TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. SPITRGEON. THE Nonconformist Churches, and indeed all Churches, have lost in Mr. Spurgeon a man of considerable powers and of immense influence, which was persistently and strenuously exerted to do good. He was probably the most successful preacher to an audience of bourgeois who ever lived, and it is not difficult to understand why. There is an idea afloat that Englishmen are growing sceptical, and as regards one section of the cultivated, and the semi-Socialist division of the workmen, it is partly true ; but the lower division of the middle class, a thick stratum in English society, for the most part retains, though it does not always follow, its old faith. Its members believe in Evangelicalism, qualified by shrewd sense, and find in that gospel a sufficient rule of conduct in most emergencies of life. They do not, therefore, wish their faith to be disturbed, or even much expounded in the Scotch way, but to be assumed or expressed clearly, and applied to all the contingencies of life by a preacher with gifts, the greater the gifts the better, but without originality of religious thought. They also desire, - and this most heartily, that their teacher should be a man who believes his message more earnestly than his audience do, who is visibly and unmistakably earnest to enthu- siasm, who lives straight up to his own principles and their ideal, and who is independent enough to rebuke all back- sliding with a certain energy. They found all these requirements satisfied to the full in Mr. Spurgeon. Gifted with a superb voice, said on one occasion, though we hardly believe it, to have been distinctly heard by twenty-four thousand persons, and possessed by a theology which was exactly that of his congregation, the preacher poured out before them arguments which, nine times out of ten, contained nothing but common-sense applied to religion or the conduct of life, but which were so aptly and intelligibly expressed, so warmed by conviction, so familiar and yet so new, that they made on those who heard them all the impression of the loftiest eloquence. They con- vinced, if they did not exactly waken, and made thousands of ordinary men, exposed, sometimes in an unusual degree, to ordinary temptations—the temptation to sand the sugar in particular—distinctly stronger to resist them. Mr. Spurgeon was, in fact, a Cobden in the pulpit, preaching a well-understood form of Christianity instead of Free-trade. His English was always admirable, though it was sometimes not refined ; he was a. master of felicitous illustration, drawn often from the homeliest things ; and he knew how to become impressive, and occasionally drive a truth home with the startling force which comes from the unexpected. He was not a great orator, but he was for his audience a most rousing and convincing preacher. The influence of his words was, of course, materially aided both by his character and the independence of his position. He was the manliest of men, never posed, never disguised anything, would say his own thought, however unpopular it might be, and detested the fads which it has been a fashion of this half of the century to add to the Christian law. Believing in charity, he practised it, and gave with both hands ; but he held that men should work for their living, and not sponge on the community, and hated the modern feeling of " pity" for the thriftless and the idle. His chapter on Debt in his most characteristic book, "John Ploughman's Talk," that cross between the "Proverbs " and " Poor Richard," embodies the feeling of those austere Evangelicals who held that in abolishing imprisonment for debt Parliament had relaxed the moral law ; and his opinion about all sorts of beggars, was summed up in his apophthegm, " There should be patience and pity for poverty i • but for laziness, give me a long whip." He denied that all men were good, believing many to be thorough rogues ; refused absolutely to raise the consumption of alcohol into a moral ques- tion ; and defied the anti-tobacco maniacs in a sentence which, though strictly Biblical, struck critics as gro- tesque, and caused scandal even in his devoted congre- gation. We doubt if he sought to be humorous in the pulpit, though he never avoided humour if it rose in his mind ; but he could not help talking sense, and the sense of a master of strong English often assumes a more or less comic form. You see precisely the same thing in " John Ploughman's Talk," where many of his strings of sentences, in their crisp and energetic form, rouse just the sense of unexpectedness and enlightening incongruity which is the foundation of all true humour. Those might assail his method who would ; he cared nothing, for he was inde- pendent alike by temper and position. It is often for- gotten, when Mr. Spurgeon's repute is carried to the credit of Nonconformity—to which, of course, in one way, it en- tirely belongs—that from a very early period, practically- from boyhood, Mr. Spurgeon had been emancipated from the great evil of all Voluntary Churches, the dependence of the teachers on the taught. Deacons and flock together could do nothing to him. He made the Tabernacle, not the Tabernacle him ; and if, per impossibile, his congrega- tion had quarrelled with him, he had only to walk out, to instantly and with acclamation as great a society elsewhere. A position of that kind liberates a man ; and Mr. Spurgeon, who would have been independent under any circumstances, was doubtless emboldened by it to- manifest his thorough independence, as, for instance, he- did—as we think, wrong-headedly and ignorantly—when he quitted the Baptist Union for tolerating too much of human reason in its interpretation of the Scriptures. Mr. Spurgeon was helped to independence, too, by his practical ability. He cared personally nothing about money ; he could give away " like a Prince ;" but he had the faculty,. often so painfully absent from the clergy, whether Estab- lished or Nonconformist, of managing large pecuniary affairs. Thousands might be given him, and it was certain not only that he would steal none—a trait now practically universal in English teachers of religion, who are trusted on that point as no priesthood ever has been in the world— but that he would spend the money wisely, would waste none on fads, and would have as clear a result for his cash as if he had been a shopkeeper buying stock. His orphanages are models of good management. His independence reacted on his spiritual influence, every listener feeling that what he said, he said because he thought it, and for no other earthly reason, and, combined with his habitual abstinence from cant—by which, in this place, we mean the utterance of words only because they have a pious effect—it gave weight to his eloquence and edge to his powers of persuasion. Mr. Spurgeon was a great preacher,. first of all because he believed, and had the necessary gifts to be one ; but his powers were visibly enlarged by his character, with its energy, its ability, and its determined. independence.
Is such an influence a good thing in a community like this ? We cannot understand how a Protestant can answer that question in the negative, and regard the kind of contempt with which many excellent Christians used to look down on Mr. Spurgeon and his congregation, with simple surprise. We regret the narrowness of their view of Christianity, particularly as regards its dependence on verbal inspiration, and their inability to perceive what the place of a visible Church should be in the diffusion of ' a divine message ; but what they give and receive is in the main true, if Christianity is true, and as regards con- duct is absolutely beneficial. Nobody ever was the worse man for teaching of Mr. Spurgeon's. Take the book we have already mentioned, " John Ploughman's Talk," to pieces, and a critic might detect in it, as he might also in Proverbs, a vein of earthly shrewdness rather than spirituality ; but suppose any one swallowed the book whole, as thousands upon thousands have done, and what would he become ? A very upright man, though possibly a pawky one, with a vein of humble religious feeling, and a deep sense that to do wrong is to offend against divine laws and degrade oneself. It is not possible that teaching which must produce that result can be anything- but good, more especially among a population like ours,. which, in its absorption in material things and impervi- ousness to ideas, tends to become practically secularist, and to believe that nothing is real except the world lying in. sight around. Mr. Spurgeon knew his audience, and spent his life in trying to warm respectability into virtue, and acquiescence in Christianity into energetic obedience to its commands ; and if that is not good work, there is none. Whether he fully succeeded or not, is for a higher know- ledge than ours to decide ; but he turned a vast chapel into a sort of college for making good ministers, and made of a huge middle-class congregation, drawn together mainly by delight in his preaching, an effective centre of all good works. That looks, at all events, like Christian success.
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