The recovery of the truth that led so many to leave the organized Churches was not answered by all. But God, as in days of old, did not forsake His people because they fell short of His purpose, and there were those who stood for the gospel in the various sections of Christendom. Our history would be incomplete if no account were taken of such men who, according to their light, contended “for the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 33Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. (Jude 3) JND) and exerted a powerful influence against the evil forces at work in Christendom.
In the sixteenth chapter of Luke, the Lord tells of a rich man who, while faring sumptuously every day, ignored the hungry beggar who lay at his gate full of sores. In the nineteenth century, something like this existed on a national scale. As a consequence of the Napoleonic wars and the rapid changes brought about by the industrial revolution, there was widespread poverty and other social evils. In 1848 there are said to have been thirty thousand filthy, naked, lawless, deserted children in the metropolis. In the coal mines, children as young as five were crawling on their hands and knees for twelve or more hours a day, dragging behind them, like miniature horses, little trucks of coal. Women, too, worked there like beasts of burden. The mingling of men and women in those dark caverns led to the worst of evils, while the long hours of toil in dust and damp and darkness brought on premature old age. In the newly developed factories also, little children and mothers of families toiled from morning till night, often under harsh and callous foremen. The rich worldlings cared little for the conditions of the poor. Herbert Spencer taught that such hardship and suffering was part of the natural law of evolutionary progress.
Many Christian men did what they could to mitigate these evils, but one stands out preeminently as devoting his life to the alleviation of human misery and suffering among the poor by all the means in his power. This was Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who was born in 1801. His father was callous; his mother a woman of society. As a child, he was neglected by both. He received neither love nor care from either of his parents. An old servant not only showed him much affection but taught him the knowledge of God. She read the Bible to him and gave him a true Christian training. Before he was eight, she died, and he mourned her loss as the best friend he had had in the world. Alone, friendless and unhappy, he nourished the hunger of his soul on the book he had learned to know on his old friend’s knee — the Bible. At twenty-six, he entered Parliament, and the following entry in his diary shows the bent of his mind at that time.
“Whether I shall ever be well-off, God alone knows, but this I pray, that never asking for wealth, should it be sent me, I may receive at the same time a heart and spirit to lay it out for man’s happiness and God’s glory.”
That prayer was answered. When, in 1851, he succeeded to the earldom, his own estates called for his first attention, for his father had paid no regard to the needs of his tenants. He mortgaged his own property to give his tenants decent living amenities, and among other things he paid a Scripture reader to visit his people in their homes.
He turned his attention to the alleviation of the awful conditions then existing in lunatic asylums. He strove to improve the lodging houses. He fostered the Ragged Schools and took an interest in Christian work in the slums of London. On one occasion, he received a round-robin, asking him to meet a number of thieves in London. He kept the appointment together with the City Missionary and found himself with an audience of four hundred criminals before him. The story of the dying thief was read to them; prayer followed. The men were invited to unburden their minds. Many pleaded for a fresh chance in life. As a result, he made arrangements for three hundred of them to emigrate to the colonies, where most of them made good.
On another occasion, he visited, with others, a foul, reeking, vermin-infested spot under Holborn Arches where the vicious and the wretched lay on rotten, filthy straw or in a hole hollowed out of the soil. Braving the stench and dangers of that resort of crime and squalor, he and his companions were busy from midnight till two in the morning rescuing thirty of these poor outcasts and taking them to the comparative comfort of one of the rooms used for a Ragged School.
Largely through his influence and pleading, the awful conditions in the mines and factories were greatly ameliorated. But Christian love was his motive. He maintained that Democrats and Trade Unionists who were working from merely human motives were only setting up false idols. He was a truly earnest Christian and a man of prayer. His labors were the outcome of his faith — the simple faith of the gospel.
It was at this time that Herbert Spencer was busy formulating his evolutionary philosophy based on the survival of the fittest, a philosophy to which, in later years, the horrors of Nazism can be clearly traced. Much about this time, too, Karl Marx was busy formulating the communistic creed, another evil doctrine which has opened up for the world a vista of terror, the end of which cannot even yet be seen. What a contrast this affords with the fruits of Christian faith.
A few extracts from Lord Shaftesbury’s biography by Edwin Hodder will prove that his faith was the good old biblical faith, which alone, in all ages, has had power. He said on one occasion:
“For my own part, I believe that the sole remedy is one of the oldest — not amusements for the people or a system of secular education or this thing and another that are suggested; the sole, the sovereign remedy, in my opinion, is to do what we can to evangelize the people by preaching on every occasion and in every place, in the grandest cathedral and at the corner of the street, in the royal palace and in the back slums, preaching Christ to the people, determined, like St. Paul, not to ‘know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:22For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2)).”
“Lord Shaftesbury never questioned the inspiration of the Scriptures; his faith was never staggered by the difficulties involved in the acceptance of the whole of the Bible, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. ‘Thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter’ (John 13:77Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter. (John 13:7)) was a favorite text with him, and he applied it to questions upon which other men’s minds were perplexed. For himself, he was content to wait, convinced that for all the things hard to be understood there was an explanation forthcoming, even though it might not come to him.”
He had a childlike confidence in God as the hearer and answerer of prayer, and he believed implicitly in the second coming of the Lord. “It entered into all his thoughts and feelings; it stimulated him in the midst of all his labors; it gave tone and color to all his hopes for the future. The motto engraven upon the flaps of the envelopes he daily used bore the inscription: ‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus’ (Rev. 22:2020He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. (Revelation 22:20)) in the original Greek.”
“I cannot tell you how it was that this subject first took hold upon me,” said Lord Shaftesbury to his biographer. “It has been, as far as I can remember, a subject to which I have always held tenaciously. Belief in it has been a moving principle in my life, for I see everything going on in the world subordinate to this one great event. It is not a popular doctrine; it is not, as it should be, the hope of the Church; it is, as a rule, held only by the poor. I have on several occasions taken upon me to point out to the clergy that it should be one of the main subjects of preaching. I made a speech at Exeter Hall and said, ‘You begin to see that the world cannot be saved by human agency; it must be by the coming again of Christ. As a Church, you are full of self-righteousness. You think you can do all by yourselves and do not even hint at a second advent.’ Things are better than they were, however. I remember the time when it was the rarest thing possible to hear the subject referred to.”
On another occasion he wrote:
“This dispensation seems to be drawing to a close, yet our Lord delayeth His coming. And why? Perhaps He comes not because so few people ask Him to come. Were effectual, fervent prayer of righteous men multiplied a hundredfold, the state of things might be changed, and many now alive might live to see the fulfillment of the promise which is the grand and only hope of all the ends of the earth.”
“Miss Marsh, one of his greatly valued friends, writing after his decease an ‘In Memoriam’ letter to the Record, remarks, ‘“There is no real remedy,” he often said, “for all this mass of misery, but in the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. Why do we not plead for it every time we hear the clock strike?” ’”
Frequently, in his closing days, he uttered the prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly,” and the last words he spoke were, “I am in the hands of God, the ever-blessed Jehovah — His hands alone. Yes, in His keeping, with Him alone.” He finished his course in 1885.
He declined an Abbey burial and directed that upon his tomb his name and three Bible texts should alone be inscribed:
London in the middle of the nineteenth century was, as we have already seen, a very different city from what it is today. Its social condition then was very bad. There were vast areas of slums. Over three thousand children under fourteen years of age were living as thieves and beggars. More than twenty thousand over fifteen years of age roamed the streets in idleness, and a hundred thousand were without any education. The Ragged Schools, which Christian folk had founded, were places of peril even to their teachers, and tens of thousands had no other homes than the common lodging houses which have been described as more fit for pigs than human beings. We have already seen something of the efforts that Christian people were making to remedy this state of affairs.
It was at such a time that God raised up a messenger to speak His Word to the people of London. This was Charles Haddon Spurgeon, whose history proves that he was raised up and fitted by God for the work to which he was called. He was born at Kelvedon in 1834. His great-grandfather, Job Spurgeon, in the seventeenth century, suffered imprisonment for attending a Non-Conformist meeting. His grandfather was, for fifty-four years, pastor to a company of Christians who met at Stambourne, Essex. His father, too, was minister of an independent church. His mother was an earnest Christian who prayed much for her family and especially for her eldest and self-willed boy Charles. Every Sunday evening she gathered her children around her, and as they read the Scriptures she explained them. Then she prayed with them, and some of her words remained engraved on their memories for the rest of their lives. Father and grandfather played their part in implanting in Spurgeon’s young mind the truths of the gospel. By these means the Spirit of God wrought in his soul, but he was a lad in his teens before he surrendered his heart to the Lord. Prolonged and intense exercises went on in his young heart. As they grew in intensity, he says, “I cried to God with groanings — I say it without exaggeration — groanings that cannot be uttered! And oh, how I sought, in my poor, dark way, to overcome first one sin and then another and so to do better, in God’s strength, against the enemies that assailed me, and not, thank God, altogether without success, though still the battle had been lost unless He had come, who is the Overcomer of sin and the Deliverer of His people, and had put the hosts to flight.” But deliverance had not come yet. The thunders of Sinai still echoed in his soul. Then came a memorable day, Sunday, January 6, 1850. He had already been to one place of worship after another seeking to hear a word of peace. This Sunday morning a violent snowstorm was raging, and he was prevented from reaching the chapel he intended. He took refuge from the storm in the Primitive Methodist Chapel in Artillery Street, Colchester. Truly, God moves in a mysterious way. The storm prevented the preacher from coming. Only a dozen or so were present, and after a hurried consultation, one of them, an uneducated villager, mounted the pulpit. The text was, “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth” (Isa. 45:2222Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. (Isaiah 45:22)). The preacher uttered a few simple, homely comments on the text, in broad Essex dialect, and after about ten minutes seemed to come to the end of his tether. Then suddenly he fixed his eyes on the fifteen-year-old lad and said, “Young man, you look very miserable; you will always be miserable, miserable in life and miserable in death, if you don’t obey my text, but if you obey now, this moment you will be saved.” Then lifting up his hands to emphasize his words, he shouted, “Young man, look to Jesus Christ! Look! Look! Look! You have nothin’ to do but look and live.” A fine sermon might have effected nothing. That simple man’s simple, direct, personal message broke young Spurgeon’s chains in a moment. He looked and he lived. He had been waiting, he afterwards said, to do many things, but when he heard the word, “Look,” he could have looked his eyes away. “I thought,” he said, “I could dance all the way home. I could understand what John Bunyan meant when he declared he wanted to tell the crows on the ploughed land all about his conversion.”
He became exercised about baptism, and in May he was baptized publicly in the River Lark. He began to distribute tracts. This was his first service. Then he became a Sunday school teacher. He was soon invited to give the closing address, and it was so attractive that the older people began to come and listen. Thus early did his gift make room for him.
He was induced shortly after to accompany another and older man to a meeting at Barnwell. On arrival, the older man declined the task and young Spurgeon was left to take it up. “Give them,” said the other, on seeing Spurgeon’s diffidence, “one of your Sunday school addresses.” He was immediately booked for preaching both on Sundays and weekdays in the places around. In October 1851, when he was still only seventeen years of age, he was engaged to supply the pulpit of a chapel at Waterbeach near Cambridge.
“Waterbeach was notorious for its drunkenness and profanity when Spurgeon went to it as God’s messenger. ‘In a short time the little thatched chapel was crammed, the biggest vagabonds of the village were weeping floods of tears, and those who had been the curse of the parish became its blessing. I can say with joy and happiness that almost from one end of the village to the other, at the hour of eventide, one might have heard the voice of song coming from every rooftree and echoing from almost every heart.’” It recalls the effect of Richard Baxter’s preaching at Kidderminster in the seventeenth century.
There was a large Baptist Church at New Park Street, London, with accommodation for twelve hundred but which was attended by two hundred at the most. It was in an uninviting neighborhood and people had moved to more desirable parts. This congregation wanted a minister. Someone had heard Spurgeon preach and, young though he was — only nineteen — dared to recommend him. When the invitation came for one Sunday, the young preacher did not believe it could be meant for him. In reply, he indicated his youth and that he was quite unknown outside his own country district. But he went. No one offered him hospitality. He had a cold, almost rude, reception. In fear and trembling, he preached in that large building to eighty people. One of the deacons expressed the opinion that if the preacher were with them three months, the place would be filled. The congregation insisted on every effort being made to secure his services. He was very reluctant to accept a term of six months’ service, but when he finally yielded to their entreaties, he asked for their prayers, adding, “Remember my youth and inexperience and pray that these may not hinder my usefulness.”
Writing later of those early years of his service, when he was still only twenty years of age, he says, “In the year 1854, when I had scarcely been in London twelve months, the neighborhood in which I lived was visited by Asiatic cholera, and my congregation suffered from its inroads. Family after family summoned me to the bedside of the smitten, and almost every day I was called to visit the grave. I gave myself up with youthful ardor to the visitation of the sick and was sent for from all quarters of the district by persons of all ranks and religions. I became weary in body and sick at heart. My friends seemed falling one by one, and I felt or fancied that I was sickening like those around me. A little more work and weeping would have laid me low among the rest: I felt that my burden was heavier than I could bear, and I was ready to sink under it. As God would have it, I was returning mournfully from a funeral, when my curiosity led me to read a paper which was pasted up in a shoemaker’s shop in Dover Road. It did not look like a trade announcement, nor was it, for it bore in a good, bold handwriting these words: ‘Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling’ (Psa. 91:9-109Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; 10There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. (Psalm 91:9‑10)). The effect on my heart was immediate. Faith appropriated the passage as her own. I felt secure, refreshed and girded with immortality. I went on with my visitation of the dying in a calm and peaceful spirit; I felt no fear of evil and I suffered no harm. The providence which moved the tradesman to place those verses on the window I gratefully acknowledge, and in the remembrance of its marvelous power I adore the Lord my God.”
During alterations to the Chapel, Exeter Hall was taken as a temporary measure, but it proved too small for the crowds that came to listen. Later, and again as a temporary expedient, the Surrey Music Hall, capable of seating ten thousand, was used. It was filled, and another ten thousand remained in the gardens. Early in the service someone maliciously raised the cry of fire. There was a stampede and a number were injured and several killed. Spurgeon was carried out fainting, and it was a week before he recovered. He suffered intensely. The entire press raised its voice in reproach. But the meetings were later resumed, though in the morning and not the evening, and continued for three years.
On the day of National Humiliation for the Indian Mutiny, he preached at the Crystal Palace to nearly twenty-four thousand people. A few days prior to this event, he went to try the acoustics of the place. The sentence he uttered was, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” (John 1:2929The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. (John 1:29)). To a workman in the galleries who heard it, it was a voice from heaven. He dropped his tools, went home and did not rest until he knew Christ as his Saviour.
When the Surrey Gardens Hall was later used for Sunday evening concerts, Spurgeon withdrew. The project failed and the proprietors became bankrupt. The building was afterwards destroyed by fire.
He paid several visits to the Continent, preaching in Paris, Geneva and Holland, where he had a heart-to-heart talk with the Queen. His visits to the Provinces were also greatly blessed. Urged to go to America by the promise of thousands of listeners, he replied that he had no wish to speak to ten thousand people; his only ambition was to do the will of God.
In March 1861, the great Metropolitan Tabernacle was opened, where he preached for the rest of his life. It could hold about six thousand people — sometimes it held more. During the ensuing years, thousands were converted. A friendly critic once suggested that the sermons he preached between 1860-1867 (the first seven years of his service in the Tabernacle) were not on the high level of the earlier or later ones. It is strange that this coincides with the beginning of his Tabernacle service. When the Tabernacle project was being discussed, he said, “I made up my mind that either a suitable place must be built or I would resign my pastorate. You by no means consented to the latter alternative, yet I sternly resolved that one or the other must be done —either the Tabernacle must be erected or I would become an evangelist and turn rural dean of all the commons in England and vicar of all the hedgerows.”
What, one wonders, might have been the result if he had adopted the other alternative and, like Whitefield and Wesley, gone out into the highways and hedges, compelling men to come into the gospel feast. Scripture defines the evangelist as a gift to the whole Church. His orbit is unlimited. Paul, the greatest among evangelists, never settled down to be a pastor. His longest stay at Ephesus was three years, but the whole of Asia heard the Word in that time. One of the fundamental errors of Christendom has been the confusing of the function of gift, which is universal, and that of oversight (eldership), which is local.
Spurgeon held tenaciously to “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 33Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. (Jude 3) JND). In 1887 he raised his voice against the infiltration of modernistic notions. At first he wrote in general terms as to the growing declension in faith, but later he was more specific and referred to the Baptist Union. In consequence, he found himself outside the Baptist Union.
Here are some words of his, uttered in the very thick of the conflict: “Why not found a new denomination? It is a question for which I have no liking. There are denominations enough, in my opinion, and if there is a new denomination formed, the thieves and robbers who have entered other gardens walled around would climb into it also, and nothing would be gained. Oh, that the day would come when, in a larger communion than any sect can offer, all those who are one in Christ may be able to blend in perfect unity. This can only be by way of growing spiritual life, clearer light upon the more eternal truth, and a closer cleaving to Him who is the Head, even Jesus Christ.”
The conflict seems to have clouded his last days. As he was leaving for Mentone, where, in fact, he went to die, he said to a friend, “The fight is killing me.” There he revived a little, but he did not return alive. Peacefully on January 31, 1892, his spirit departed to be with the Saviour he loved so ardently and served so faithfully and so well. He awaits with a host of fellow-laborers an abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.