For example:—He described a man who had been useful and approved as a church-member: (always addressing his own people)—“The Master has allowed you to work for many days in His vineyard, and paid thee good wages, even given thee souls for thy hire.”
In what shape reverses came to the prosperous laborer we were not told, but that he did see others outstrip him in usefulness and honors:
“You are bidden by the Master to take a lower—maybe the lowest seat. Ah, then, my friend, thou hast the dumps!”
I heard him say in another sermon: “If my Lord were to offer a prize for a joyful Christian I am afraid there are not many of you who would dare try for it. And if you did, I fear me much you would not draw even a third prize.”
Occasionally he is coarse in trope and expression. I hesitate to record a sentence that shocked me to disgust as being not only in atrocious taste and an unfortunate figure of speech, but, to my apprehension, irreverent:
“If we are not filled, it is because we do not hang upon and suck at those blessed breasts of God’s promises as we might and should do.”
His illustrations are like his diction—homely. There was not a new grand thought, nor a beautiful passage, rhetorically considered, in any discourse we ever heard from him; not a trace of such fervid imagination as draws men, sometimes against their will, to hear Gospel truth in Talmage’s Tabernacle, or of Beecher’s magnificent genius. We have, in America, scores of men who are little known outside of their own town, or State, who preach the Word as simply and devoutly; who are, impartially considered, in speech more weighty, in learning incomparably superior to the renowned London Nonconformist. Yet we sat—between six and seven thousand of us—and listened to him for nearly an hour, without restlessness or straying attention. Yes! and went again and again, to discover, if possible, as the boys say of the juggler—“how he did it.”
In giving out the notices for the week, Mr. Spurgeon thanked the regular attendants of the church for having complied with the request he had made on the preceding Sabbath morning, and “stopped away at night,” thus leaving more room for strangers. “I hope still more of you will stop at home this evening,” he concluded in a tone of jolly fellowship the people appeared to comprehend and like. He was clearly thoroughly at one with his flock.
At night we also “stopped away,” but not at home. After much misdirection and searching, we found the alley—it was nothing better—leading to Dr. Cummings’s church in Crown Court, Long Acre. It was small, very small in our sight while the remembered roominess of the Tabernacle lingered with us,—plain as a Primitive Methodist Chapel in the country; badly lighted, and the high, straight pews were not half filled. The author of “Voices of the Dead” and “Lectures upon the Apocalypse” is a gray-haired man a little above medium height. His shoulders were bowed slightly—the bend of the student, not of infirmity; his features were clear-cut and spirituelle. He preached that night in faith and hope that were pathetic to us who had read his prophecies—or his interpretation of Divine prophecy—as long ago as 1850, and recalled the fact that the time set for the fulfilment of some of these had passed.
His text was Rev. i. 3: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things that are written therein—for THE TIME IS AT HAND!”