Foreword
by Rosalie deRosset
ON MY BOOKSHELVES at home, in a section that gathers my preaching collections, sits a handful of old volumes, all published in the late nineteenth century and written by Charles Spurgeon. On the flyleaf of each book, my grandfather, a preacher, revivalist, and missionary who never went past eighth grade because of economic exigencies, but who read and studied voraciously, has inscribed his name and the date and circumstances of these purchases. “Bought at Lima, Ohio (50 cents), Saturday, February 13, 1926, while on my way to Kings’ Creed,” reads one of them. I have many old books, but I cannot look at these particular ones without a sense of awe. My grandfather, who shared Spurgeon’s vision for evangelism, valued his editions. I take them off my shelves as I begin to write this introduction and they feel precious in my hands. Opening them, I am amazed at the psychological, theological, and spiritual wisdom, not to mention the imaginative illustrations, I run across in just a cursory reading.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born June 19, 1834, in a small cottage in Essex, England, to John and Elizabeth Spurgeon who had seventeen children, only eight of whom survived infancy. Shortly after Charles’s birth, the family moved to Colchester where his father was a minister to independent congregations in the area. When he was only eighteen months old, Charles went to live with his paternal grandparents in Stambourne and stayed with them until he was five. Clearly, their influence on his future vocation was immeasurable. The stories he records in his autobiography, describing both the physical beauty of the countryside where he lived and the spiritual richness to which he was exposed, are vividly told. Charles’s grandfather was a popular preacher and often kept him at his side as he prepared his sermons. His grandmother offered her grandson a penny for each Isaac Watts hymn he could memorize. Charles was so prolific in this process that the reward was soon reduced to a half-penny, and he still emptied her purse. Spurgeon notes in his autobiography that leaving his grandfather was the “great sorrow of [his] little life.”*
In this house, probably on later visits, Charles became a reader. While exploring the house and nearby church, he found secret hideaways, his favorite the house attic where he discovered great numbers of books, including theology, the stories of Christian martyrs, history, and Victorian literature, which provided him a broad education. “Never was I happier,” he wrote, “than when in their company.” He fell in love with Puritan theology, particularly Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. He read the classic allegory over a hundred times throughout his life. In time, his own library consisted of twelve thousand books.
Though raised as the son and grandson of preachers, Spurgeon never considered this calling in his youth. In fact, it appears he came to the vocation quite by accident, what some biographers call serendipity. But until this moment, he had wanted badly to be saved because, as he reports, he had “always loved safe things.” He had felt the oppression of his sin and knew Christ promised that anyone who believed in Him would never perish. Much like John Bunyan, however, he could not believe Christ would save him; he did not feel heard by Him.
One day in January 1850, when he was fifteen, the young Spurgeon was looking for cover during a severe snowstorm when he came across a Methodist church in Colchester. The preacher at the chapel had not arrived so a parishioner who could not even pronounce words clearly ascended to the pulpit and read the text from Isaiah 45: “Look upon me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth.” After delivering a homespun commentary, the parishioner noticed Spurgeon and said, “Young man, you look very miserable.” He went on to admonish him to obey the Bible’s text or he would always be miserable. At that moment, which Spurgeon described later in writings, he was converted and found “solid joy and peace.” “There and then the clouds were gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun; and I could have risen that instant, and sung with the most enthusiastic of the precious blood of Christ, and the simple faith which looks along to
Him…. Simply by looking to Jesus, I had been delivered from despair … when they saw me at home, they said to me, ‘Something wonderful has happened to you,’ and I was eager to tell them about it.”
Spurgeon felt his conversion profoundly. He soon began studying the Bible diligently and distributed religious tracts. Within a year, he became known as the “boy preacher” and was given his own pastorate at a small church in Waterbeach, a community close to Cambridge. Eventually, Spurgeon became pastor at London’s New Park Street Church, bringing the membership there from the low hundreds to five thousand, one of the largest independent congregations in the world at that time. Altogether, it is recorded that 14,460 people joined the church while he was there.
By 1855, Spurgeon’s congregation had grown so large it had to be moved to Exeter Hall. That year also Spurgeon married Susannah Thompson whom he had met at the evening service of his first Sunday at New Park Street. She found him quite odd on first acquaintance and was not, in her words, “at all fascinated by the young orator’s eloquence,” but these first impressions did not last long. They saw each other often at a mutual friend’s home, and the attraction grew. Spurgeon’s first gift to Susannah was a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. A year after they were married, the couple gave birth to twin boys, Thomas and Charles Jr., both of whom also became preachers. Susannah was not a healthy woman and was unable to accompany her husband when he preached. However, she prayed for him hourly throughout her life and was involved in sending out his books to ministers all over the United Kingdom. She also helped him take notes in the night when he awoke with a revelation. The marriage was often described as made in heaven, and it is said the couple’s affection for each other never waned.
Between 1856 and 1859, after the congregation had outgrown Exeter Hall, the attendees met at the Royal Surrey Gardens music hall, a place intended for public concerts. The hall could accommodate crowds of ten thousand people. Then, in 1861, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, which could seat six thousand people, opened. It was filled to capacity during the thirty years that Spurgeon preached there.
Spurgeon’s popularity in late nineteenth century London was vast; visitors flocked to hear him. Many were puzzled by his success because he was not an attractive man. He was short and heavy and not, it is reported, even well-dressed. Yet, as one New York Times journalist noted upon hearing him, his voice had great volume, clarity, and projection. She found his style devout, humorous, and earnest. While she also wrote that he was not the best speaker she had ever heard, she nevertheless found him to have a distinct individuality and power.
Spurgeon himself worried that an oratorical gesture on his part, or a particularly eloquent statement would draw attention to himself; he wanted to be “hidden,” in one biographer’s words, “behind the cross.” In fact, his plain, but urgent preaching with its direct appeal to the people earned him critical attacks that persisted throughout his lifetime. In spite of this, Spurgeon pushed forward. He was known for his devotion to and leadership of multiple ministries, ministries he provided at the expense of his health, as he preached as many as twelve times a week, usually speaking from a page of notes. His sermons were transcribed by stenographers, then printed and distributed regularly throughout England and even sent to the United States where they appeared in newspapers. American publishers, it is interesting to note, often deleted his strong comments opposing slavery. By the time Spurgeon died in 1892, he had preached nearly 3,600 sermons and published forty-nine volumes of commentaries, sayings, anecdotes, illustrations, and devotions. His sermons were printed under several titles and continue to sell into the twenty-first century.
Charles Spurgeon wrote many kinds of books during his life: an autobiography, a commentary, books on prayer, a devotional, a magazine, poetry, and hymns. Among some of the more important volumes he authored are Lectures to my Students (1890), a wonderful collection of talks delivered to students at the Pastor’s College that he founded in 1857 and that was renamed Spurgeon’s College in 1923; his Treasury of David (1869), a popular commentary on the Psalms; and All of Grace (1894), a book that is still in print over a hundred years later.
Unlike some of Spurgeon’s works that are directed to deepening the believer’s walk with God, All of Grace is a compilation of sermons focusing on the grace of God and His concern for the eternal salvation of men and women. Published two years after his death in 1892, this booklet, in a succinct and colorful style, addresses justification, the nature of deliverance from sin, the content of faith—Spurgeon refers here to knowledge, belief, and trust—the Holy Spirit’s role in regeneration, and the connection between forgiveness and repentance. He asserts from start to finish that salvation is a work of the Lord, a truth that is profoundly comforting. As he explains these doctrinal passages in a clear style, he also offers advice to his readers on how to deal with their weaknesses—whether that be fear of falling away from faith, or confusion in understanding submission, or recognizing and dealing with self-righteousness that can so easily invade the believer’s life.
In fact, it seems appropriate to suggest that Spurgeon has provided in this booklet a more colorful, while also plain and clear rendering of basic doctrine—that also doubles as an evangelistic tool—than have many recent and well-known writers using bigger, but less interesting venues. Furthermore, the book is a work that crosses the boundaries of age, appropriate for young people while still engaging adults.
Spurgeon writes with urgency in All of Grace, beginning with a strong declaration of intent: “He who spoke and wrote this message will be greatly disappointed if it does not lead many to the Lord Jesus. … To answer this end, the very plainest language has been chosen, and many simple expressions should be used.” He concludes with the force of a warning, “If you have not followed me step by step as you have read these pages, I am truly sorry. Book reading is of small value unless the truths which pass before the mind are grasped, appropriated, and carried out in a practical way. … It is all in vain that you and I have met unless you have actually laid hold upon Christ Jesus my Lord.”
These words express the essence of Spurgeon’s greatest passion; to speak of sin and salvation with the goal of stirring up human emotion that leads to a conscious giving over of body, mind, and spirit to God—salvation that includes repentance and remission of sins, concepts he saw as inseparable. In his words, “Repentence of sin and faith in divine pardon are the warp and woof of the fabric of real conversion.”
While All of Grace is simple and direct, it also contains metaphors that linger with the reader, bringing home the truth they illustrate memorably. Spurgeon believed and wrote in Lectures to my Students, “Do not rehearse five or six doctrines with unvarying monotony of repetition. With abundant themes diligently illustrated by fresh metaphors and experiences, we shall not weary but, under God’s hand, shall win our hearer’s hearts.” In one such illustration, he notes, “Faith is the aqueduct along which the flood of mercy flows…. It is a sad sight to see around Rome the many noble aqueducts which no longer convey water into the city, because the arches are broken and the marvelous structures are in ruins. Similarly, faith must be true and sound, leading right up to God and coming right down to ourselves … an irreversible channel of mercy to our souls.” In another simpler metaphor, he writes, “It is the eye which looks … faith is the hand that grasps … the mouth which feeds upon Christ.”
Toward the end of his life, Spurgeon suffered a great deal of sickness including rheumatism, gout, Bright’s disease, and debilitating depression, conditions during which he pleaded agonizingly to God for relief and for a return to the ministry he so loved. He understood despair and wrote, “I am as a potter’s vessel when it is utterly broken, useless and laid aside. Nights of watching and days of weeping have been mine. … We can still say ‘Our Father’ and when it is very dark, and we are very weak, our childlike appeal can go up, ‘Father, help me! Father rescue me!’”
One of Spurgeon’s disciples, the Baptist minister Archibald Brown, once wrote about his mentor, “In his heart, Jesus stood unapproached, unrivaled. He worshipped Him; He adored Him. He was our Lord’s delighted captive.” It is small wonder then, as this small book makes plain, that Charles Spurgeon wanted everyone else to know, to be enthralled with, and to witness to the power of this Christ.
ROSALIE DEROSSET