Bio10c Boreham on Spurgeon

In his Life of Spurgeon, Dr Fullerton devotes a good deal of his space to an enquiry as to the sources of Mr S’s commanding authority. It is an elusive and difficult question. It is admitted that there is scarcely one respect in which Mr S’s power were really transcendent. He had a fine voice; but others had finer ones. He was eloquent; but others were no less so. He used to say that his success was due, not to his preaching of the gospel, but to the gospel that he preached. Obviously, however, this is beside the mark; for he himself would not have been so uncharitable as to deny that others preached the same gospel and yet met with no corresponding success. The truth probably is that, although he attained to super-excellence at no point, he was really great at many.
And behind this extraordinary combination of remarkable, though not transcendent, powers, was a deadly earnestness, a consuming passion, that made second-rate qualities sublime. The most revealing paragraph in Dr Fullerton’s book occurs towards the end. It is a quotation from Mr S himself. ‘Leaving home early in the morning’, he says, ‘I went to the vestry and sat there all day long, seeing those who had been brought to Christ by my preaching of the Word. Their stories were so absorbing to me that the hours fled without my noticing how fast they were going. I may have seen some thirty or more persons during the day, one after the other, and I was so delighted with the tales of divine mercy they had to tell me, and the wonders of grace God had wrought in them, that I did not know anything about the passage of time. At seven o’clock we had our prayer meeting. I went in and prayed with the brethren. And, after that, came the church meeting. A little before ten I felt faint, and I began to wonder at what hour I had eaten my dinner, and I then for the first time remembered that I had not tasted any! I never thought of it. I never even felt hungry; God had made me so glad!’
Mr S lived that he might save men. He thought of nothing else. From his first sermon at Waterbeach to his last at Mentone, the conversion of sinners was the dream of all his days. That master-passion glorified the whole man and threw a grandeur about the common details of every day. He would cheerfully have thrown away his soul to save the souls of others.
I was in London on the day of his burial. Indeed, I stood beside the grave at Norwood and saw the casket, surmounted by the palm-fronds that had accompanied it from Mentone, reverently lowered. Before hearing the final benediction pronounced by a future Archbishop of Canterbury (then Bishop of Rochester), I listened to the most perfect tribute that, on any such occasion, I have ever heard. For brevity, beauty, dignity and pathos, I have often thought that the exquisite apostrophe addressed by Archibald G Brown to the dead preacher deserves to rank with the historic utterance of Abraham Lincoln on the field of Gettysburg. On my mind, at any rate, it created an impression that has deepened rather than faded with the years.
On that unforgettable day the great city stood still. The black crowds stretching for miles and miles testified to the reverence and affection in which everybody held him. They were taking farewell of a great man, good as gold and honest as the day, who had left the world immensely better than he found it.