Alright, in this hour I want to talk about one of the most important aspects of Charles Spurgeon's style of preaching. He is, of course, called the Prince of Preachers, and his sermons and his homiletical style are so well known and have been so thoroughly dissected by so many people already that what I want to do in this hour is focus on an unintended consequence of Spurgeon's candor and his clarity, and I want to talk mostly then about Spurgeon as a polemicist. We'll get into some of the conflicts that he faced over the course of his ministry. I want you to understand how he defended the truth when controversy followed in the wake of his preaching, and controversy followed him a lot. And in fact, controversy would follow anyone who was as committed to truth and clarity and boldness as Spurgeon was. He didn't like to pick fights. In fact, as far as I know, there's maybe only one notorious incident where he purposely picked a fight. He didn't do that a lot, but he always preached the truth with conviction and boldness and clarity, and the result was he got a lot of pushback, and he answered it always with grace and maturity. He mastered the art of being staunch and unwavering without being caustic or predatory towards his opponents. In fact, his whole life is an illustration of 1 Corinthians 15, 58. Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. You know that your labor in Christ is not in vain. From the very start of his ministry, Spurgeon was a man of strong convictions. And in fact, this is a remarkable thing about him. Throughout the course of his entire life, he never reversed his opinion on any major point of doctrine. Those are pictures of Spurgeon that carry you through his life. And as far as I know, there's not a single thing he ever preached that he had to come back and retract. At least nothing major, nothing of any consequence that you would actually pay attention to. and that is not because he was arrogant or stubborn. His beliefs weren't mere bigotry, but before he would form any doctrinal conviction, he would always study the issue carefully, and he was a meticulous student of both scripture and church history, and so before he ever taught on any issue, he had a thorough understanding of it and a settled opinion. And in my judgment, in the major controversies that he is remembered for, he was in every case on the right side of the issue. All of his positions, all of his controversial positions have been vindicated by church history. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that I agree with everything Spurgeon ever taught. He was a Sabbatarian, for example, and I'm not. He was more sympathetic to Preterism than I think most of us would be inclined to be. He spoke more favorably about Baptist successionism than he should have. In other words, he seemed to buy into the trail of blood mythology. That's a view of church history that is a sort of twisted view of church history that tries to construct an unbroken string of Baptist churches that goes all the way back to John the Baptist. And in order to do that, they artificially sanctify a lot of groups and movements that were actually heretical. But Spurgeon never went to war over any of those issues. What I'm saying is that in all the major controversies that he's remembered for, the issues that he did fight hard to defend, in my opinion, he was always 100% right. And I love the fact that once he arrived at a well-formed opinion, he never softened his personal convictions. He never sacrificed the truth on the altar of public opinion. But before we get into that, I do want to say some things about Spurgeon's preaching style. So we'll talk a little bit about his approach to preaching, and then we'll examine his role as a polemicist. Now you understand, I hope, that Spurgeon was not a verse-by-verse expositor. He was not a model. of the expository method that I would advocate, or that is taught by John MacArthur in the Master's Seminary. He would always start with a biblical text, usually it would be a single verse or a phrase from a verse, but he would use that text to suggest or introduce a biblical theme, and then he would preach through what was basically a topical message on that theme, and also from week to week, He skipped around in the Bible, following no discernible pattern. He didn't, like, work his way through the texts in order in books of Scripture or anything like that. Now, he didn't utterly ignore biblical exposition. In fact, every week in the morning service, he would give a more formal, verse-by-verse exposition of an extended passage of Scripture. But that was a totally different feature of the Sunday service. That was distinct from the sermon. That was more like the Bible reading. He would read through the text of Scripture and comment on it. It was basically a Bible reading with Spurgeon's comments interspersed between the verses. And his comments were very short, usually just a sentence or two. And then he would generally take a short phrase from whatever passage he had commented on, and he would use that phrase or that single verse as a launching point for his sermons. And in his sermons, to be honest, he sometimes departed very quickly from the context of the original text, whatever he was preaching on. He didn't always pay much attention to the context because his sermons were topical rather than expository, and sometimes his topic had a very tenuous connection to his original text. And my favorite example of this is his sermon on God's providence. There is No date recorded when he preached this, and it wasn't published in the large collection of his sermons, the Metropolitan Tabernacle series, until 1908. It had been published prior to that in a different form, which is what you see here. But 1908, that's 16 years after Spurgeon died, this sermon was published in the Metropolitan Tabernacle series. The text was Ezekiel chapter 1 verses 15 through 19, and that's where the prophet describes his vision of the heavenly throne, with a wheel in the middle of a wheel, and Spurgeon says, He says, these wheels signify divine providence. And then he explains it like this. These are his words. Providence is like a wheel because sometimes one part of the wheel is at the top and then it's at the bottom. That's his explanation that ties the wheels within a wheel to the doctrine of providence. I've read this sermon a few times, and I still don't see how Spurgeon gets divine providence out of a wheel within a wheel. I mean, it's true that what goes around comes around. Do you all have that saying? What goes around comes around, meaning you're going to reap what you sow, basically. But that doesn't mean that the point of Ezekiel 1 is the doctrine of divine providence. Nevertheless, you read this sermon, it's not a bad sermon on the doctrine of providence. He manages to give a really good sermon on the principle and the doctrine of divine providence. So whatever else we might say that is critical about Spurgeon's approach to preaching, we ought to acknowledge that no preacher has ever made the gospel more clear or proclaimed it more faithfully. He was a truly great preacher. His content was doctrinally sound and thoroughly biblical in the sense that what he said was true, and he always supported it with quotations from Scripture. And so even though I can't recommend his way of dealing with texts, And I hope none of the preachers here would aspire to that model in your sermons. Don't follow the pattern he followed. Still, it would be totally wrong to characterize his preaching as unbiblical. It wasn't. It was biblical. And by the way, in his lectures to students, he defends expository preaching. He notes that the Puritans were known for going through long texts of scripture and series of sermons that followed the Scriptures all the way through and he actually said in the context of that lecture to his students that he thought that was a superior way of preaching But he for whatever reason he didn't adopt it himself. I think it's just that he was so much in in the in the cycle of doing what he did, that it would have been hard for him to depart from it. But there are actually statements from him indicating that he thinks expository preaching would be better than the approach to preaching that he himself followed. Spurgeon had several unique abilities that overshadowed whatever deficiencies you might find in his approach to homiletics or exegesis. For one thing, he had a photographic memory. I mentioned this before. He remembered everything, and it's clear that his mind was saturated with Scripture. He used to say that he wanted to be so full of Scripture that if you cut him, he would bleed biblion instead of blood. And that's actually a pretty good description of who he was, what he was like. That's how he managed to have such an immensely fruitful ministry, even though he was preaching topical sermons, sometimes from out of context verses. And by the way, that approach to sermonizing was pretty common in Victorian times. Spurgeon like all of us, was a product of his times. But he was extraordinary, even by the standards of his time. On top of his photographic memory, he had a keen, logical mind. He had apparently a very powerful voice. Sadly, nobody ever recorded him. And he had an amazing capacity for hard work, even though, even when he wasn't feeling well, which was almost all the time, he still worked hard. And his method of preparation is also something that no preacher should ever try to emulate. But it reflects the high level of natural giftedness that Spurgeon possessed. Here's what Spurgeon himself said about how he prepared his sermons. He told his students, quote, Brethren, it's not easy for me to tell you precisely how I make my sermons. All through the week I am on the lookout for material that I can use on the Sabbath, but the actual work of arranging it is necessarily, I don't know why it was necessary, but he says it was, necessarily left until Saturday evening. because every other moment was fully occupied in the Lord's service. So he's saying he put off the actual preparation of his outline and notes until Saturday evening. Mrs. Spurgeon, his wife, writes this, up to six o'clock every Saturday evening visitors were welcome, but at six o'clock every visitor left. Mr. Spurgeon would often playfully say, now dear friends I must bid you goodbye and turn you out of my study for you know what a number of chickens I have to scratch for and I want to give them a good meal tomorrow. So what's remarkable about that to me is the fact that not only did he put off his preparation till Saturday, he saved it until after 6 p.m. Saturday evening. I actually do most of my preparation on Saturday because I work a normal job during the week and my sermon preparation is necessarily left to Saturday. But I get up at 6 a.m. on Saturday and start to work on the sermon and usually don't finish it until 8 p.m. So I'm working on it all day. He put it off until after 6. And, you know, at 6 p.m., that's when my mind has started to really shut down. So I don't know how he did what he did, but it reflects the sharpness of his mind and the effectiveness of his photographic memory. And in his preparation time, when he shut himself up in the study and began to actually put the sermon together, he would actually use a piece of scrap paper, just a small back of an envelope or something like that, to write out his outline. And he rarely took any more notes into the pulpit than that one piece of paper, which was a basic roadmap of where he wanted to go. And if he did that, if he had the outline, the roadmap, he was able to compose what he wanted to say extemporaneously while he was speaking from the pulpit. All of that eloquence came out of him. Now, don't get the... Don't get the wrong idea. A lot of prior thought and soul searching went into the development of the outline. Notice that he said all during the week he's looking for material that he can use. He said this about those Saturday night sessions in his study. He said, quote, I confess that I frequently sit hour after hour praying and waiting for a subject and that this is the main part of my study. Much hard labor I have spent in manipulating topics and ruminating on points of doctrine, or making skeletons out of verses and then burying every bone of them in the catacombs of oblivion." He said, I believe that almost any Saturday night in my life, I make enough outlines of sermons that if I felt at liberty to preach all of them, it would last me for a month. He said this, "...as soon as any passage of Scripture really grips my heart and soul, I concentrate my whole attention upon it, I look at the precise meaning of the original, I closely examine the context so as to see what special aspect of this text means in its surroundings, and I roughly jot down all of the thoughts that occur to me concerning the subject, leaving to later period the orderly marshalling of them for presentation to my hearers." Now, you can sample almost any random Spurgeon sermon, and you will probably be amazed at the richness and the depth of his preaching. The key to this was Spurgeon's own habit of reading things voraciously. He filled his mind with the truth of God's Word from beginning to the end of the week, every single week of his life. And therefore, he could just preach from the overflow of his heart. There was so much there. And his unique mind and abilities enabled him to give a sermon extemporaneously that most of us would be hard-pressed to write, even if we had a whole week to do it. I mentioned the power of his voice. After his London congregation outgrew the new Park Street building, he preached for several years in a place called Exeter Hall. This was an auditorium that could accommodate 4,500 people, and it was jammed with people who came to hear Spurgeon. He also preached at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, which was a concert and entertainment venue that held 10,000 people all at once. And it was full when he spoke there. He once spoke to a crowd of 20,000 people at the Crystal Palace. And in all of those venues, there was no amplification. They didn't have electronic amplifiers or speakers. The only amplification they had was that soundboard that hung over the speaker that would reflect his voice back into the audience. But people testified that even if you stood at the back of the crowd, you could hear every syllable clearly. And remember that Spurgeon was only 19 years old when he was called to London to pastor the oldest, most famous congregation of Baptists anywhere in the world. And he was a mere teenager, stepping into a pulpit that had previously been occupied by Benjamin Keech, John Gill, and John Rippon. The three magisterial Baptists, arguably in Spurgeon's era, those would have been the three most famous Baptists out of church history. And within a couple of years, after he started there in London, he was regularly preaching to congregations of 10,000 people. Regularly. So how is it that someone so popular with so many natural gifts became embroiled in controversy as frequently as Spurgeon did? It's not at all like the megachurches of today. America is filled with megachurches where pastors draw crowds close to 10,000. And most of them are people, men, who cater to their audience's desires. And they're more committed to entertainment than they are to preaching. Spurgeon wasn't like that at all. But he began and ended his ministry, and consistently, all the way through it, preached the Word of God faithfully, and didn't tickle people's ears. And you can look at almost any point in his career, and he was dealing with some kind of controversy, because what he was doing is proclaiming the truth of God's Word, which is not always easy to hear. And this proneness to be embroiled in controversy is, I think, the most interesting feature of Spurgeon's legacy. So let's look now at his role as a polemicist. And we're going to talk about this over a couple of our sessions. But I want to talk about his role as a polemicist, that is, a debater, a defender of unpopular doctrines. Given his youthfulness and his theological stance and his meteoric rise to fame out of nowhere, I suppose it was predictable that Spurgeon, at age 19, was going to face harsh critics. Still the force and antagonism of his critics caught Spurgeon by surprise, and it began the year he began ministering in London. I mentioned that most of the conflicts that we remember Spurgeon for were doctrinal issues that he was defending. That wasn't true at first. The early critics of Spurgeon were petty and mean-spirited in a petty and personal way. He was lampooned by cartoonists. He was attacked in print by newspaper columnists. He was criticized by other ministers who were jealous of his success, or they were hostile, some of them, to his doctrine. And he got it from both sides. The hyper-Calvinists despised him and the Armenians on the other side likewise despised him. So he was caught in this vice of contrary opinions because of his Calvinism. And he was relentlessly mocked by unbelievers. The enemies of everything that is holy went after him fiercely. So let's face it too, Spurgeon was a bit of a country bumpkin when he first came to London. He was not well suited for urban ministry. He had no sense of style or sophistication and that made it hard to get by in London in those times. London, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, and in fact Spurgeon's wife, I mentioned her in passing, she was just a teenage girl when Spurgeon first preached at the New Park Street Chapel, and she recalled how the thing that caught her attention on that first Sunday was that polka-dotted handkerchief that he kept waving, she said, as if this added some kind of flourish to his gestures. In fact, let me read you what she said about it. She said this, and this is Susanna Spurgeon, Spurgeon's wife. She said this years later. That's harsh. Alas, she says, for my vain and foolish heart, I was not spiritually minded enough to understand his earnest presentation of the gospel and his powerful pleading with sinners. But the huge black satin stock, that's the thing he wore around his neck, the long badly trimmed hair, and the blue pocket handkerchief with white spots, which he himself has so graphically described, these attracted most of my attention and awakened some feelings of amusement. That's from the girl that married Spurgeon. His critics were unmerciful. Let me read you one example. This is from an article published, in fact, I forgot to hit the slide. That's Susanna Spurgeon. Here is another example of critics. This is one from an article published in April of 1855 from a newspaper called the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. This is a secular newspaper. The critic writes this. Just now, the great lion, star, meteor, or whatever else he may be called of the Baptists, is the Reverend M. Spurgeon. Didn't he get his name right? Minister of Park Street Chapel, Southwark. He said, he has created a perfect furor in the religious world. Every Sunday crowds throng to Exeter Hall where for some weeks past he has been preaching during the enlargement of his own chapel as to some great dramatic entertainment. The huge hall is crowded to overflowing, morning and evening. For a parallel to such popularity, we must go back to Dr. Chalmers, Edward Irving, or the earlier days of James Parsons. These were famous but questionable ministers. But he said, I will not dishonor such men by comparison with this young religious demagogue. They preach the gospel with all the fervor of earnest natures. Mr. Spurgeon preaches himself. He is nothing unless he is an actor, indulging in coarse familiarity with holy things, declaiming in a ranting and colloquial style, strutting up and down the platform as though he were at the Surrey Theatre, and boasting of his own intimacy with heaven with nauseating frequency. His fluency and self-possession and oratorical tricks and daring utterances seem to fascinate his less thoughtful hearers, who love excitement more than devotion. I have glanced at one or two of Mr. Spurgeon's published sermons, and I turned away in disgust from the coarse sentiments, the scholastical expressions, and claptrap style that I've discovered. It would seem that the poor young man's brain is turned by the notoriety he has acquired and the incense that's offered at his shrine. From the very pulpit, he boasts of the crowds that flock to listen to his rodimentade. That's a fancy word for boastfulness. By the end of the year, he says, not less than 200,000 of his published trashy sermons would be scattered over the length and the breadth of the land. He says, I don't think he's been invited to take part in any denominational meetings, nor indeed does he seek such fellowship. He glories in his position of lofty isolation, and he is intoxicated by the draughts of popularity that have fired his feverish brain. He is a nine days wonder, a comet that has suddenly shot across the religious atmosphere. He has gone up like a rocket, and before long he'll come down like a stick. He says, the most melancholy consideration in the case is the diseased craving for excitement which this running after Mr. Spurgeon by the religious world indicates. He says, I would charitably conclude that the greater part of the multitude who weekly crowd to his theatrical exhibitions consists of people who are not in the habit of frequenting a place of worship. And on this very same day that article appeared, another London periodical, a magazine called The Brooks Chronicle, published an equally vitriolic attack on Spurgeon, written by, this time, an anonymous critic, who, among many other mean-spirited things, referred to Spurgeon's preaching as ginger pop sermonizing. Ginger pop sermonizing. That is the last thing any objective person would say about Spurgeon's preaching. It wasn't shallow, it wasn't sugary, it wasn't just sermonizing. It was good doctrine preached in a voice of clarity and precision that nobody else had ever matched. But London was populated with angry critics and academic elitists who were determined to do or say anything they could that might discredit Spurgeon. In fact, the writer of that second critique, the one that was published in the Buck's Chronicle, was an Armenian who... was provoked by Spurgeon's Calvinism because listen to how he characterized Spurgeon's doctrine, his message. He said that Spurgeon teaches that if Jack Scroggins was put down in the black book before the great curtain of events was unfolded, that the said Jack Scroggins, in spite of all he may do or say, will and must tumble into the limbo of a brimstone hell. to be punished and roasted without any prospect of cessation or shrinking into a dried cinder because Jack Scroggins had merely done what Jack Scroggins could not help doing. It is not pleasant to be frightened into the portal of bliss by the hissing bubbles of the seething cauldron. It is not Christian-like to say, God must wash brains in the hyper-Calvinism Aspergian teaches before that man can enter heaven. It does not harmonize with the quiet majesty of the Nazarene. It does not fall like manna for hungry souls, but it is like the gush of the pouring rain of a thunderstorm, which makes the flowers hang their heads, looking up afterwards as if nothing had happened. When the Exeter Hall stripling talks of deity, let him remember that God is superior to profanity, and that blasphemy from a parson is as great a crime as when the lowest grade of humanity utters the brutal oath at which the virtuous stand aghast." So he's accusing Spurgeon not merely of bad doctrine, but of gross blasphemy. And, you know, to hear a review that critical might actually comfort some of you who thought that vitriol and verbal abuse was invented for Twitter. That same flavor of controversy was popular in Spurgeon's time as well. Now, as I said, Spurgeon never sought conflict, and he didn't take any delight in debates and controversies, but he wasn't intimidated by these critics either. He was gifted with words, and he was quick-witted, and he was certainly adept at using sharp-edged humor. to sort of defang his critics. He was capable of leveling stinging reproaches against his doctrinal adversaries as well. And in fact, Spurgeon staunchly defended the use of humor and sarcasm and even ridicule against evil. He said, if you're going to ridicule anything, you should ridicule the devil and his strategies. But he didn't think it was appropriate to default to some nasty style of argument. And he was never mean-spirited towards his adversaries themselves. What he mocked was their positions. Even when he was heaping scorn and derision on their theology, he was kind to the people he disagreed with. He believed that the level of spleen venting we do should be commensurate with the gravity and the immediacy of the error. Not every mistake calls for the atomic bomb response. In fact, here's another incident that illustrates Spurgeon's patience and his good humor with his adversaries. When he came to London, one of the best-known preachers in the city was a hyper-Calvinist named James Wells. James Wells. pastored Surrey Tabernacle in South London. It was not far actually from where the Metropolitan Tabernacle would eventually be built. James Wells was a gifted preacher who at the height of his fame drew a congregation of 1,500 people every Sunday. But he was often cantankerous and he was purposely cruel with his criticism. Frankly, that seems to be the besetting sin of hyper-Calvinists. They like to be cruel. And in January of 1855, at the start of Spurgeon's first year at the New Park Street Tabernacle, the New Park Street Chapel, James Wells sent a long letter to the editor of the Earthen Vessel. This was a high Calvinist periodical. They published hyper-Calvinist material. And he wrote anonymously under the pseudonym Job, like the Old Testament biblical character Job. But it was well known who the true author was. He didn't really hide it. And in that letter, James Wells cited Spurgeon's testimony of conversion when he was 15 years old. And then Will Wells said this, quote, heaven grant that it may be proved to be true. for the young man's sake and for that of others also, but I have, I have, most solemnly I have, my doubts as to the divine reality of his conversion. I do not say, because it's not for me to say, that he is not a regenerated man, but this I do know, that there are conversions which are not of God. So he's questioning the reality of Spurgeon's conversion. Spurgeon didn't reply at all. He ignored the letter. But of course the paper was then besieged with more letters from their readers and they were both pro and con. The next month Wells wrote again a follow-up letter, and he doubled down. He stubbornly refused to withdraw or modify or soften his suggestion that Spurgeon was an unconverted man. He said, quote, I am not at present, instead of being shaken, I am more than ever confirmed in what I have written. I beg, therefore, to say that anything said upon the subject by Mr. Spurgeon's friends will be to me as straws thrown against a stone wall, of which I shall take no notice. So he was saying, if you want to defend Spurgeon, I'm not even going to pay attention to you. So as far as I know, Wells never did relax his contempt for Spurgeon. And they ministered in the same city for decades after this, once they encountered one another in the street. And Wells asked Spurgeon whether he'd even seen the inside of Surrey Tabernacle, where he preached. And Spurgeon, trying to be polite, said no, but he would very much like to see it. And so Wells told Spurgeon that if he'd come around on a Monday morning, he would show him the auditorium. He said that would give him enough time to ventilate the place before Sunday. And Spurgeon then asked Wells if he had seen the inside of the Metropolitan Tabernacle. And Wells said, yes, he had come by there on a recent Saturday and looked around. Ah, Spurgeon said, so that accounts for the delightful fragrance in our services that week. He turned it against him, turned it upside down, and used what Wells had said to insult Spurgeon. He used it to be kind to Wells. Spurgeon was an immensely patient man like that, and he was a careful critic. He always preferred to dismantle errors meticulously with scripture and with logic, rather than blasting every target with large cannons. Regarding the mean-spirited style of discourse, Spurgeon said, But he said, I don't think anybody ought to pay very heavy fees to be a nasty critic. You can grow into that with very little watering, very speedily. So he was saying, critics like that are like weeds, you know, they grow easily, but they're not edifying in any way. He was never the kind of person, Spurgeon, who purposely provoked a controversy just because he thought it was fun to fight. And in fact, the earliest controversies came to him, and they were mainly sparked by other people's petty resentments against this young man, still a teenager, or barely out of his teens, who was enjoying so much success, and who was, even at that young age, already so firm and so bold with his opinions. And I already touched on this, but it's worth revisiting. The one remarkable thing about Spurgeon to me is that from the start of his ministry to the end, his theology remained substantially the same. As I said, I don't know of any major issue where Spurgeon ever changed his position. He was not a reed shaken in the wind. It was the furthest thing from his personality to be carried about by every wind of doctrine, and in fact I'm not aware of a single instance in which Spurgeon was forced to retract or change something that he had preached or published. There may be some incidental details that he modified or refined, but he didn't budge on any major doctrine from the start of his ministry until the day he died. It was the same theology all the way through. And I mentioned that fact one time when I was writing a blog. On my blog, I mentioned that Spurgeon preached in the same pulpit for 40 years and never once had to retract anything he said, never once had to change his opinion on anything. Some of my post-modernized young readers were absolutely outraged to hear that. Because you know that the conventional wisdom today suggests that the very essence of humility is to undergo these regular paradigm shifts where from time to time you have to acknowledge that you've been totally wrong in some fundamental aspect of your worldview or your belief system, and you can renounce and ridicule everything you said you believed last year, and you can still claim to be humble if you do that. But if you hold steady to the same worldview that you embraced 10 years ago and refuse to budge on your convictions, then in the world today, you are going to be regarded as someone who is arrogant. In fact, your refusal to change is irrefutable proof that you're the arrogant one. That's how people today think. But, for the record, the reason Spurgeon was so steady in his beliefs is that he wouldn't speak on an issue until he had studied it thoroughly and settled the matter in his heart. And in fact, in the early years, when he came to the New Park Street Chapel, you follow his sermons and you'll note that he is preaching through the basics of biblical truth and Christian doctrine. He avoided anything that was speculative or doubtful. He never reached beyond his own understanding, like a lot of young preachers do. He wasn't trying to deal with advanced issues before he'd actually had a thorough and reasonable opportunity to study the matter and come to a firm and settled opinion. And it wasn't that Spurgeon aspired to be vague or ambivalent on important doctrines, just the opposite. He never sounded an uncertain trumpet. He loved soundness, and thoroughness, and clarity, and firm convictions, and he cultivated all of those things in his own approach to theology. That's the very thing that made controversy inevitable for Spurgeon. He was a voice of clarity and firm conviction during an era when practically everyone else wanted to put all of the doctrines of Christianity back on the table for negotiation. Remember, this was the time of Charles Darwin and people were reconsidering whether the miracles of the Bible were true, whether the story of creation was even believable and all sorts of things like that. They wanted to remain Christians by name at least, and hold to the morality of Scripture, but they didn't want to believe in the authority and the inerrancy of Scripture. Spurgeon wasn't like that. And so he fought against the tendency of his generation to try to reinvent and reimagine every point of doctrine in Christianity in order to make things more suitable to the modern mind. That was, I would say, the central error of the modernists. They felt that the church needed to keep up with the world, when, in fact, the commission Christ gave the church is to preach a message that never changes. It's eternal, and it will not pass away. But in modern thinking and in postmodern thinking, everything is perpetually up for debate and reevaluation. We live in an era not too different from what Spurgeon faced. And he was of the opposite mind of his whole culture. He was convinced that as faithful Christians, we need to hold fast and contend for the faith once delivered to the saints, contend earnestly for it. And so, conflict was inevitable. Ian Murray wrote the best book on Spurgeon, The Controversialist, and I'm certain many of you probably read it. This is one of the classics of 20th century Christian publishing. I think one of the most important books to be written, certainly the most important book about Spurgeon to be written in the past hundred years, The Forgotten Spurgeon. Murray traces three of the major controversies that spanned Spurgeon's career. There was a conflict over Spurgeon's Calvinism. There was a massive debate that the one to fight Spurgeon picked with the Anglican Church over baptismal regeneration, and then finally there was the downgrade controversy. Now, there were of course a lot more controversies than those, but those are the major representative ones that Ian Murray deals with, and Murray's book is, I think, the single best resource if you want proof that Spurgeon was not the safe, broadly tolerant, always congenial type of person that most 20th century evangelicals always seem to want to make him out to be. This is my beef with Rick Warren. He wants to make Spurgeon out to be a sort of Santa Claus figure who's nice to everybody, and Spurgeon wasn't like that at all. The fact is, even Spurgeon's own autobiography made the very same point that Ian Murray was making. Some of you may own the two-volume edition of Spurgeon's autobiography that was published by the Banner of Truth. That is a slightly reorganized and re-edited version. The original autobiography was a massive four-volume work that was compiled posthumously by Mrs. Spurgeon and Spurgeon's personal secretary, Joseph Harold, who I mentioned yesterday, or maybe this morning. But the most notable difference between the Banner of Truth edition and the original autobiography is that the original edition has a lot more pictures. And I love it for that reason. It's like a big scrapbook with pictures and drawings and things like that from Spurgeon's life. The Banner of Truth edition actually is probably organized a lot more logically. And so I like both versions either way. It's the one biography of Spurgeon that you cannot skip reading. Having stood shoulder to shoulder with Spurgeon through those grueling years of the downgrade controversy, Joseph Harold, Spurgeon's secretary, was eager to make it clear for posterity the idea that Spurgeon was a warrior And Harold wanted to show that to his readers, Spurgeon's courage and his steadfastness and his willingness to suffer for Christ's sake. So chapter 53 in the original version of the autobiography bears all the earmarks of having been written by Joseph Harold. The chapters aren't, we're not told whether Joseph Harold wrote this chapter or Mrs. Spurgeon wrote it, but this one looks like Joseph Harold clearly wrote it. It's titled, The Downgrade Controversy Foreshadowed, and it chronicles the early controversies that Spurgeon was involved in. The chapter opens with these quotations from Spurgeon about the necessity of controversy. He points out, for example, that the majority of Christians seem more concerned about things like taste and decorum and respectability, more than they genuinely care about the truth. Victorian evangelicals, for the most part, considered that it was a crude and vile thing to refute false doctrine or to point out the faults of the church and of the age. And Spurgeon's answer was this. These are his exact words. If this be vile, we propose to be viler still. That was from 1856. He said that less than two years after he took the pulpit in London. Here's another quote that Joseph Harold cites from 11 years later. This is fully 20 years still before the downgrade controversy. Spurgeon says this, quote, as good stewards, we must maintain the cause of truth against all comers. Never get into religious controversies, says one. That is to say, being interpreted, be a Christian soldier, but let your sword rust in its scabbard and sneak into heaven like a coward. Such advice, Spurgeon says, I cannot endorse. If God has called you by the truth, maintain the truth, which has been the means of your salvation. We are not to be pugnacious, always contending for every crotchet of our own, but wherein we have learned the truth of the Holy Spirit, we are not tamely to see that standard torn down, which our fathers upheld at the peril of their blood." He said, this is an age in which truth must be maintained zealously, vehemently, continually, and playing fast and loose as many do, believing this today and that tomorrow, that is the sure mark of children of wrath. In other words, unsaved people. But having received the truth, we hold fast to the very form of it, as Paul bids Timothy to do. This is one of the duties of the heirs of heaven. Stand fast for truth, and may God give the victory to the faithful. Now, Spurgeon's stature in the public perception rose steadily over the years, of course. As he established a record of faithfulness and consistency, more of the critics sort of melted away and he gained a lot of respect. And it got to the point where when Spurgeon spoke, people listened. And the critics couldn't any longer just reflexively write off his strong opinions as the dreams of an idealistic youth. He was now a grown man, holding these same opinions with the same fervor, and he had a lot of popular respect. So the critics began to quiet down a bit. And so as a result Spurgeon's ministry went through what was a relatively peaceful time from the early 1870s until about 1886. That was 14 or 15 years total during which Spurgeon was not necessarily constantly embroiled in public controversy. He wasn't always in the center of attention and in the eye of some hurricane of controversy. Now there were controversies even during those relatively peaceful years, but they weren't the kind of controversies that were publicized on the front pages of city newspapers or talked about everywhere on a public scale. And so when the downgrade controversy broke out in 1887, Spurgeon's critics tended to write off his opposition to all this modernism. They said that's just the half-demented ravings of a once kindly preacher who's now suddenly showing the signs of losing his mind and losing his inhibitions. He's getting old, they said. Joseph Harold wrote this chapter to answer that, to say that Spurgeon was not new to controversy when the downgrade controversy broke out, but he had fought battles for the truth throughout his ministry. And here's how Joseph Harold begins the chapter. Immediately after those three quotations from a younger Spurgeon, where Spurgeon talks about the importance of fighting for the truth, Harold says, I think you can partly read this, When in 1887 there arose the great downgrade controversy in which Mr. Spurgeon was to prove himself Christ's faithful witness and martyr, many people were foolish enough to suppose that he had adopted a new role, and some said that he would have done more good simply by preaching the gospel and leaving the so-called heretics to go their own way. He says, Such critics must have been strangely unfamiliar with his whole history, for from the very beginning of his ministry he had earnestly contended for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, long before the sword and the trowel appeared, with its monthly record of combat with sin and labor for the Lord, its editor had been busily occupied both in battling and building, vigorously combating error in all of its forms, and at the same time edifying and establishing in the faith those who had been brought to a knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus. And Harold makes an important point there. I think that Spurgeon chose the name of his magazine very carefully. The Sword and the Trowel. The sword, an instrument of battle. The trowel, an instrument for building. And he's showing that Spurgeon was equally interested in defending the truth and edifying the saints. And he did both on an equal scale. And so, then Harold goes on to give the details of some of Spurgeon's earliest controversies. I have only time tonight to introduce you to one of them and give you the gist of it, and then you need to read this chapter. The rest of Spurgeon's autobiography, too, if you want to get a better sense of Spurgeon as a controversialist, a polemicist. Joseph Harold says that the first actual theological or philosophical controversy Spurgeon was drawn into was, of all things, a debate over the propriety and substance of a hymn book. It was a dispute about church music, the same thing churches fight over today. It was talking about a book called The Rivulet. This was a hymn book written by a congregational minister named Thomas Toke Lynch. His hymnbook was a collection of mediocre poetry, mostly celebrating God's handiwork in nature. And it's titled The Rivulet. The subtitle is on the front of this version, subtitled Hymns for Heart and Voice. And when you get a chance, you can Google the rivulet controversy and I encourage you to do that because the whole thing is a fascinating story and it's a great lesson on church disputes and how they arise and how even petty things can become huge distractions to the church. So I encourage you to read up on it. And the whole matter of this is a fascinating story. It's filled with many lessons about our contemporary wars over worship and all the disputes that occur over music and other petty things in the church. And if you look at Google Books or the Internet Archive, you'll even find a copy of this hymn book, The Rivulet, and you can read it for yourself. There's also a book-length copy of the memoir written by Thomas T. Lynch. It's online, you can read it, and he includes an extensive narrative of his own perspective on the controversy over his hymn book. Anyway, the poetry in the rivulet was mostly awful. and the hymns were mostly insipid and clear doctrine and biblical truth were mostly absent from Lynch's hymns. Here's a sample. This is a hymn about the virtues of meditation. Our heart is like a little pool left by the ebbing sea of crystal waters still and cool when we rest musingly. He's talking about meditation. I think that poem is as funny as it is bad, because you think about it, tide pools are actually best known for the horrible stench they generate. They don't smell good. Anyway, that sort of thing was wildly popular among a certain class of genteel religious people in Victorian times. And I picked that one mostly at random. Not all of Lynch's hymns were quite that bad. A couple of them actually have survived and are in our 20th century hymn books. We used to sing one of them when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute, Gracious Spirit dwell with me, I myself would gracious be. This is actually a sweet little hymn, a prayer to the Holy Spirit to sanctify us. But here's the thing, Spurgeon didn't start the rivulet controversy. It was actually started by a newspaper editor, a man named James Grant, who published an unfavorable review of the rivulet in a periodical titled The Morning Advertiser. And Grant was especially harsh in his criticism. He said things like this, quote, from beginning to end there is not one particle of vital religion or evangelical piety in this book. He said that, quote, nearly the whole of the hymns might have been written by a deist. He said a very large portion might be sung by a congregation of free thinkers. And another critic wrote that Thomas Lynch's hymns were crude, disjointed, unmeaning, unchristian, ill-rhymed rubbish. And frankly, I think those complaints, they're not terribly exaggerated. It is true that the poetry and the theology in this book were bad, but some of the subsequent criticism that was aimed at the rivulet used rhetoric that was deliberately overblown and exaggerated and frankly a little bit mean-spirited. And the argument grew all out of proportion. It became one of those conflicts that everybody talked about and everybody had to express an opinion on. And the hymn The hymn book really wasn't getting that much use. It really wasn't having all that much influence. So it was a complaint and a controversy that was out of proportion to the actual issue, because nobody was using this as a hymn book. It really didn't pose any threat to the church. And Spurgeon, who by then knew quite well what it felt like to be on the receiving end of malicious critics, He wasn't fond of hyperbole in church controversies, and so he actually stayed out of this controversy for five months or longer, even though he had friends on both sides of the debate who were urging him to weigh in, give your opinion. But the rhetoric and the passions on both sides became seriously overheated, and Spurgeon hadn't uttered a peep about it, but because of his popularity and his influence, many of his closest friends and fellow ministers were insistent that he must take one side or the other. He had to weigh in on this. Now if I read things correctly, it seems to me Spurgeon wasn't at all happy about the position this forced him into, having to express an opinion on something that he really wasn't that into. He didn't approve of exaggerated criticism, so he didn't want to side with the cruel critics who were trashing this book. And he didn't like it when inflated passions clouded or crowded out rational arguments in the War for Truth. He thought, if you're going to make a criticism of this book, it should be rational more than it is passionate. Besides, Spurgeon's own congregation wasn't at all confused or beguiled by the rivulet. They weren't using the book. They weren't affected by it. Nobody had to read it unless they chose to. Spurgeon said at one point, quote, Let us commence the present service by singing the 34th hymn in the ribulet. He's talking about a famous incident in Scotland where Jenny Geddes threw the stool she was sitting on at the preacher because he started reading a prayer out of the prayer book that had been imposed on the church by the king, and the Scots were not in favor of having the British king tell them how to do their worship. So she threw her stool at him, and Spurgeon says, if I got up and told people we're going to sing out of this hymn, somebody would throw a stool at my head. That's basically what he's saying. So he's clearly not a fan of this hymn book. But on the on the one hand, his theological convictions put him on the side of the hymn books critics. But on the other hand, his own gentle spirit inclined him to be more gracious than they were being. And so he published what is really a kind hearted, reasonable, but still very thorough critique of the hymnal. And he titled his article, Mine Opinion. Thomas Lynch, the author of the hymn book, later said that Spurgeon was the only one of his major critics who treated him with true respect. Here's a sample of what Spurgeon wrote, and notice how he used humor to defuse the dark passions. He said this, quote, These hymns rise up in the rivulet like mermaids. There's much form and comeliness on the surface. But their nether parts, I think, would be hard to describe. Perhaps they're not the fair things they seem. When I look below their glistening eyes and flowing hair, I think I discern some meaner nature, joined with the form divine. But the surface of this rivulet is green with beautifully flowering weeds, and I can scarcely see into the depths where lurks the essence of the matter. I love the way he says that, because he's being kind to Lynch, saying there is some beauty here, but he says, I think if you look beyond the surface, what's really there is something ugly. And he was using a parody of Lynch's own style to show the silliness of the hymns. Lynch got the point, and in his account of this controversy, he said that Spurgeon saw enough in the glistening eyes of the mermaids to suspect that they might have a fishy body and a snaky tail. But he confessed that he couldn't see the snaky tail. And actually, what Spurgeon was saying was that beyond the flowery, shallow surface of the glib verses in this hymn book, things looked pretty murky. But Spurgeon closed his review by suggesting that it's time for this raging controversy over this to end because this little volume of poems doesn't warrant so much fuss. He was also saying there are more important problems in the church that people who want to be critics ought to be addressing. He wrote, quote, liberty of conscience is every man's right. Our writer has spoken his mind. He's talking about Lynch. Why should he alone provoke attack when many others who agree quite as little with our views are allowed to escape? He's saying there are other people who disagree with us who are actually more dangerous and nobody's talking about them. Why are they picking on this hymn book of all things? He says, the battle is either a tribute to superior ability or else it's a sign of the times and I believe it to be both. The work has its errors in the estimation of one who does not fear to subscribe himself a Calvinistic Christian But it has no more evil leaven than other books of far less merit. No one would have read this book with a jealous eye unless it had been made the center of a controversy, for we either should have let it quietly alone, or we would have forgotten the deleterious mixture and retained the little good which it certainly contains. The author did not write it for us. He wrote it for men of his own faith. and thus ended Spurgeon's first controversy. It was a relatively minor one for him, but I hope you see that he's taking a kind of mediating role. Even though he had to take the side of those who opposed this hymn book, he did it in a way that defused the ugly passions in this controversy, and thus ended his first controversy. But Spurgeon found it necessary afterward to attack even more sinister trends towards humanism and Socinian doctrines, theological liberalism, and then came the famous baptismal regeneration controversy. a series of controversies over creeping high church and Romanist tendencies in the Anglican establishment. He had conflicts with Hyper-Calvinists. He had disputes with stylish innovators like Dr. Parker. We'll talk about that in a subsequent message. He faced resistance from Arminian and revivalist preachers. He had opposition from the Darbyite brethren, the Plymouth brethren. He had the struggle against scientific rationalism. Someone made a cartoon of him as a little bust of Spurgeon being held by a gorilla. And it was like a comment on his anti-Darwinism. And the caption of the cartoon said, a gorilla ponders Mr. Spurgeon. There was the struggle against scientific rationalism. There was a sustained defense of the authority of scripture that lasted through his entire ministry. And then finally, there was the downgrade controversy, which we're going to talk about. We'll devote most of a session to talking about that. But in fact, as Joseph Harold points out, all of the lesser conflicts were merely prelude and preparation for that final controversy, the downgrade controversy, the one controversy that Spurgeon is most remembered for. And all these other issues came together in that. And I wish we had time to survey every issue that he fought a battle over. But let me summarize the point that I want to leave you with. Spurgeon's ministry was controversial in its day, not because he was pugnacious. He wasn't. He was tenderhearted and patient and he was a good humored man with a large heart, but he was devoted to the truth. And that made him a devoted enemy of error. The Lord had blessed him with a voice and a brain and with the influence to be the kind of warrior that he was, and providence often placed him in circumstances that demanded that he go to battle. He couldn't avoid it. And thankfully for the church, Spurgeon was willing to fight, even when it seemed the rest of the church was against him. He stood firm and in many ways I would say his influence as a polemicist is an even more valuable legacy for the church of our generation than his example as a preacher. We need to follow his example. Taking a Taking a steadfast stance on matters of doctrine is even more politically incorrect today than it was in Spurgeon's time. But for that very reason, because it's considered uncouth today to point out anyone else's error and say that it's error. For that very reason, the church today is in desperate need of men who will fight the good fight like Spurgeon did, even though we know that's not going to win us any accolades from the world, much less from the main bastions of evangelical opinion. Even most of the church isn't going to support someone who wants to stand and go to battle for the truth. But as the Apostle Paul said, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Let's pray. Father, again, we thank you for this example. This aspect of Spurgeon's life, his willingness to fight, may make us uncomfortable. It's not the prettiest thing to observe, and yet, it's also how Jesus was, and the Apostle Paul, and all of the great men of Scripture, who we revere and honor precisely because they stood for the truth against a world of opposition. May we do that as well. May we honor Christ by standing with him against all who despise him. For his glory and in his name we pray, amen.