The Boy Under the Gallery

For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 1 CORINTHIANS 2:2

A manse full of Puritans. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born on the nineteenth of June, 1834, at Kelvedon in Essex, the eldest child of John Spurgeon, a clerk who also preached to a small Independent congregation, and his wife Eliza. For much of his early childhood the boy lived with his grandparents at Stambourne, where his grandfather James Spurgeon was the Independent minister for more than fifty years. The old manse had a room full of Puritan books, and the child who would one day be called the last of the Puritans learned to read among them. He first read Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress there, and he never left the company of those old writers. He grew up knowing the doctrines of grace, the catechism and the Bible. What he did not have was peace.

A snowstorm in Colchester. By his mid-teens the conviction of sin had grown into misery. He went from chapel to chapel looking for someone who would tell him how a sinner could be right with God, and heard, as he later remembered it, a great deal about duty and very little about Christ. On Sunday the sixth of January, 1850, a snowstorm turned him aside from the chapel he meant to attend and into a small Primitive Methodist chapel in Artillery Street, Colchester. The minister had not arrived. A thin layman, a working man with little education, went up into the pulpit and preached on the only text he seems to have had: Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth (Isaiah 45:22). After some minutes he ran out of material, fixed his eye on the pale young stranger sitting under the gallery, and told him he looked miserable and would always be miserable unless he obeyed the text. Then he shouted at him to look to Jesus Christ. Spurgeon looked. The burden he had carried for years went, and he said all his life that he had seen the sun that morning. Everything he ever taught begins in that chapel.

Baptist, preacher, pastor. Although raised among paedobaptist Independents, he became convinced from the New Testament that baptism belongs to believers, and he was baptised by immersion in the River Lark at Isleham on the third of May, 1850. He moved to Cambridge as a schoolmaster’s assistant, joined a Baptist church there, and began to teach in its Sunday school. That autumn he was sent to a cottage meeting at Teversham, assuming someone else was to preach, and discovered on the road that the preacher was to be himself. He was sixteen. Within a year he was pastor of the little Baptist chapel at Waterbeach, a rough village outside Cambridge, and the chapel filled. He never went to university or college. An opportunity to meet the tutor of a Baptist college came to nothing through a misunderstanding over a room, and as he walked away he believed he heard a word of Scripture pressed on his mind: Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not (Jeremiah 45:5). He took it as settling the matter, and he never regretted it.

London. In the winter of 1853 he was invited to preach at New Park Street Chapel in Southwark, a historic Baptist congregation that had dwindled to a remnant in a building meant for many more. He was nineteen. By the spring of 1854 he was its pastor, and within months the chapel could not hold the crowds. It was enlarged, and still could not. The congregation hired Exeter Hall on the Strand, and then the great Music Hall in the Surrey Gardens. From 1855 his sermons were printed every week, and they were soon being read in America, Australia and across the British Empire. The newspapers mocked him as a vulgar boy, a clown and a sensation. He kept the cuttings, and went on preaching Christ crucified in plain words to people who had never heard it put so they could understand it.

Susannah. In January 1856 he married Susannah Thompson, a member of the New Park Street congregation who had first thought the young preacher rather unpolished. The marriage was deeply happy. Their twin sons, Thomas and Charles, were born in September that year, and both became ministers. For most of their married life Susannah was an invalid, and much of it she spent at home in pain; yet from her room she ran a Book Fund that sent thousands of volumes of theology to poor ministers who could not afford them.

The night at the Surrey Gardens. On the nineteenth of October, 1856, a month after the twins were born, Spurgeon preached for the first time in the Surrey Gardens Music Hall to a crowd of perhaps twelve thousand, with thousands more outside. Early in the service someone raised a false cry of fire. In the panic on the stairs seven people were killed and many injured. Spurgeon was twenty-two. He was taken away almost prostrate, and for days he was sunk in a grief so deep that some feared for his mind. He recovered through a verse — Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him (Philippians 2:9) — which turned his thoughts from his own wreck to the honour of Christ. But the darkness of that night never entirely left him, and he suffered from recurring depression for the rest of his life.

The Tabernacle. In March 1861 the congregation moved into the Metropolitan Tabernacle at the Elephant and Castle, built to seat some five thousand and often holding more. He preached there twice every Sunday for thirty years. Around the pulpit grew a great web of work. The Pastors’ College, begun in 1856 with a single student, trained hundreds of men, many of them poor and ill-schooled as he had been. The Colportage Association carried Bibles and good books into villages. The Stockwell Orphanage, founded in 1867 after a widow named Anne Hillyard offered him a large gift for the purpose, received fatherless boys and later girls. There were almshouses for poor widows, mission halls, Sunday schools and a monthly magazine, The Sword and the Trowel. He wrote The Treasury of David, a commentary on the Psalms in seven volumes, over some twenty years, and the daily readings later gathered as Morning and Evening. His brother James came to share the pastoral load. The prayer meeting beneath the platform, he insisted, was the engine of it all.

Pain and controversy. From his mid-thirties he suffered from gout and a kidney disease that laid him aside for weeks at a time, and in later years he spent part of most winters at Menton on the French Riviera, trying to recover strength. He was also a fighter. In 1864 his sermon against baptismal regeneration provoked a storm with evangelical clergy in the Church of England and cost him his place in the Evangelical Alliance. In 1887, alarmed by what he saw as a slide in the churches away from the inspiration of Scripture, the atonement and eternal judgement, he published warnings in The Sword and the Trowel under the name the Down Grade, and in October that year withdrew from the Baptist Union. In January 1888 the Union’s council passed a vote of censure on him. Friends parted from him, among them some of his own former students, and he felt it bitterly. The Cheque Book of the Bank of Faith, which he began in those months, speaks of being cast into deep waters.

Home. His last sermon at the Tabernacle was preached in June 1891. He fell desperately ill that summer, rallied, and went to Menton in the autumn with Susannah. He died there on the thirty-first of January, 1892, at the age of fifty-seven. His body was brought back to London, tens of thousands filed past the coffin, and he was buried at West Norwood Cemetery. On the coffin lay his Bible, open at the verse from Isaiah that had once been preached to a miserable boy under the gallery in Colchester.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Spurgeon was saved through a sermon preached badly by an untrained man. Thank God this week for someone who pointed you to Christ without polish, and tell them if you can.

2. He took the verse from Jeremiah as a check on his ambition. Is there a great thing you are seeking for yourself? Bring it honestly before God.

3. The Surrey Gardens disaster left a wound that never fully healed. Name a sorrow you have tried to pretend is behind you, and bring it to Christ rather than hiding it.

4. Around his pulpit grew colleges, orphanages and almshouses. Ask what one practical work of mercy your own faith should be producing.

5. Notice how much of his life was carried by others — Susannah, his brother, the praying people beneath the platform. Pray today for someone whose work depends on your prayers.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You met a miserable boy in a snowstorm and told him to look, and he looked and lived.

I thank You that You need no polished preachers and no perfect circumstances to save a soul. You need only to be lifted up.

Keep me from seeking great things for myself. Give me instead a heart that is glad to point away from itself to You.

And when my own nights come, as his did, keep me looking where he looked, until I see You face to face. Amen.