I was at a committee meeting for Grace Publications recently. See here for more on GPT. My friend Tim Curnow said he's noticed references to F W Boreham here - see here - and kindly gave me copy of Boreham's 1951 collection Arrows of desire that he had spotted. Thanks Tim! I haven't had a good look at it yet but I noticed an article called So this is Spurgeon! which I thought worth reproducing. This is part 1. (Two more parts to follow). Boreham was the last student to be interviewed by Spurgeon himself for his college.
I often heard Spurgeon. On each occasion it was an ordinary Sunday morning service; on each occasion I had to stand in an apparently endless queue waiting for the doors to open; and on each occasion I found myself, on gaining admission, an insignificant unit in the crowd of five or six thousand people who packed the vast auditorium to capacity. And this sort of thing went on, summer and winter, year in and year out, for a generation.
The service was never advertised. Why should it be? Mr S’s trouble was to keep people away. He was everlastingly imploring his own members to absent themselves in order to make room for the strangers who desired to hear him. He had no organ and no choir. The singing was led by a precentor with a tuning fork.
Those who went to hear Spurgeon - and in those days everybody, from kings to crossing-sweepers, went at some time or other - bore away with them an indelible impression: they vowed that, if possible, they would go again; they talked of the strange and striking experience for years afterwards; but not one of them was ever able to explain, in so many words, what it was about the service, the singing or the preacher, that produced upon his mind so extraordinary an effect.
Few men have achieved such world-wide and enduring fame with such slender natural advantages. He had nothing in the way of a magnetic presence. When he made his way from the vestry to the pulpit, it seemed incredible that so very commonplace a figure could hold those thousands spellbound. His infirmity often compelled him to keep his seat whilst preaching; and, on each of the occasions on which I heard him, he leaned heavily with both hands on the pulpit rail.
Some people thought him positively repulsive. George Eliot did. Mrs Florence Barclay, of The Rosary, was also shocked at first. ‘He reminded me’, she makes one of her characters say, ‘of a grotesque gorilla and I often dreaded the moment when he should rise up, face us and announce a text. It seemed to me that there ought to be bars between, and that we should want to throw nuts and oranges. But when he rose to preach, his face was transfigured. Goodness and inspiration shone from it, making it the face of an angel!’
A princely presence is undoubtedly a great asset to a public speaker; but it has the disadvantage that it may excite inflated anticipations that his subsequent utterance may fail to fulfil. Mr S’s crude appearance, on the contrary, led his hearers to expect a torrent of mediocrity; and his powerful and persuasive eloquence, when they heard it, gathered to itself the value of a sensational surprise.
It was often said, too, that Mr S was not quite a gentleman; and Dr W Y Fullerton, his biographer, admits that, judged by conventional standards, the charge can be sustained. It was certainly true in the early days, and nobody told him so more plainly than his wife. Even in their courting days, she had good reason to be scandalised. On one occasion, for example, he took her to a service at which he was to preach. A crowd was struggling for admission to the building. Mr S calmly walked off to the vestry, leaving his poor little lady-love to battle with the crowd as best she could. Instead of making the attempt, she hurried home in high dudgeon and poured her tale of woe into her indignant mother’s ear.
After the service, the young preacher anxiously sought his lost sweetheart, and it was not until he had heard from her mother’s lips exactly what that lady thought of him that the task of reconciliation could begin. But it is difficult to see how any man - and exceedingly difficult to see how such a man - could breathe the atmosphere that Mr S breathed during the years of his amazing ministry without being incalculably sweetened and enriched and refined in the process.
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