Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

He was little more than a boy when he gained fame as a London preacher, addressing congregations of ten thousand at the Surrey Music Hall before the Metropolitan Tabernacle was built for him. His style was then very theatrical: a foreign scoffer remarked that his denunciations of the stage must have been prompted by jealousy, since he was himself so consummate an actor. In later years he relied less on meretricious effects and more on his essential earnestness, but to the end he took any liberties that occurred to him with his subject or his audience. In other respects he changed little or nothing. Through all the Darwinian controversy he remained unmoved by the arguments which flurried so many theological dovecotes. “Huxley and Darwin,” he would say, “can go to—their ancestors the monkeys,” and he would pause wickedly after the “to” for his congregation to titter. With the Higher Criticism, as with evolution, he would have no truck whatever. But against the Church he had no particular feeling; he read the Anglican divines much as another man might read Confucius, thinking them curious and interesting people from whom something might be learned. To the students of the Camberwell College, indeed, he recommended a book of Anglican sermons. Its author, he said, had been a parson, still worse a bishop, but despite these grave disadvantages had been a worthy and able man. In later years he even withdrew from the Liberation Society, apparently because he felt that his fellow-Dissenters were on the whole readier than the Church to fall in with what he called “down-grade” tendencies in biblical criticism. For the same reason he even withdrew from the Baptist Union. “If,” he said, “you preach what is new, it will not be true; if you preach what is true, it will not be new.” For Rome, Spurgeon never pretended tolerance. When another Baptist owned that during a visit to France he had been present at the Mass, and “had never felt nearer the presence of God,” Spurgeon replied that it was a good illustration of the text, “If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.” It was, no doubt, his hatred of Rome that led him in 1886 to become a Liberal Unionist.

His Radicalism, however, had always been of a peculiar kind. He did not believe in “trusting the people,” since most of the people were miserable sinners. He was not a Pacifist. “Turn the other cheek,” he used to say, “but if that is smitten too, another law comes in; you must either go for your man or get away from him.” It was long, also—not, indeed, until he grew gouty—before he could be got to adhere to the teetotal movement, while he simply jeered at an anti-tobacco crusade. Spurgeon himself liked a good cigar; was in no way an ascetic; lived in style at Norwood, and used to drive to the Tabernacle in a turnout which would have done credit to a stockbroker. On the other hand, he was the unrelenting foe of the theatre, and he denounced dancing as having cost the first Baptist his head. There was, indeed, in him a great deal more of the old hard-headed than of the new soft-hearted Puritan. His only departure from the seventeenth century was in the matter of his jocularity. It was natural with him—perhaps an inheritance from some jovial Hollander of the Jan Steen type—but it was also carefully cultivated. He kept an immense library of funny books to draw on for pulpit use, and was never more carelessly happy in the telling of a story than when he had studied it in all its bearings the night before. He never hesitated to use slang when it seemed to him effective; witness the following:

“It is always best to go where God sends you. Jonah thought he would go to Tarshish instead of Nineveh, but when the whale got hold of him he was sucked in.”

“Though you are teetotallers you must all come to your bier at last.”

“To some people Bible reading is like flea-catching; they pick up a thought here and there, hold it between finger and thumb, and then hop on somewhere else.”

“Seek to possess both unction and gumption.”

These sentences were addressed to candidates for the Baptist ministry. It is noteworthy that in such Spurgeon always assumed a lack of refinement—an assumption which would be hotly resented by the Nonconformist student of to-day. Especially irritating would be his advice never to drop an aspirate; to the importance of the initial “H” he was continually reverting. In deeper matters he was insistent on eternal punishment; to question hell was to question the Scripture. But he used to say that no doubt God would show “every consideration” to those predestined to damnation—how he never explained in detail. He would have been very angry with feminism if it had been an important thing in his day; woman, he thought, should be kept in her place; and he despised the man who was swayed by his wife. He was fond of pointing out that most of the troubles of the Hebrew patriarchs could be traced to their too much marriage.

And the rest of the acts of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the wideawake that he wore, the clerical coat that he would not wear, the puns and money that he made, the stones that he weighed, and the spiritual bread that he dispensed, the sermons that he preached, the 30,000 printed copies a week that he sold, the men that he knew, those that he consorted with, and those that he assailed mightily—are they not written in chronicles of Nonconformity? In due time Charles Haddon Spurgeon died, and was gathered to his fathers, and nobody reigned in his stead, and of the mighty house that he did not build nothing is written anywhere, for, with all his brightness and breeziness and firm faith and sturdiness and trite common sense, he lacked all the qualities that go to the building of anything but a reputation. He had a voice, and after that little.

GENERAL BOOTH.