Introduction

This volume contains sermons preached by Mr. Spurgeon at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, in 1855. His first sermon in London was preached in New Park Street Chapel on December 18, 1853. He was then little more than ninet-een years old, having been born at Kelvedon, Essex, on Jmie 19, 1834. Young as he was this first sermon in London was the 673rd that he had preached. When he came to New Park Street Chapel the congregation was greatly reduced in numbers, and almost on the point of dissolution. Very soon, however, it was densely crowded, and while it was being enlarged the congregation met in Exeter Hall, where many of these sermons were preached. The enlarged chapel when opened proved too small, and the Metropolitan Tabernacle was projected. Mr. Spurgeon’ s career in the Metropolitan Tabernacle to his death in 1892 has no parallel in the history of the pulpit. To the end the place was crowded by some 6,000 hearers at every Sunday service. Considering that sermons here published were preached by a yomig man of twenty-one, their maturity is amazing. The youth was from the first a ripe theologian, master of a great system of thought, definite and precise in his teaching. It is little to say that he did vi INTRODUCTION

not shrink from great themes; from the first he chose them by preference. In his preface he makes some sHght apology for the humorous allusions, saying that it is at any rate less a crime to cause a momentary laughter than a half-hour’s profound slumber. But the solemnity and urgency of the discourses are overpowering. There is very little from which the preacher would have dissented in his later years. He came, however, to give much less place to the preaching of Calvinism as distinct from Arminianism, and he gave over describing the physical torments of the lost. On the subject of the millennium he never seems to have reached a stable position. On this subject he says that ‘* He who is learning truth will learn it by degrees.” In his later discourses passages may be found on both sides of the controversy. But substantially what the preacher was at the beginning, he was at the end. In their printed form his sermons have had an unprecedented circulation, and they will long survive him. Their strong, racy, Saxon English style, their theological grasp, their evangelical earnestness, their rich and homely wisdom, and their amazing fertility of thought within the limits which the preacher resolutely prescribes for himself, give them a separate place in the literature of the pulpit.

W. R. N