinner would be the last to embrace an offer made to convinced sinners; but proclaim the gospel to a vile, guilty sinner, and he saith, “That is I” . . . God needs to do a great deal to sinners, in order to turn them; but God is requiring nothing of sinners but that they return.’ Recollections of the Late John Duncan, A. Moody Stuart, 1872, pp. 96–7, 219. 62 20, 239.

‘The day was,’ he says in another sermon, ‘when the very idea of sending the gospel to the heathen was regarded by our orthodox brethren as a piece of Don Quixotism, not to be attempted, and even now, if you say, “All the world for Jesus,” they open their eyes and say, “Ah, we are afraid you are tainted with universal redemption, or are going off to the Arminian camp.” God grant these dear brethren new hearts and right spirits; at present their hearts are too small to bring Him much glory. May they get larger hearts, hearts something like their Lord’s, and may they have grace given them to estimate the precious blood at a higher rate, for our Lord did not die to buy a few hundred of souls, or to redeem to Himself a handful of people; He shed His blood for a number which no man can number, and His elect shall excel in multitude the sands which belt the sea.’⁷20, 239.

The above quotations are vitally important for a variety of reasons, Firstly, they indicate that there is a real difference between Biblical Calvinism and Hyper-Calvinism. The latter term is sometimes used as though it were simply a stronger formulation of Scriptural doctrines – something beyond a ‘moderate’ position – but this is an incorrect usage, for the system deviates seriously from Scripture and falls short of Scripture. Another wrong usage of the term, which is even more common, is for the label ‘hyper-’ or ‘ultra-’ Calvinist to be attached to those who are in fact opposed to Hyper-Calvinism. Being ignorant of the distinct theological differences which separate Hyper-Calvinism from the faith of the Reformers and Puritans, and being unaware of its different historical origins, some critics use the phrase as though it were the most suitable to describe anyone who is earnest in opposing the tenets of Arminianism. But while this may be a convenient way to brand ‘extremists’, it reveals the spiritual muddle of those who thus use it. Spurgeon, however, had frequently to put up with this treatment and it is not unknown today.

If the reader turns to the twentieth-century biographies of Spurgeon he will have no difficulty in finding references to the preacher’s opposition to the ‘hyper’ school. J. C. Carlile, for example, says, ‘Naturally Mr Spurgeon’s theology often brought him into controversy,’ and he immediately proceeds to mention the controversy we have sketched above. We are left with the impression that Spurgeon was just like we are – opposed to extremes, and we are confirmed in this feeling when we are told by W. Y. Fullerton that ‘he broke away from the sterner school’.⁸C. H. Spurgeon, W. Y. Fullerton, 1920, p. 290. Fullerton appears to be implying that Spurgeon left Hyper-Calvinism, but it is quite clear from his autobiography that he never was a Hyper-Calvinist! It was this fact which occasioned a difference with one of his deacons at Waterbeach – his first pastorate. cf. The Early Years, pp. 221–2. Of course we are given a vague statement of Spurgeon’s Calvinism, but Carlile adds that ‘the stern truths of the Calvinist faith were held practically by all Protestants’.⁹C. H. Spurgeon: An Interpretative Biography, J. C. Carlile, 1933, p. 147. So with such assurances we are unsuspectingly allowed to suppose that the doctrinal content of Spurgeon’s preaching caused no great uproar in the religious world of his day. This is all thoroughly misleading. The twentieth-century biographers have in fact entirely passed over the greatest controversy of his early ministry; there is not even a whisper of the word which echoes through the six volumes of the New Park Street sermons; it cannot be found in the indexes to these biographies. Why should modern evangelicals be so much concerned to make the word ‘Arminianism’ vanish away?¹⁰More seriously, ‘Arminianism’ has even been removed from the text of some of Spurgeon’s Sermons reprinted in the Kelvedon edition, though no warning of abridgement is given to the reader. Compare, for example, the sermon preached on 18 October, 1857 which is No. 159 in New Park Street Pulpit, Volume 3, and which appears in volume 13 (Sermons of Comfort and Assurance), page 222 of the Kelvedon edition published by Marshall, Morgan & Scott.

Whatever the purpose, this method of dealing with Spurgeon has quite effectively created an impression of the man which has wide currency today; yet we believe this impression of the nature of Spurgeon’s ‘evangelicalism’ is one which a study of his autobiography and a study of his unabridged sermons thoroughly demolishes. When a small selection of his sermons, entitled Revival Year Sermons, was published in 1959 to commemorate the revival of a century earlier, some British reviewers could not refrain from expressing their feeling that the sermons were ‘hand-picked’ in an attempt to put over a party position which was not really Spurgeonic at all, and when the same sermons were translated into Spanish by a minister of that country, Spanish Baptists questioned the veracity of the translation! We may smile at the story of the Victorian schoolboy who thought that Spurgeon was the Prime Minister of England but it seems there are similar wild ideas about what kind of man he really was, current at the present time.

In expanding these statements it is first necessary to show that the prevalent doctrinal outlook in the 1850s was not Calvinistic, as Carlile affirms, but rather Arminian, and it was chiefly because Spurgeon stood against this that his arrival in London was looked upon with such disfavour by the religious world. Spurgeon’s exchanges with Hyper-Calvinism were only skirmishes compared to the battle which he had to fight on quite a different and much wider front; he judged that Hyper-Calvinism was held only by a group, with comparatively small and scattered influence, within the Baptist denomination, whereas he regarded Arminianism as an error which was influential throughout Nonconformity, as well as within the Church of England. He consequently devoted more time and energy to the exposing of the latter, and the correctness of his assessment of the position is borne out by the strength of the opposition he soon encountered.

The few religious periodicals which favoured Hyper-Calvinism could never have caused the storm which raged round Spurgeon’s ministry in its early years. The newspapers generally, religious and secular, were indeed so far from Hyper-Calvinism that they were not even aware that Spurgeon was opposed by Hyper-Calvinists!

There is no shortage of literary evidence indicating that Spurgeon’s doctrinal position was his chief offence in the eyes of his contemporaries. For example, Silas Henn introduced his book Spurgeon’s Calvinism Examined and Refuted, published in 1858, with these words:

By many, the Calvinistic controversy has been considered as long since settled, and comparatively few in these times, amid such enlightened views of Christianity, dare to proclaim, openly and without disguise, the peculiar tenets of John Calvin. Even in many professedly Calvinistic pulpits, the doctrines are greatly modified, and genuine Calvinism is kept back. But there are some who hold it forth in all its length and breadth, and among these, the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, the notorious preacher at the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens, is the most prominent.

The same criticism is commonly to be found in many of the newspapers of that period. The Bucks Chronicle accused Spurgeon of making Hyper-Calvinism essential for entrance to heaven; The Freeman deplored that he denounced Arminians ‘in almost every sermon’; The Christian News likewise decried his ‘doctrines of the most rampant exclusiveness’ and his opposition to Arminianism; and The Saturday Review was pained, as we have noted earlier, at the profanity of his preaching ‘Particular Redemption in saloons reeking with the perfume of tobacco’. Perhaps The Patriot, a Nonconformist journal, best summarized in the following broadside why they were all so much offended at the young preacher:

All, in turn, come under the lash of the precocious tyro. He alone is a consistent Calvinist; all besides are either rank Arminians, licentious Antinomians, or unfaithful professors of the doctrines of grace. College training does but wean young men’s sympathies from the people; and ‘really ploughmen would make a great deal better preachers’. The doctrine of election is, ‘in our age, scorned and hated’. ‘The time-serving religion of the present day’ is ‘only exhibited in evangelical drawing rooms’. ‘How many pious preachers are there on the Sabbath-day who are very impious preachers during the rest of the week!’ He ‘never hears’ his brother ministers ‘assert the positive satisfaction and substitution of our Lord Jesus Christ’. These fishers of men ‘have been spending all their life fishing with most elegant silk lines and gold and silver hooks, but the fish will not bite for all that; whereas we of the rougher sort’, adds the self-complacent censor, ‘have put the hook into the jaws of hundreds’. Still ‘rougher’, if possible, is Mr Spurgeon’s treatment of theologians not of his own especial school. ‘Arminian perversions’, in particular, are to ‘sink back to their birthplace in the pit’. Their notion of the possibility of a final fall from grace is ‘the wickedest falsehood on earth’.¹¹Pike, G. H., The Life and Work of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, 2, 196.

These quotations are coloured by the annoyance of the writers but they are all unanimous in two charges: namely that Spurgeon’s doctrine was not that which was characteristic of contemporary Protestantism and secondly that he openly and repeatedly opposed Arminianism. Instead of clearing himself from the guilt of these charges Spurgeon readily accepted them.¹²4, 341. ‘Scarcely a Baptist minister of standing will own me’, Spurgeon wrote in a letter to a friend, and in another he commented that contemporary preachers ‘are afraid of real Gospel Calvinism’ (The Early Years, 342-3). The eminent Thomas Binney, after hearing a sermon on behalf of the London Association of Baptist Churches in 1855 in which the pastor of New Park Street spoke against Arminianism, declared ‘I never heard such things in my life before!’ ‘We need not be ashamed of our pedigree,’ he says, ‘although Calvinists are now considered to be heterodox.’ His estimate of the religious situation was that the church was being tempted ‘with Arminianism by the wholesale’¹³1, 208. and that her primary need was not simply more evangelism nor even more holiness (in the first place) but a return to the full truth of the doctrines of grace – which, for convenience, he was prepared to name as Calvinism. It is clear that Spurgeon did not view himself simply as an evangelist but also as a reformer whose duty it was ‘to give more prominence in the religious world to those old doctrines of the gospel’¹⁴The Early Years, p. 350 . . . ‘The old truth that Calvin preached, that Augustine preached, that Paul preached, is the truth that I must preach today, or else be false to my conscience and my God. I cannot shape the truth; I know of no such thing as paring off the rough edges  of a doctrine. John Knox’s gospel is my gospel. That which thundered through Scotland must thunder through England again.’¹⁵ibid., p. 162. These words take us back to the heart of his New Park Street ministry; there is a reforming zeal and prophetic fire about the man which, while it awakened some, aroused others to wrath and hostility. Spurgeon spoke as a man convinced that he knew the reason for the church’s ineffectiveness, and though he might have to say it alone, he would not be silent:

There has sprung up in the Church of Christ an idea that there are many things taught in the Bible which are not essential; that we may alter them just a little to suit our convenience: that provided we are right in the fundamentals, the other things are of no concern . . . But this know, that the slightest violation of the divine law will bring judgments upon the Church, and has brought judgments, and is even at this day withholding God’s hand from blessing us . . . The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible is the religion of Christ’s Church. And until we come back to that the Church will have to suffer . . .

Ah, how many have there been who have said, ‘The old puritanic principles are too rough for these times; we’ll alter them, we’ll tone them down a little.’ What are you at, Sir? Who art thou that darest to touch a single letter of God’s Book which God has hedged about with thunder, in that tremendous sentence, wherein He has written, ‘Whosoever shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and whosoever shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city.’ It becomes an awful thing when we come to think about it, for men not to form a right and proper judgment about God’s Word; for man to leave a single point in it uncanvassed, a single mandate unstudied, lest we shall lead others astray, while we ourselves are acting in disobedience to God . . .

Our victories of the Church have not been like the victories of the olden times. Why is this? My theory to account for it is this. In the first place, the absence of the Holy Spirit in a great measure from us. But if you come to the root of it to know the reason, my fuller other answer is this: the Church has forsaken her original purity, and therefore, she has lost her power. If once we had done with everything erroneous, if by the unanimous will of the entire body of Christ, every evil ceremony, every ceremony not ordained of Scripture were lopped off and done with; if every doctrine were rejected which is not sustained by Holy Writ; if the Church were pure and clean, her path would be onward, triumphant, victorious . . .

This may seem to you to be of little consequence, but it really is a matter of life and death. I would plead with every Christian – think it over, my dear brother. When some of us preach Calvinism, and some Arminianism, we cannot both be right; it is of no use trying to think we can be – ‘Yes’, and ‘no’, cannot both be true . . . Truth does not vacillate like the pendulum which shakes backwards and forwards. It is not like the comet, which is here, there, and everywhere. One must be right; the other wrong.¹⁶6, 166-70.

This reforming element in Spurgeon’s early ministry can only be rightly interpreted if we understand his convictions on the theological drift of his age. He believed that God had called him to stand for a reviving of the old Calvinistic evangelicalism once predominant in England and it was because this conviction was so intertwined with the course of his ministry during his first years in London that he has a chapter in his autobiography, at this point, entitled A Defence of Calvinism.¹⁷The Early Years, pp. 163–75; also reprinted in a booklet of this title (Banner of Truth, 2008). An interesting letter of Spurgeon’s which has only recently come to light bears out the same point. The letter is to Charles Spiller, a Baptist minister in Chipping Campden, and while Spurgeon mentions the attack he has suffered from the Hyper-Calvinistic quarter in The Earthen Vessel, it is plain that his main attention is turned in quite a different direction. He rejoices that, through the platform of Exeter Hall, God has given him an opportunity to disturb the general religious malaise which he believed to be connected with an absence of the old orthodoxy.

75 Dover-road,
Boro.
13th February, 1855.

My Dear Brother,

Amid the labour of an enormous correspondence I yet find a moment to acknowledge your note. I bless God that I have sounded an alarm in Zion for I find the sound has gone forth. You may conceive my position, a young man under 21 preaching on that occasion to all the ministers ofLondon (nearly), but I thank God I never yet feared man and although last Sabbath more than 4,000 were assembled in Exeter Hall, though every inch was occupied and they clinging to pillars and everywhere, yet I feel unawed by it, for the God within makes even the Babe mighty. My position, as Pastor of one of the most influential churches, enables me to make myself heard and my daily labour is to revive the old doctrines of Gill, Owen, Calvin, Augustine and Christ. My sermons are printed weekly, I enclose one – the sale is great – and you can procure them at your bookseller by order. They are also printed in the Penny Pulpits.

If you have ever seen The Earthen Vessel you will see how I have been attacked, and set down as a deceiver – the consequence has been that more interest was excited, all the Earthen Vessels were sold –- hundreds of rejoinders were sent to the Editor – while I have quietly looked on, and rejoiced that all things work together for good. I think you will be amused if you read that magazine for December, January and February. I am not very easily put down, I go right on and care for no man on God’s earth. You may well pray that I may be kept near to God, for with knocks up, and kicks down – if I did not lean on His arm I were of all men most miserable. It is no easy matter to be belaboured, both by high and low, and stand still firm. I bless God my church increases at a hopeful rate, 20 to hear tonight before the church, and more to come. All honour to God – for His name I can bear reproach – but the truth I must proclaim. Your note is like a flower in winter – it has the bloom of the summer on it, oh, to have Christ in the Heart, the Holy Ghost in the soul and glory in prospect – for this we might well barter worlds, and for this let us strive not only in words in the pulpit but in verity and truth in our closets alone with our Father.

I am,
Yours fraternally,
C. H. Spurgeon.¹⁸This letter was first printed in The Baptist Times, 17th January, 1963. At this period Spurgeon evidently had the same doctrinal emphasis in his many preaching visits to the provinces. A writer in 1879, for example, recalls how he first heard Spurgeon at Arley Chapel, Bristol, nearly a quarter of a century earlier. After describing his manner and appearance, he continues: ‘I still see and hear Mr Spurgeon as he preached that morning at Arley Chapel. The point in the sermon which remains clearest in my mind was the very pronounced teaching of the doctrine of election, and the preacher’s assertion of his being at one with Calvin and Augustine, of whom, as well as of the doctrine, my knowledge at that time was by no means extensive: Sword and Trowel, 1879, p. 420.

That it was his emphasis on reviving the old doctrine which aroused intense opposition to his ministry, Spurgeon had not the slightest doubt: ‘We are cried down as hypers; we are reckoned the scum of creation; scarcely a minister looks on us or speaks favourably of us, because we hold strong views upon the divine sovereignty of God, and his divine electings and special love towards his own people.’¹⁹2, 391. Preaching to his own congregation in 1860 he said:

There has been no single church of God existing in England for these fifty years which has had to pass through more trial than we have done . . . scarce a day rolls over my head in which the most villainous abuse, the most fearful slander is not uttered against me both privately and by the public press; every engine is employed to put down God’s minister – every lie that man can invent is hurled at me . . . They have not checked our usefulness as a church; they have not thinned our congregations; that which was to be but a spasm – an enthusiasm which it was hoped would only last an hour – God has daily increased; not because of me, but because of that gospel which I preach; not because there was anything in me, but because I came out as the exponent of plain, straight-forward, honest Calvinism, and because I seek to speak the Word simply.²⁰6, 435-6.

Spurgeon was not surprised at the enmity that was manifested towards his proclamation of the doctrines of grace: ‘Brethren, in all our hearts there is this natural enmity to God and to the sovereignty of His grace.’²¹29, 85. ‘I have known men bite their lip and grind their teeth in rage when I have been preaching the sovereignty of God . . . The doctrinaires of today will allow a God, but he must not be a King: that is to say, they choose a god who is no god, and rather the servant than the ruler of men.’²²36, 416.

The fact that conversion and salvation are of God, is an humbling truth. It is because of its humbling character that men do not like it. To be told that God must save me if I am saved, and that I am in his hand, as clay is in the hands of the potter, ‘I do not like it’, saith one. Well, I thought you would not; whoever dreamed you would?²³6, 258.

On the other hand Spurgeon regarded Arminianism as popular because it served to approximate the gospel more to the thinking of the natural man; it brought the doctrine of the Scripture nearer to the mind of the world. The common view of Christianity was accepted by men simply because it was not the teaching of Christ: ‘Had the religion of Christ taught us that man was a noble being, only a little fallen – had the religion of Christ taught that Christ had taken away by His blood, sin from every man, and that every man by his own free-will, without divine grace, might be saved – it were indeed a most acceptable religion to the mass of men.’²⁴7, 475–6. The sting in Spurgeon’s comment was occasioned by the fact that this was precisely what a superficial Protestantism was preaching as the Christian Faith! So in attacking the worldly notions of Christianity which were current, Spurgeon could not help also undermining what so many within the church were actually preaching. No wonder there was a great uproar! But Spurgeon did not flinch, for he believed the old truths were powerful enough to turn his age upside down.

Featured Image:

Jacques-Laurent Agasse, 1767–1849, Swiss, active in Britain (from 1800), Old Smithfield Market, 1824, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B2001.2.252. Public Domain.