Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter 21.
A Thoroughly Furnished Life A Sermon Delivered by Rev. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. In the Metropolitan Tabernacle On Thursday Evening, February 25th, 1892

"I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also."—2 Timothy 1:5.

"Continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus, All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works."—2 Timothy 3:14-17.

You will all expect me not only preach the gospel, but also to speak of that departed saint and pastor, preacher and organizer, who for so long a time, stood in this pulpit as God's ambassador. Happily, it is quite easy and natural to combine these two things. It is not every man of whom we might discourse, and at the same time, preach the gospel; but as Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a kind of living gospel, to talk about him is to talk about the blessed Master himself, whose he was, and whom he served. So I shall endeavour, by God's help, in some measure to meet your expectation, by combining gospel truth, with an illustration and example of it, in the beloved and departed Spurgeon. No question absorbs more of the thought, especially of the young, than the question, What are the secrets of success in life? Every one of us desires success. Failure is humiliating, disappointing, disastrous. Success is inspiring, encouraging, rewarding.

What, then, are the secrets of the highest success? Not a success that is temporary and transient; not a success which is deceptive and superficial; not a success which, as God interprets it, is itself failure; but a success which God counts such, and which in God's book of remembrance has an honourable record; for there is a scroll on which stands no unworthy name, and where no deed done for Christ and for humanity, fails of an honourable, illustrious, and enduring record. And the question is, "How may my name stand on that scroll, emblazoned in letters of light, with a record as imperishable as the life of God?" That is an aspiration which may well put to shame any inferior and worldly ambition. Such an aspiration is not unworthy of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, "who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame."

These verses from the second Epistle of Paul to Timothy, as we shall see, if we closely and carefully examine them, suggest to us certain great secrets of a successful life; and for convenience sake, I will select first the foundation; second, familiarity with the Scriptures; third, faith in a personal Saviour; and fourth, furnishing for good works. All these four are suggested in these verses, and constitute, in fact, the leading thoughts of this passage. The foundation of Timothy's successful life was laid in a holy ancestry; the source of his knowledge and wisdom was found in familiarity with the entire Word of God; the bond of faith in the personal Saviour supplied the personal element and inspiration; and last of all, there was a thorough furnishing or complete equipment for the work of life. Of course there may be other secrets of power; and yet I question whether, within these four, there may not lie the germ of every possible secret of the highest success, I shall first advert to these very briefly, and then show how they were illustrated in the marvellous career of that servant of God, whose work of faith and whose voice of witness we shall henceforth know only in remembrance. I. First, let us look at those foundations of success, WHICH ARE LAID IN A GODLY PARENTAGE AND ANCESTRY. When a distinguished philosopher and wise man of these modern times was asked the question, "When should the character of a child begin to be formed?" he answered, "At least, one hundred years before the child is born." And this was no jest: he indulged in no trifling. He meant that in parental character—nay, even farther back than that&mdashin ancestral character—there were found the formative influences that determine largely what the child or the grandchild shall be. We do not sufficiently appreciate the far-reaching influence of what is called, in these days, "heredity," or the influence that flows down through the channels of our ancestry and affects our character, our conduct, and, largely, our destiny. In the recent criminal investigations in the United States of America, there was found a family, known as the Jukes family, that was traced through all the branches back to one godless, profane stock. To one vile man were traced, directly, 709 descendants, and indirectly, 1,200. The most of these were criminals, vagabonds, outcasts and paupers. At least, 76 of the number had been habitual criminals, guilty of 115 different offences; and there were 52 per cent, of all the women in that large family that were abandoned, living by the price of their own shame. Most of these descendants had been for some time, greater or less, in prison. There were not more than 20 of the entire 709 that had ever learned a skilled trade, and 10 out of the 20 had learned that trade in jail. Now here were from 700 to 1200 characters, mostly criminal, all of whom could be traced to one ancestral fountain. Those who have been familiar with such slums in great cities as the Five Points in New York, and the Seven Dials in London—those who have seen the successive crops of generation after generation of iniquity, will know how the product deteriorates, and by how fearfully rapid a descent children sink to lower and lower depths of degradation and depravity. If this is the case where vice and crime are regnant, who shall dare to tell us that there may not be a corresponding ascent to higher levels, when godly parents, holding body, mind, and will in subjection to conscience and the Spirit of God, beget, conceive, and rear their children in the fear of God? We have no reason to hope that children will ever be regenerated before birth, though many have, doubtless, like John the Baptist, been full of the Holy Ghost from their mothers' womb; but I have no doubt that godly parents, by self-sacrifice and self-control in the grace of God, may transmit to children aptitudes, to say the least, for a higher mental, moral, and spiritual condition than would have been possible under other circumstances; and these aptitudes may, at least, prepare the way for altitudes—higher elevations, nobler and purer and hoiler attainments, characters and lives. Paul called to remembrance the unfeigned faith which was in Timothy, which dwelt first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. That is to say, there was a sort of heredity to his faith; it bore the parental complexion and feature, and there was a connection between the faith of the mother and the faith of the child, and even that of the grandmother and the grandchild. Here, then, the foundations of a successful life were laid in parental consecration. I speak of this first, not only because it is first in the text, but because I am addressing largely those who are, or in the future are likely to be, parents. I beseech you, sanctify your bodies, your minds, your hearts. Sanctify wedlock and marriage.

Let children be begotten, conceived, born, reared, in the fear of God, and let it be felt to be the most solemn responsibility that any human being can assume in the eyes of God, to bring a child into this world. These are delicate subjects, for the most parts forbidden to the pulpit; but the time is coming when this mock-modesty will no longer be countenanced, and when ministers of Christ shall feel free to speak in the name of God concerning the springs of human life in parental character and personal self-dedication, and how those springs may be purified with the salt of the gospel. II. The second secret of a successful life, here unveiled to US, is FAMILIARITY WITH THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. It is said of Hengstenberg, the famous scholar, that on one occasion in the presence of his students, he took up a Greek New Testament and said, "Young gentlemen, within the covers of this book, all the wisdom of the ages is concentrated." If I might contribute my little word of witness on this great subject, I have found in the patient study of the Word of God, in the original tongues, which began when I was twelve years of age, the fountain of the highest knowledge and wisdom—knowledge is only the accumulation of information, but wisdom is skill and sagacity in the use of knowledge. That one book imparts both, and is itself a library as well as an encyclopaedia. To the fervent, devout, and careful student that one book brings the advantages of a university education. All the treasures of divine wisdom and knowledge that can be communicated to man, are hid in this Thesaurus or treasury of God. And those who, from beginning to end, revere it as the Word of God, those who study it daily, systematically, and prayerfully, those who believe it to be the utterance of the Holy Ghost, and therefore to be illumined properly to our understanding and heart only by the Holy Ghost, and who both expect and receive divine guidance in searching into these wonders, will find in the Bible everything that stimulates the noblest thought, the purest love, the most correct conscientious judgment, and the holiest and firmest resolve.

Begin therefore with children, and teach them the Holy Scripture. Let children commit the Scriptures to memory, even before they are able to understand the words which they commit, for, be assured, while such commission to memory of the Holy Scriptures in childhood, may, for the time being, oftentimes be a form, without a proper and intelligent apprehension, that form will abide in the memory, to be filled out by increasing intelligence and growing appreciation of what the words contain and express.

I am thankful to God, in every fibre of my being, that for thirty years I have been accustomed to commit to memory, day by day, texts of Scripture; and, as the Malagasy, during the great persecution of twenty-five years in Madagascar, found that the Scriptures which they had put in memory's keeping, could neither be torn to pieces, nor burned to ashes, but were their permanent and perpetual possession, so I bless God that, however men might destroy the written Word of God as printed in various languages, upon the unseen tablets of my own intellectual and moral being, much of the Word of God is permanently engrossed, and only the annihilation of my memory could remove it. From a child let your little ones learn the Holy Scriptures, and commit their sacred words to memory; and then, so far and so fast as the understanding enlarges by experience and observation, the form of sacred words will become more pregnant with the spirit, and what was, in the child, the mere shell of knowledge, shall be found to hold a precious kernel for his intellectual and spiritual apprehension and appreciation.

III. The third element in success suggested here is faith in a personal Saviour. Whenever we stop short of the Christ of God, we have not found the centre even of gospel truth. The Word of God, to those who carefully study it. seems, the more they search it, only a firmament for the glorious display of the Sun of Righteousness, or a garden for the setting forth of the beauty of the Rose of Sharon, and the diffusing of his sacred fragrance. To those who love the Christ of the Scriptures, the Church itself in its best estate is only a telescope, through which to look at the Star of Bethlehem; to separate it from all surrounding objects, and limit the field of vision so that one may gaze upon it with the more satisfaction and the more enlargement of soul; and every fellowship of disciples becomes the more precious, because in the resemblance of the children of God to the eternal Son of God, his image is made more vivid and visible. We must magnify the personal bond of faith! Suspect any creed that either leaves out the Christ or obscures him. Suspect any church that teaches you to look at its machinery of ordinances and sacraments, rather than through and past them all, to the eternal Redeemer himself. Suspect any work, even of mercy and charity and philanthropy, that leaves out of view the glory of Jesus Christ. The personal bond is that which determines the Christian, for Christianity is not a creed without a life, any more than it is a life without a creed. Christianity is Christ-ianity. It makes Christ central in its doctrine, central in its duty, central in the destiny of believers; and whoever has not gotten hold of Christ, has not gotten hold of Christianity. Humboldt, the great German, wrote five volumes of "The Cosmos," or description of the material universe; but in those five volumes I have never yet found the word "God." Some people discuss Christianity in volumes, and do not see that the King of the Christian system, who, from his throne, sways his sceptre over all Christian doctrine, and life, and history, is the eternal Son of God, Moreover, no man understands the Bible who does not understand Christ, for Christ is the key of the Bible. He interprets types; he fulfils prophecies; he unlocks even historic characters and historic events. Adam and Abraham and Joseph, Moses and Joshua, David and Solomon, Daniel and Isaiah, are enigmas if you do not understand Christ. He unlocks the mysteries of the word, and the blood that he shed unlooses the seven-sealed book of the Apocalypse.

IV. One other secret of success suggested by the text demands notice, before I apply and illustrate these truths by that remarkable life that has faded out from before our eyes; and that secret is the thorough furnishing for GOOD WORKS.

"Thoroughly furnished unto all good works." It is not to be overlooked that this furnishing, like the learning, the wisdom, the knowledge, to which we have referred, is here traced to the Holy Scriptures. "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine,"—that is teaching; "for reproof,"—that is the rebuking of evil and the stirring up of the conscience; "for correction,"—that is the reinstatement of the man after he has fallen, putting him upon his feet; "and instruction in righteousness,"—that is the full training of the man in the knowledge and performance of all that which is righteous in God's sight; "that the man of God may be made perfect," or complete, "thoroughly furnished," or equipped, "unto all good works." The Bible is, then, not only the source and foundation of the highest knowledge and wisdom, it is the House Beautiful, such as Bunyan saw in his vision of the pilgrim; within it there is everything that a pilgrim can ask: the Dormitory, where he can rest after the weariness of the labour and toil of his march, the Refectory where he will find living bread and living water, the milk for the babe, the strong meat for the man, and the delicious honey out of the rock. There is the Picture Gallery, where he shall look on the characters of olden times portrayed for warning, on the one side, for imitation on the other. In that House Beautiful is the Armoury, where he can equip himself from head to foot with the complete panoply of God.

There is also the Lavatory where the fountains of water and of blood give him perfect cleansing from the penalty and power of sin. Not only so, but the Observatory through whose windows he can look out on celestial scenes, and even into the very face of God. There is nothing that cannot be found in that House Beautiful for him who goes forth as God's pilgrim-saint to God's work and war in this wicked world.

Let us now spend a little while in illustrating these four secrets of success by this most remarkable man.

I need not tell you that Charles Haddon Spurgeon had a godly ancestry reaching back to the times of the martyrs. He belonged not only to godly parentage and grand parentage, but to a line of ministers of the Word of God, who held fast to the old truths which he so gloriously preached, and for which he so laboriously strove, so that he was but the last result of a series of generations of Christian fathers and mothers who had feared God and served him, who had studied the Holy Scriptures, and had been linked by faith to a personal Christ; and in himself he represented aptitudes that had been created or fostered in them, and so rose to altitudes seldom attained by any of the men of his generation. As was eloquently said here by Dr. Evans, on the day of the commemorative services, some people have tried to depreciate Mr. Spurgeon by saying that he was "without early advantages of birth and training," but, with Dr. Evans, we affirm that no man of his generation, perhaps, was more blessed by early advantages of birth and training. Give me a godly father and mother, and godly grandparents, and I will forego social position and rank and honourable titles, and the wealth and the fame of this world. Give me this, and I will forego, if it please God, all the schools of man for the sake of training in this school of God.

He who owed so much under God to a godly ancestry was, from a child, trained in the Holy Scriptures; and everybody who knew him knows how wise they made him unto salvation. Even as a boy he knew his Bible; and at an age when most of us were but boys, he began to preach the gospel, and, from the first, with such remarkable knowledge of the Word of God, and facility and felicity in its presentation as turned the eyes of all men to the boy-preacher of London. Surely this was no accident. We may talk about his "genius," but it was not genius that gave command of the Holy Scriptures, and made him mighty in them; that made him familiar with the events narrated in the Old and New Testaments, and filled his mind with those grand illustrations of truth that are scattered all the way through the Word of God. All this meant painstaking industry, research, prayer for divine guidance, and the opening of mind and heart to the instruction of God's Spirit through the Word. Mastery comes not by genius, but by effort. A man may be born with fine faculties, but acquisitions come by painstaking endeavour. And when that boy-preacher startled all London by the marvel of his preaching, and still more by the marvel of his praying; it was the result of early and long study of the Word on the one hand, and communion with God in the closet on the other. From a child he knew the Scriptures. What a blessed thing to have a child who is precocious in godliness. I do not care for intellectually precocious children, but I like a precocious child spiritually—a child that has in him the heart of a man, and the conscience of a man, and the will of a man, and the experience of a man. If you call such a child "abnormal" he is not half as abnormal as those Christian disciples of sixty years that have not outgrown their babyhood yet! Think of people threescore years of age singing—

"Where is the blessedness I knew, When first I saw the Lord?"

when they ought to have grown past that blessedness, as the dawn of the day moves on to its zenith splendour.

"Where is the soul-refreshing view Of Jesus and His word?"

whereas those first views of the Word and of Jesus should have been but as the dim glance of the man who saw men as trees walking, but who needed another touch to give the clearness and the vividness of perfect vision!

"What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!"

How sweet their memory still!" think of it, sighing for the peace that was felt fifty years ago!

"But they have left an aching void, The world can never fill."

How any "void" can ache is a mystery to me anyway, but if any of you are troubled with an "aching void" I think that you would better get the void filled up! Oh, give us stalwart Christian disciples! How often the little child puts the oldest of us to shame by the simplicity of his faith and the fervour of his prayers, and the unfaltering nature of his trust. May God give us a generation of children that from their childhood know the Holy Scriptures! And do you, as parents and teachers, be more anxious that your child shall get a knowledge of the Word of God than a smattering of French and German and other languages that the inhabitants of these countries scarcely recognize when they hear them! Why should we be so jealous to have our children get some little acquaintance with foreign tongues and modern philosophies, and all manner of worldly learning, while the Bible is to them a shut and sealed book? Oh, for the university training of the Word of God! Oh, for a generation of young men and young women like Apollos, "mighty in the Scriptures," though they may have none of the "learning and wisdom of the Chaldeans."

One never wearies of speaking of the personal faith of Mr. Spurgeon in a personal Saviour. Nothing has melted my heart in the remembrance of him more than this, that he always seemed to think of Christ as one that was immediately in his presence. To a great many people Christ is a being of eighteen hundred years ago, and they strain their eyes looking back through these long centuries to get a glimpse of the crucified and risen Jesus. Mr. Spurgeon went into his closet, handled Christ, and saw that it was he himself. When he prayed it was a personal prayer into a personal ear. His daily walk of faith and hope and humility, was a daily fellowship with the Lamb of God. He got his inspiration for work from studying Christ. Hope found its foundation in the promises Christ affirmed and confirmed. He got his courage in suffering from the supporting power of those everlasting arms. Christ was to him, not a flower in a garden, but a living, present, almighty Saviour. Christ was to him not a vision of the past, but a vivid reality of the present, and when he communed with Jesus Christ it was as a man talks with his friend; and because Christ was to him inseparably associated with the Holy Scriptures,—because those Scriptures everywhere testified of him, because they foretold him and he fulfilled them, he had no patience with those who, in the name of scholarship and learning, disintegrate the Rock of Ages, so that a man has no firm footing for his feet!

If I pause to consider how he was thoroughly furnished for all good works, it will be gathering up and braiding together all the other thoughts I have presented. Nothing is more wonderful about him than how he was furnished for everything he did by the study of the Word of God, and contact with a personal Redeemer. That is what I have specially sought to emphasize, because all the rest largely goes without saying. His furnishing unto all good works was derived from the Scriptures of Christ, and the Christ of the Scriptures. It was a singular providential diversion of plan, which led him away from university training and caused him to enter the gospel ministry without what men call in these days, "a thorough classical education." Why did God ordain that, but to give you and me encouragement? Had Charles Haddon Spurgeon been a university trained man, a prize scholar in Oxford or Cambridge, men would have attributed his success very largely to what he had learned and acquired in those great schools of human learning. But God decreed that that mighty man should come before the people without a university to back him, that he might prove to men that it was "not by might, nor by power," but by the Spirit of the living God, and that his success might say, in all future years, to young men like you, and the young men of other generations after you, that thoroughly to know Christ in the Word of God, and to know the Word of God as interpreted by the Christ and the Holy Spirit, is the grandest qualification for a Christian minister, and a Christian worker, that can possibly be bestowed. I wish that I had a thousand times the power of emphasis to proclaim and enforce this truth.

Look at his kaleidoscopic preaching. I can think of nothing to represent it but a kaleidoscope, which, at every turn, reveals new beauties, new combinations, new glories of form and colour out of a few small pieces of coloured glass! He took these few great initial truths of the Holy Scripture: atonement by blood, substitutionary sacrifice, justification by faith, the work of the Holy Ghost in regeneration and sanctification, and kindred truths to these; he put them within the kaleidoscope of his preaching, and at every new turn men saw, from the combination of those simple elements, forms of symmetry and colours that had all the variety of the rainbow, and they wondered that out of the old word of God alone such ever new attractions should be revealed. There is the secret of his furnishings for all good works. No man will dare to affirm that his furnishing came essentially from any source but the Word of God and the personal experience of the Christ.

What did Mr. Spurgeon mean when he said that, if at any time he lost his track of thought, he put himself into his gun and fired himself at the people? What did he mean but that from the depths of an experience of the communion of his soul with Christ, he drew that impulsive and propulsive force that, like the gunpowder in the gun, drives the ball to its mark? Even a mastery of Holy Scripture without an experience of grace, is only like the finest ordnance without gunpowder or spark of fire. But give us first the knowledge of God as here revealed, and then the knowledge of God as confirmed by personal contact of faith: and you have a mighty piece of ordnance provided with an explosive force, that can shake the very walls of the fortress of the devil!

Here was found his furnishing for all good works. Take those two thousand sermons of his, preached in this pulpit, printed at a penny a piece, and then scattered in twenty-five languages over the entire world, read by thousands and millions of readers. Whence came the furnishing for these sermons? From that blessed Word. I read with greatest interest that address which he delivered before the Conference, and which is now published under the name of The Greatest Fight in the World. I have no hesitation in saying that I think that to be the greatest single utterance that Mr. Spurgeon ever gave to the church. It is, I suppose, the last one that he prepared with careful and painstaking elaboration before he left this world. If you will read that you will find that, in the first place, it is full of the most glorious gospel truths. In the second place, it fairly bristles with Biblical illustrations and figures of speech. And, in the third place, which is more wonderful, it runs in the mould of a Scriptural dialect, as though the man were himself first of all saturated with the phraseology of Scripture, and when he came to express himself on that critical occasion, his thoughts fell into the forms of Scriptural expression as naturally as water runs in the channel scooped out for it by the brook. That is a marvellous address. I wish it might be published in the cheapest form and given away to every living soul that can read the. English tongue, and then translated into every language on earth, that every man that is open to convictions of truth might read it. And I would to God that the men that have learned the art of preaching a sermon and leaving out the Christ, or of preaching the Christ in the language and after the fashion of the schools, and so shooting their arrows over the heads of the common people, could, from that single address, learn the secret of telling the truths of the Word of God, "not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth," expressing spiritual things in spiritual terms. I never have met, in all my own experience, a discourse that made a deeper impression on my mind as to reproducing the prophetical style of utterance in the modern pulpit, and so stamping a preacher as one of God's prophets. Here is another example of his furnishing unto all good works, and its source.

Whence came those twenty-seven volumes of The Sword and the Trowel? What are they? Those volumes are full of exposition of the Word, and the practical application of the Scriptures to the experience of the godly life. That is the soul and substance of twenty-seven years of that monthly issue. Take his hundred books: commentaries, tracts, leaflets, collections of proverbs. What are they? They are historical, and biographical, and expository, and exegetical; but the foundation of them is this: Scripture, on the one hand; experience of God's life in the soul, on the other. So again, for all this wonderful work of an author, he got his furnishing in the Word of God, and in the contact with a personal Christ. The Treasury of David, that seven-volumed commentary on that single book of the Bible, the Psalms,—which some "higher critics" would make us believe is not worthy, after all, of very much study,—has sold more largely than any other single commentary in the English tongue on one book of the Bible. What are those volumes, again, but the evidence that the furnishing for his work was a furnishing in Bible knowledge, and in the interpreting power of the Christian experience.

Whence came these institutions? First of all, where did he get the model for this church of Christ? There is nothing else like it, that I know of, anywhere in the world. It is a Baptist church in this, that believers' baptism is here emphasized, and that immersion in water is the form of baptism. It is a Methodist church in the ardent zeal, and the fervent prayer, and the aggressive work, manifested here, and in the audible "amens" and responses that you hear in prayer and preaching. It is a Congregational church in this, that it is independent of all outside ecclesiastical authority, and the people are the ultimate rulers. It is a Presbyterian church in this, that the bench of elders is the centre of its authority and its life, only that these are more consistent Presbyterians than most others, because when they choose a man as an elder, that choice carries with it the authority to preach, and teach, and administer the sacraments, if circumstances require, and if the brother exhibits the fitness for these duties; whereas, in other Presbyterian churches, if a man is set apart for the eldership, and afterwards shows fitness for preaching and teaching, and is called to the pastorate of a church, he must be ordained over again to make a minister of the gospel of him, which I have consistently held for many years to be utterly opposed to all New Testament precedent. Mr. Spurgeon, when he completed the organization of this church, looked to the Holy Scriptures for his mode), and because he found, or believed that he found, in the New Testament, a bench of elders that, being once consecrated to the eldership, had right and authority to fulfil any function of teaching, preaching, ruling, or oversight, he modelled his church on that New Testament basis; and I say again in your hearing, and venture my reputation upon it, that it is the purest and most apostolic specimen of Scriptural Presbyterianism in the world. And then I like, again, the Scriptural sentiment here, that if any man has or develops the gift of preaching, he has the right to preach. These deacons and elders are preachers, all of them who have the gift, and I wish that they all felt that they had the gift and would go to work; but what I seek to impress is, that, according to his perception and understanding of the Word of God, Mr. Spurgeon sought to model this greatest church in Christendom; here, then, is another good work which found its furnishing in this blessed Book.

Whence came the Pastors' College? Whence came the Orphanage? Whence came the Almshouses? Their suggestion was found in the Word of God. He looked upon those orphans as fatherless ones of whom Christ said, "Suffer them to come to me and lead them to my sheltering arms." He looked upon the Pastors' College, as a school to train those who were dear to Christ, to perpetuate the true apostolic succession in the preaching of an apostolic gospel. And when these Almshouse were built, or enlarged and provided with inmates, was it not for the sake of Jesus and the charity commended in the thirteenth chapter of first Corinthians, that all this colossal work was done?

I have not attempted anything like a eulogium of this wonderful man. His works are his encomium; but I yearn to say—especially to young men before me—that you are verily guilty before God if your life does not attain a high degree of success, for in the midst of the metropolis of the world you have a living illustration of how a child, trained in the Scriptures, may begin at sixteen years of age to preach a mighty gospel, may keep up that preaching without interruption, except as his health and strength forbade, until he is nearly fifty-eight years of age, and then die in the midst of the prime of his life, and at his bier draw forth the tears of more disciples of Christ, and I venture to add, of more men of the world, than any one man that has departed during the present century. Young men, you may not have a chance for scholarly learning, but the Bible is in your hands, and you can study that. You may not have a chance for wealth and worldly honour, but you can be rich in the experience of a saint, and be honoured as a chosen vessel of God, to bear his name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. You may not have opportunities for gratifying a secular ambition, but you can gratify in God the aspiration after the highest attainments in holiness and the largest spheres of service to God and man. I pray you look back to-night through the years to the time when the little boy knelt in the arbour of his home, and Mr. Knill put his hands together on his head in benediction and prayer, beseeching God that that little boy might be taken up by the power of the Holy Spirit, anointed to be a preacher of the gospel, and made a distinguished instrument by whom that gospel should pervade the world. We shall not perhaps find very much of Mr. Knill on the records of history, any more than we hear much of Ananias in Damascus in the period of church history in which the apostles lived; but Mr. Knill's prayer over that little boy in the arbour, like Ananias's uplifted hands on the head of the converted Saul, inseparably links him with the glory of Spurgeon's future, as Ananias is linked with the glory of Paul the evangelist.

If you cannot preach like Spurgeon, cannot you pray like Knill? If you cannot claim the genius of Spurgeon, cannot you claim the spiritual contact with God that sets apart a child under your hand as a chosen vessel for the Lord? If you can do nothing more, parents, cannot you take your children, and, Sunday-school teacher, cannot you take your pupils, and lead them to Christ? You can come down to a level with them, make them feel at home in your society, and induct them into the mysteries of God and a holy life. You cannot possibly tell what God may do with the little child that you, as a mother, nourish at your breast, or as a teacher seek to lead into the knowledge of God.

There was a little waif picked up by a Sunday-school teacher who gave him a sixpence to induce him to go to a Sunday-school, and to that converted man in after years we owe the greatest triumphs of Christ in the vast empire of India. There was a bishop in the church in the United States who was found in a sugar barrel on the Pacific coast, and who was as a poor, homeless little orphan taken up in loving arms, led to the Sunday-school, and taught the things of God. We look too far for the spheres of service. They lie at hand and close by us; and he that has the spirit of his Master, and like him, can take little children in his arms, and put his hands upon them and bless them, may be setting apart a Samuel, or a John, the Baptist, or a Paul, for the work of the modern prophet, preacher, and evangelist. My closing word is one of appeal. You sometimes hear the gospel preached where only the tongue does the preaching, and where there seems to be no heart and no spiritual experience at the back of the utterance. Charles Spurgeon was a man whose heart answered to the heart of man, as in water face answereth to face.

Once more, in the presence of God and this assembly, let it be said, as on a previous occasion, that Charles Spurgeon was the perpetual and all-convincing evidence of Christianity. The gospel that he preached can never be a falsehood while it makes such a man. One such disciple in these days is an answer to all infidelity and all irreligion the world over—a triumphant vindication of the existence of a God, of the truth of these holy Scriptures, of the reality of a crucified and risen Christ, and of the verity of a present Spirit abiding in the church, and working in the world. We, at least, have no excuse for our infidelity. The sceptic that knows the story of Spurgeon will stand speechless before the bar of God when called to account. In the early days of the apostles, when the Sanhedrim accused them, and forbade them to preach any longer in the name of Christ, we are significantly told that the man who was healed by Peter and John stood beside them, and they "could say nothing against it"; and when they went aside to confer about this new religion, this concession they were compelled to make—"that a notable miracle hath been done by these men we cannot deny." So I say to you, that the man who stood here, spiritually healed of God, was a sufficient answer to all the attacks of modern doubt, and so long as the memory of Charles Haddon Spurgeon survives, and the savour of his presence is shed abroad in the fragrance of that memory, you, that hear me now, if you perish, will go down to perdition with a weight that will sink the soul to the lowest depths, in that you have seen such a visible and living proof of the truth of God, and have turned your ears to fables.