Bio 10b Boreham on Spurgeon

Dr Fullerton says that in matters of taste, he developed wonderfully as time went on. ‘He mixed with the highest as their equal, put the lowliest delightfully at their ease, said the right word at the right moment, took infinite pains to remember people’s names and faces, and was generosity itself, both in thought and action.’
One of these days some able and penetrating historian will undertake to analyse the subtle and permeating influence of Spurgeon and to view his life and work in its true historic perspective. When that volume appears, its readers will be impressed by the way in which the rugged personality of Mr S stands out boldly against a striking, dramatic and picturesque background. For, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, English history took a surprising turn; the nation was made all over again. Its politics, its literature, its science, its commerce, its art, and, above all, its faith were recast and refashioned; whilst the position of Great Britain among the world powers assumed an entirely new character and importance.
In this renaissance Mr S played a conspicuous part, and he did it in two ways. He did it by creating a popular atmosphere for evangelism. This was his supreme triumph. In his famous Memoirs, Grenville graphically describes Mr S - whose physique struck him as singularly reminiscent of Macaulay’s - preaching, at an ordinary service, to nine thousand people. It impressed him, as it impressed all thoughtful observers, as an arresting and epoch-making phenomenon. It forced the evangelical pulpit into the glare of public attention.
The world was compelled to sit up and take notice. It made thinkable and possible the work of all those ministers and evangelists who have since captured the attention of the populace. And it is only when we attempt to estimate the spiritual, ethical and civic value of the impact of Mr S’s flaming intensity upon each individual unit in the surging crowds that flocked every Sunday with wistful faces to hear him that we realize how vitally he contributed to the new order that sprang into being in his time.
Nor was this all. Mr S had a second string to his bow. A great age produces great men, and, by the very men that it produces, is made still greater. The annals of the Victorian era glitter, like a starry sky, with brilliant and illustrious names. There were giants in those days. But among those Homeric figures there was scarcely one upon whom Mr S did not exercise a profound and formative influence. He magnetized and sometimes electrified them. They went to hear him: they sought his counsel, and they struggled to keep the movements that they directed in harmony with the atmosphere that he generated.
The most skillful of analytical historians must find it beyond their wit to account, in precise terms, for Mr S’s authority over the minds of the men who dominated his period. But the most cursory review of the history of the nineteenth century must convince any man that his sway was stupendous. A kingmaker occupies a more exalted eminence than a king. And, in that age of crisis and of transformation, there were many kingly spirits who gratefully confessed that, but for Mr S’s ministry, in public and in private, their own contribution to the nation's astonishing development would have been negligible.