‘A Man of God is a Manly Man’: Spurgeon, Luther and ‘Holy Boldness’

Abstract

Although Charles Haddon Spurgeon still enjoys hero status in certain quarters today, it is hard to conceive fully the extent of his reputation and influence during his lifetime.¹ An established Baptist minister in London while still only a teenager, he preached regularly for nearly 40 years to congregations of several thousand, reaching tens of thousands more throughout the world via printed versions of his sermons. By the time he was 26 the numbers wanting to hear him each Sunday were such that the 6,000-capacity Metropolitan Tabernacle was built for him in Newington Butts, an unfashionable yet populous region south of the Thames, now known more familiarly as ‘The Elephant and Castle’. His printed sermons had a regular weekly readership of 25,000, with those on special topics selling as many as 350,000, and his Sunday messages were cabled every week to New York for inclusion in large-circulation newspapers in the United States. Translated into 40 languages and into Braille, Spurgeon’s sermons were read throughout the world, to the extent that by the time of his death in 1892 more than 50 million copies had been sold worldwide, a figure which has since more than doubled. When his numerous books, pamphlets, tracts and other writings are also taken into account, Timothy George’s claim in the early 1990s that, ‘a century after his death, there are more works in print by Spurgeon than by any other English speaking author, living or dead’ becomes almost believable.² Among notable contemporaries who admired his preaching and courted his friendship were John Ruskin and William Gladstone, the latter finding in Spurgeon a committed supporter of the Liberal cause. During his final illness prayers were said for him by the Prime Minister, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Chief Rabbi and even the Prince of Wales; and, following his death, some 60,000 people filed past his body as it lay in state, his funeral procession, some two miles in length, bringing over 100,000 people onto the streets of London.³