Kootenai Church 2021 Equipping Conference with Phil Johnson

Well, good evening, everyone. Welcome, if you are out in the foyer, please come into the main sanctuary here and find a spot at one of the tables. All right, now that we've kind of all settled down, let's open our time here with a word of prayer.

Let's bow our heads. Our Father, you are so good to us in so many ways, and you are better to us than we deserve. You have graced us with salvation in Jesus Christ, with this place to hold this conference.

You have blessed us with the fellowship that we enjoy in your Son, and we thank you for these rich graces, and we thank you for the history of your church and the men and women who have served you and sacrificed so much and have been such godly examples throughout the ages.

We are grateful for those giants who have gone before, and we know that Spurgeon is one of those, and we pray that tonight, as we give our hearts and minds in meditation upon the work that you have done in his life, that you would be glorified through what is taught here.

We pray for your grace upon Phil as he brings the message tonight, that we would be instructed and that we may truly see your hand of grace and glory in the life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and we pray that you would strengthen and embolden us as your servants to mimic that faithfulness and to be faithful in the times in which we live, that you may be honored in and through your church in this world and, of course, for all of eternity.

We ask this in Christ's name, amen. Well, welcome to our conference. I thought that the subject matter, the life and the legacy of Charles Spurgeon would be something of a niche subject. So when I originally came up with the idea for a conference on the life and legacy of Charles Spurgeon, I thought, I don't know how many people would actually be interested in going to a conference like that.

I thought that it would probably be a very unique collection of people, and maybe just a few people that would be interested in a conference, but I was surprised at how fast this conference sold out, especially compared to some of the other conferences that deal with other issues that we seem to be pressing upon, that seem to be pressing upon the church right now, like the abortion and end-of-life issues that we dealt with with Scott Klusendorf and creation evolution issues that we've dealt with in the past.

So this conference sold out quickly. Within almost three or four weeks, we had almost reached capacity of what we had set the limit for here. And I didn't know if that was because the subject matter is Charles Spurgeon, and I'm just, there's so many more people who want to hear about Charles Spurgeon than I would have ever guessed, or if it's because the speaker is Phil Johnson, or some combination of the two.

It may be that the speaker is Phil Johnson. I probably could have done a seminar, a conference on the subject of the history of the rubber eraser featuring Phil Johnson, and he would have come up here, and we could have sold out in four weeks.

So I think that people are excited to hear about Charles Spurgeon and the legacy that he has left us. Here's just a couple of comments on the schedule of events. Tonight's Q &A that you see there in your brochure is already scripted.

I've already come up with the questions for that. There will be a Q &A tomorrow after and during the lunchtime break. And I'll explain more about that tomorrow. When you show up tomorrow, you have some three-by-five index cards on your table.

So during the morning, if you think of a question that you want to have asked during the lunch Q &A, or at some point at the end of some of the sessions, then I'll have you fill that out tomorrow and bring them up to the table that I'm sitting at up here front and center.

And then we can deal with some of those questions that you might have. And we're gonna start promptly tomorrow at 8 .30 a .m. The doors will open at 7 .30, so you'll be able to come in and enjoy a little snack in the morning and some coffee before we get started.

And now I'll introduce our guest speaker, Phil Johnson. Phil Johnson is the executive director of Grace To You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur. He is an elder at Grace Community Church and teaches the Grace Life Sunday School fellowship class along with his fellow elder, Mike Riccardi.

Phil was the curator of the online Spurgeon Archive and a contributing blogger with the Pyromaniacs blog for years. He is the editor for John MacArthur's books and a prominent and regular preacher at Grace Community Church and the Shepherds Conference, and is frequently heard on Christian radio.

And he is the voice of John MacArthur's radio ministry, the intro and the exit to the Grace To You broadcast. That is Phil who does that. And Phil is a frequent, or was a frequent guest, on Wretched Radio with Todd Friel under the Two Wretched for Radio segments.

I've been listening to Phil preach for the last 20 years. I don't think that probably since 2004, I have missed a single Sunday school class that he has taught at Grace Community Church. I have certainly listened to all of his Shepherds Conference sessions that he has taught, and I've followed his writings online, his blog, the Pyromaniacs blog, for years.

And I owe part of my own love for Spurgeon to Phil Johnson. What got me interested in Charles Spurgeon originally was listening to a set of lectures that he had given at the Shepherds Conference years ago, and I heard him talk about the life and the conversion of Charles Spurgeon, his preaching, and I was hooked.

And so now, to this very day, whenever I'm preparing a message on a text of scripture, I read any sermon that Spurgeon wrote on that, or preached on that text, because normally you can find something very quotable from almost anything that Spurgeon wrote.

One of my children, and I won't say which one, because I don't want to embarrass her in front of her husband, but one of my children, one of my children refers to Phil Johnson as her favorite preacher.

And I'm fine with that, because I have the designation favorite biological father. Phil works with someone who shares a birthday with Charles Spurgeon. Phil looks a little bit like Charles Spurgeon. And like Charles Spurgeon, Phil is a wordsmith with an immense vocabulary.

And when I came up with the idea for a conference on Charles Spurgeon, I regard, and I don't know if this is true or not, I regard Phil Johnson as probably one of, if not the world's leading expert on the subject of Charles Spurgeon.

If he's not, he's certainly high up on that list with few people ahead of him on that list. And there's nobody else on that list that would have returned my email to come and speak on the subject of Phil Johnson.

So like Phil Johnson, Charles Spurgeon, sorry, yeah, Phil, like Charles Spurgeon, is a wordsmith with an immense vocabulary. And it's one of the things I appreciate about Phil. I am thankful to Phil that he introduced me to not only Charles Spurgeon, but also to the word pettifogger.

Now that sounds like a swear word, but it's not. It's one of those glorious English words that like the whole English language was created for that word, pettifogger. But mostly I'm grateful to Phil for coming up here and for teaching us about the life and legacy of Charles Spurgeon.

So please welcome Phil Johnson.

The Life and Legacy of Charles Spurgeon

Yeah, thank you for that. Am I on here? I wouldn't drive across the street to hear me. So thank you for that. I am not one of the world's leading experts on Spurgeon, but I probably have put more of Spurgeon's preaching and writing on the internet than anybody else.

And so he's been a favorite of mine since the early 90s when I edited a book for John MacArthur called Ashamed of the Gospel. And the book was sort of, I'll explain this as part of one of my lectures, but the book was sort of woven together with the story of the downgrade controversy, which was the huge conflict that happened at the end, the last four years of Spurgeon's life.

I think the stress of it is one of the things that contributed to his early death. And he was trying to pull British Baptists back from the precipice of liberalism and compromise and modernism, early modernism was a huge problem.

And some of the things he said and wrote during that time were some of the most profound and insightful things about the importance of sound doctrine and theological steadfastness that I had ever read.

And that's what sparked my interest in Spurgeon. When I first got on the internet, I looked to see if there was any Spurgeon material online. This was 1995, the World Wide Web was less than two years old.

And in all of the internet, there were only eight sermons by Spurgeon that had been transcribed and put online. And so I took it upon myself to add as many more as I could. And so a lot of the Spurgeon material that is there originated with my website.

It became too much for me to deal with, so I gave it to, I donated it to Southwest, or rather a Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, because they own the physical library of Spurgeon.

I'll talk about that as well. But so I've washed my hands of the website, but I still love Spurgeon. And this is really my first opportunity to talk about him in quite a long time. Tonight I wanna talk about his childhood.

We're going to survey his life and ministry. And once I finished my notes for all these six sessions, the thing that struck me is how much I have to pass over. So many things about Spurgeon that we're not even gonna have time to talk about.

But I wanna talk about his childhood tonight, because I think it explains a lot of who he was and what forces shaped him. There is no one in church history who is actually comparable to him. No pastor since the apostolic era surpasses him as both a preacher and an evangelist.

There have been greater scholars. John Calvin comes to mind, and John Knox was maybe a more fierce and effective polemicist, defender of the faith. George Whitefield was a more eminent evangelist who ministered in person, Whitefield did, to crowds of up to 20 ,000 people on two separate continents.

And it happened regularly with Whitefield. Whitefield's fame and influence were arguably greater than Spurgeon's if you adjust for population and size and all of that. Augustine has had and will continue to have a more far-reaching and longer-lasting influence than Spurgeon.

So in various ways, there are figures in church history who surpass him. But all of those men would have appreciated Spurgeon's ministry. They probably would have highly esteemed Spurgeon himself because he drew from every one of them.

He stood on their shoulders. And in particular, he aspired to be a preacher like George Whitefield. But the truth is, Spurgeon could do all of those things. He was extraordinarily gifted with a whole range of genius-level aptitudes that equipped him for ministry so that he was a capable theologian, he was a powerful defender of the faith, he was an exceptionally fruitful evangelist, he preached, he wrote, he taught, he was a visionary leader, he was a beloved pastor, and above all, he was a great, if not the greatest of all time, preacher.

History nicknamed him the Prince of Preachers, and it's a fitting moniker. I don't think there's been a greater preacher who pastored such a large congregation and remained in the same place for so long a time.

John MacArthur is a close match in some ways. MacArthur and Spurgeon even share the same birthday, as he mentioned, but MacArthur has the advantage of radio and audio recordings and the internet and the ease of worldwide travel and advantages that Spurgeon never was able to utilize, and so he remains and always will remain a towering figure in Baptist and evangelical history, that you can be certain that he will never be forgotten, and it's unlikely that anyone will ever surpass him in the sheer variety of ministry skills that he displayed.

You can take any individual aspect of Spurgeon's expertise and you find people here and there who maybe could do better. During Spurgeon's lifetime, for example, there were several superior theological writers on both sides of the Atlantic with keen, biblically-minded minds, men who produced textbook-level works that will last, I think, until Christ comes.

I'm thinking of men like Charles Hodge and William Cunningham and B .B. Warfield and Augustus Strong and William Shedd, and all of those men's lives overlapped Spurgeon. They were all contemporaries, at least for a time.

You might even add J. Gresham Machen, who was 10 years old already when Spurgeon died, so that some of the best theological works I own were written in that era by those men. None of Spurgeon's published works were as weighty or as masterful as what those men wrote, but Spurgeon's published writings outnumbered and outsold all of them.

He was doctrinally sound without ever being ponderous or pedantic. He preached for working-class people and not really the Oxford and Cambridge elites, but even the Oxford and Cambridge elites listened to him appreciatively.

And as a matter of fact, Spurgeon himself had no university degree. He never enrolled in college. He produced sermons, not really scholarly works, but sermons, and yet, because all of his sermons were transcribed for publication, Spurgeon left a body of published work that represents the single most prolific output of any Christian in history.

Now, I haven't done an exhaustive study to verify that fact, but I believe it's true that he published more words than any other Christian author in history. He certainly sold and distributed more pages of printed text than any other Christian author ever, and over the past hundred years or so, he has influenced millions of pastors and laymen for good, and the current resurgence of Calvinism, even, is the fruit of his continuing influence.

His books, which are primarily collections of sermons that he preached, they were reprinted 50 years ago, and they sold briskly for decades. All of his sermons have been converted to digital data, and you can get the entire collection very cheaply, if not for free.

For about $50, you can get a disc with PDF copies of all of his sermons, and eventually, all of his sermons will be downloadable on the internet, and I'm happy to have had a hand in starting that project.

And I think Spurgeon would be delighted to know that people are using the internet to read and distribute his sermons. He was not put off by new technologies. He's considered to be kind of an old-fashioned guy, and he was even in his lifetime, but he wasn't afraid of new technologies.

He was, I think, strangely both old-fashioned and newfangled at the same time, and in fact, if you read many biographies of great preachers of the past, George Whitefield, for example, was similar, sort of old-fashioned and newfangled.

Whitefield was considered something of a scandalous innovator because he preached in the open air to people, and yet, at a time when deism was gaining popularity and whole churches were apostatizing because of it, Whitefield's theology actually represented a return to orthodoxy of an earlier era, and the same thing was true of Jonathan Edwards, who was a personal friend of Whitefield's.

All of these guys were eager and happy to stay in step with the times in terms of technological advances, like travel and communications, but they were not willing to change their doctrine or adapt their principles to the shifting winds of cultural trends.

At the height of Spurgeon's popularity, an article about him was published in Vanity Fair Magazine, the British edition. This is the December 1870 issue, and the writer of that article said of Spurgeon that he extracts edification out of slang, and by slang, that author meant that Spurgeon used simple words.

He used the words of working-class people and commonplace expressions that anybody could understand. He didn't craft his sermons for scholars, but he was preaching to the average person, and lots of people in Spurgeon's generation commented on this fact, that he could deliver the profoundest truths in everyday language, and Spurgeon himself gloried in that kind of communication.

He strived to teach it to his own students, and he had no patience with preachers who would purposely use language from the pulpit that the people in the pews couldn't possibly even understand, and his book, Lectures to My Students, is a collection of his messages to ministerial students at the college he founded.

He was training preachers, and in one place, he tells them this, I'm quoting. He says, I am persuaded that one reason why our working men so universally keep clear of ministers is because they abhor their artificial and unmanly ways.

If they saw us in the pulpit and out of it acting like real men and speaking naturally, like honest men, they would come around us. That's a pretty profound insight, I think, and his desire was to communicate, and he knew that stuffy, highbrow language, and especially, he mocked this frequently, effeminate mannerisms, he knew that that would not communicate well with men in his flock, and he cautioned preachers not to be effeminate, and I'll have more to say about this when we discuss his approach to preaching, but the point here is that Spurgeon wasn't the least bit reluctant to adapt his delivery style and his language to the culture that he was ministering in.

I'm pretty sure that if he lived today, he would be using all of the tools the internet gives us to get the message out to the largest possible audience with as much force and clarity as possible, but he wasn't willing to try to contextualize the message or make the theology more in step with the times, and in fact, 100 years after Spurgeon, now it's been, what, 130 years since Spurgeon died, language has changed greatly, but the fact is Spurgeon's sermons, for the most part, still convey that sort of plain language ease of understanding, and you can read the sermons.

Some of his language may sound quaintly Victorian to our ears. He used some of the King James these and those, especially in his early preaching. He got away from that a little later, but there are these Victorianisms buried in there, and some people read that and think maybe that he was rather old-fashioned in his language, but the fact is, even in Spurgeon's time, he was notable for making old truths clear in what was modern language and unpretentious speech, but his informality actually shocked and outraged those famous prim-Victorian sensibilities.

Preachers were not expected to use the common man's, working man's language from the pulpit, and so all the social critics and newspaper pundits wrote these blistering condemnations of his style. I'll share some of those with you in a later session, but I just want to point out that we still, today, read Spurgeon for the simple, uncluttered clarity of his message.

It still comes through today, and in this, again, you see that while Spurgeon may have been keen to stay in step with the changing means of communication, he was not at all trendy when it came to the content of his doctrine.

He understood that the message that we have been commissioned to take into all the world, that can never change, and we must not try to change it, even in the name of keeping up with a changing world, but he also understood that language and technology, they do change, and we need to use language and technology to distribute the message that people will find familiar and understandable, whatever audience we're trying to reach.

You know, the same reason you wouldn't go and speak Latin to a bunch of kindergarten students. Spurgeon would obviously share the disdain we have for all the wickedness that gets broadcast on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but he would also believe that Christians ought to be there, we ought to use every means, including social media, to disseminate the gospel message and to defend truths, and what I want to do in this hour is to begin to introduce you to Spurgeon by telling you what I can about the context of his life and times, starting from the very beginning.

We'll start this hour with a look at his background and his early life, and let me start with a word about his genealogy. The line of descent in the Spurgeon family isn't clear, but there are records of people named Spurgeon going back at least 12 generations before Charles Spurgeon was born.

One author named William Miller Higgs investigated Spurgeon's ancestral lineage, and he published a book titled The Spurgeon Family in 1906. That was 15 years after Spurgeon had died. Higgs explodes some of the myths that were going around that even Spurgeon himself seemed to believe about his family background.

Spurgeon and most of his biographers say that the Spurgeon line came from Holland. Higgs says this, in all the accounts of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's life, where a short space is given to his lineage, curiously enough, a Dutch descent is attributed to him.

As a matter of fact, the writer of this little work has been quite unable to discover any proof for such a statement, certainly on his direct paternal descent. So he traced his father's line and said, there's no evidence that his ancestors came from Holland.

And he traces the Spurgeon name back to Essex and Suffolk. Essex was the county in England where Spurgeon actually lived. And he said there were records of Spurgeons there as early as 1465. And the early Spurgeons included a farmer, a carpenter, a common laborer, but no one prominent.

And Higgs says that by the end of the 1500s, and that's just as the Protestant Reformation is beginning to break out and come to England, Spurgeons were well distributed, he says, all over the county of Essex.

And he reproduces several pages of wills and legal documents and information from church rolls that documented the existence of people named Spurgeon in Essex through almost four centuries prior to Charles Spurgeon.

And it's not possible to untangle the direct line of relationship between all these older Spurgeons and Charles Spurgeons, but it's not a common enough name to think that they're entirely unrelated. And the details and lots of the records have been lost to history and courthouse fires and things like that, but it does make it fairly certain that Spurgeon's ancestors had lived in Essex, in England, in the UK, for at least four centuries prior to Spurgeon's birth.

It's also clear that a few people in the Spurgeon ancestry were worth noticing. They weren't famous, they weren't prominent, they're worth noticing. One of the most interesting was a man who lived in the 17th century.

This man's name was Job Spurgeon. Spurgeon knew about him, he talked about him at times. Job Spurgeon lived six generations prior to Charles Spurgeon which means that if he was a direct ancestor of Charles Spurgeon, he would have been Spurgeon's great-grandfather's great-grandfather.

In other words, his fourth great-grandfather. I looked up my own genealogy to get an idea of what it would be like to go back that many generations, your great-grandfather's great-grandfather. My fourth great-grandfathers were born in the second half of the 1700s.

And one of my great-grandfathers was born on the Potomac River in 1776, the year the country was founded. So that's a long way back. And Spurgeon had this ancestor, Job Spurgeon, who preceded him by that far, lived more than 100 years before the United States was founded, in fact.

The first record of Job Spurgeon comes in 1677, 99 years prior to the birth of my fourth great-grandfather. And by then, Job Spurgeon was an adult. He was leading a religious meeting in a private home.

So he was a religious man. And by the way, those meetings had been outlawed 15 years before that. The Reformation era in England was already beginning to draw to a close. The Reformation had come, and the Church of England had tried its best to stifle the Reformation.

And the Church of England had outlawed religious meetings led by any and all ministers who refused to subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer. And Britain had passed a law called the Act of Uniformity in 1662.

Most, many of you, I think, will have heard of it because it was famous. Because it officially ejected all ministers from their pulpits who dissented from the Church of England. If they wouldn't follow the prayer book, and if they wouldn't wear priestly garments when they preached and ministered, then they were ejected from their churches.

And that is what, that was the main thing that drove so many colonists to America in those years, why so many of the original pilgrims, especially in Massachusetts, were sound and solid believers who had fled England in search of more freedom of religion.

And it also explains why the heart of evangelical conviction in England has always been outside the established church among non-conformists, not with Anglicans. There have been, and still are, Anglican evangelicals, but they are in the minority, and they've never been the dominant force in the Anglican church.

Six years after the Act of Uniformity, in 1683, Job Spurgeon was arrested and imprisoned for attending a non-conformist religious meeting. Higgs refers to Job Spurgeon as a Puritan, but in reality, he was probably an early Quaker.

And the meeting that he was attending seems to have been a Quaker meeting in Essex. The Quakers kept detailed records about all of their meetings, and the record of that one was preserved. It says, and I quote, on the 22nd of the month, called July this year, John Matthews of Harwich, Job Spurgeon of Dedham, Stephen Moore, and Stephen Arnold of Lawford, taken at a meeting, were committed to Chelmsford Jail by warrant from Justice Smith.

They were, after a few weeks, bailed out till sessions, but on their appearance there on the 3rd of October, they were required to give sureties for their good behavior, which, refusing to do, they were recommitted to prison, where three of them lay upon straw about 15 weeks in the midst of a winter remarkable for extremity of cold.

But the fourth guy, Job Spurgeon, being so weak that he was unable to lie down, sat up in a chair for the most part of that time. That's a pretty remarkable record, isn't it? And some of that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Like, it's what's going on in Canada right now. Same thing, they put him in prison and said, if you'll promise not to do this again, we'll let you go free. And they all said, we can't make that promise.

So back to prison they went, in the coldest winter on record. And that literally is everything we know about Job Spurgeon today. There's no record of baptism, no will, no census records, but we know that he spent 15 weeks in prison during the cold of winter, because he refused to pay the fine and promised that he was gonna stop participating in unauthorized religious meetings.

So what we know about him is he was a man of principle. And he refused even though he was suffering with ill health in an unheated prison, in one of the coldest winters on record. And it must have put him in unspeakable agony.

And it probably shortened his life. And if he recovered from this ordeal, he's never mentioned again in any surviving record of that time. Now, Charles Spurgeon knew that story. And in a sermon very near the end of Charles Spurgeon's life he said this about it.

This is the Prince of Preachers speaking. He says, personally, when my bones have been tortured with rheumatism, I've remembered Job Spurgeon. Doubtless of my own stock, who in the Chelmsford jail was allowed a chair because he could not lie down by reason of rheumatic pain.

He says that Quaker's broad brim overshadows my brow. Perhaps I inherited his rheumatism, but that I do not regret if I have his stubborn faith, which will not let me yield a syllable of the truth of God.

I like that story. There's one other brush with fame in the Spurgeon family. And it's found in the parish register of a city called, a town called Burnham Thorpe in East England. And there on March 13th of 1769, a woman named Elizabeth Spurgeon recorded a marriage certificate.

This is a copy of it. One of the witnesses was a 10-year-old boy who signed his name at the bottom of the record, the last line with the red arrow. Signed his name, Horace Nelson. And over that, you see scribbled his father's handwriting, correcting the name to Horatio.

And that 10-year-old boy grew up to be Admiral Horatio Nelson. If you've ever been to London, you've surely seen Nelson's column. It's that massive tall pillar that stands on a pedestal in the center of Trafalgar Square with a statue of Admiral Nelson at the top.

Now again, that wedding was in 1769. Nelson grew up to be a great admiral. He lost an arm in a battle in 1797, and then he was killed in 1805 at age 47 during the Battle of Trafalgar near the Strait of Gibraltar, just off Spain.

He lost his life, but he defeated Napoleon's Navy. So this battle was a turning point that sealed Britain's naval dominance for the remainder of the 19th century. 29 years after Admiral Nelson died, on June 19th, 1834, the most famous member of the Spurgeon clan was born in Kelvedon in Essex.

The birthplace of Charles Spurgeon is a brick cottage that is still standing today. I've been there. Today, it's on a busy street. And when Spurgeon was born, it was in a rural area. Here's an interesting fact of history.

Charles Spurgeon was born exactly 10 days after William Carey died in India, just to help you sort of get the idea of where these people fit in church history. Spurgeon's mother's maiden name was Eliza Jarvis.

She was only 19 years old when Charles Spurgeon was born. His father, John Spurgeon, was a 24-year-old part-time pastor. And at the time of Charles's birth, John Spurgeon was engaged in some kind of business during the week, working, and on Sundays, he pastored a independent congregation in a town nearby called Tolsbury.

The church is still there. The town is still there. You can go there today. He later became a full-time pastor, and Charles Spurgeon's father actually outlived his famous son by 10 years. He died in 1902.

Spurgeon's mother died in 1888. That was just four years before her eldest son went to glory. But the most important influence in young Charles Spurgeon's life was that of his grandfather, James Spurgeon.

He was pastor of the church at Stambourne, which was not far, but not really close either, to where Spurgeon's parents lived. It would be, if you drove there by car today, I think it would take maybe 40 minutes.

And for reasons history doesn't record, it's not mentioned in any biography of Spurgeon that I've ever read, so I don't know the exact reason, Charles Spurgeon was sent to live with his grandparents when he was only 18 months old.

And he remained there until he was six years old. Some modern people have speculated that maybe there was trouble in the Spurgeon home. Maybe the parents didn't get along or whatever. But there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support a theory like that.

What did occur when Spurgeon was 18 months old was that his mother gave birth to the second of her children. The second of, get this, 17 children that she had. Nine of them died in infancy. Such were those times.

And when that second child, a daughter, was born, either the mother or the daughter must have suffered from some illness or complication. And so Charles was sent to stay with his grandparents. That stay was extended by necessity.

We don't know exactly why, but the arrangement worked well for everybody involved. And James Spurgeon loved having his eldest grandson around so much that he often took Charles with him when he made pastoral visits.

And in the providence of God, those years of bonding with his grandfather set the course for the rest of his life. Charles Spurgeon was a precocious child who began reading early. He loved his grandfather's Puritan library.

And at first, he said it was the leather covers that interested him the most. But soon he found the books themselves a goldmine of wisdom and interest. And his grandfather's library was in a dark room in the upstairs portion of the house.

In those days, the number of windows in a house determined the size of real estate taxes. That's how the crown decided to tax people. They could tell, or they thought they could tell how valuable your house was by how many windows were there.

And so, you know, windows are abundant in mansions and they're scarce in cottages. So someone decided to tax houses based on the number of windows. And the house in the foreground of this picture is the preacher's manse.

And as you can see, it was built with lots of windows, but you could avoid the window tax by boarding up and blacking out those windows. You had to completely plaster over them and then they would put fake shutters and window looking things on the outside.

So it still looked the same on the outside, but the windows were all boarded up and plastered over. Spurgeon records that the law allowed eight windows free from any kind of tax. And so in order to avoid the heavy taxation, the parsonage was blocked up with several of the windows blacked out.

Spurgeon described it like this. These are his exact words. When the window tax was still in force and many people in country houses closed half their lights by plastering them up. And then they had the plaster painted to look like window panes so that there was still the appearance of a window, though no sunlight could enter.

Well, do I remember the dark rooms in my grandfather's parsonage and my wonder that men should have to pay for the light of the sun. So as it turns out, James Spurgeon's library was kept in one of those darkened rooms, but that didn't deter young Charles.

He describes that room. He says, quote, it was a dark den, but it contained books. And this made it a gold mine to me. Therein was fulfilled the promise. I will give thee the treasures of darkness. Some of these were enormous folios.

Folios are these large size books. And he says, as a boy could hardly lift them, he says, the old edition of their works with their margins and old fashioned notes are precious to me. It is easy to tell a real Puritan book even by its shape and by the appearance of the type.

I confess that I harbor a prejudice against nearly all new editions and cultivate a preference for the originals, even though they wander about in sheepskins and goatskins. And it's true, they bound them with sheepskin and leather.

Or they're shut up in the hardest of boards. It made my eyes water a short time ago to see a number of those old books in the new manse. That's the parsonage. He says, I wonder whether some other boy will love them and live to revive that grand old divinity, which will yet be to England her balm and venison.

And he goes on, out of that darkened room, I fetched those old authors when I was yet a youth, and never was I happier than when in their company. Out of the present contempt into which Puritanism has fallen, many brave hearts and true will fetch it by the help of God before many years have passed.

Those who have dobbed up the windows will yet be surprised to see heaven's light beaming on the old truth and then breaking forth from it to their own confusion. And you know, that wish was actually fulfilled.

You've got companies like the Banner of Truth and other companies here in America republishing old Puritan works. And there's been a revival of interest in the Puritans for at least the last 30 years.

I know that would please Spurgeon, although he says he likes the old editions better than the modern ones. I have to disagree with him there. The old editions use the type, you know, you've seen it where S's look like F's and letters are oddly shaped.

And it's a little hard to read until you get used to it. So I do prefer the modern editions. But it was from his grandfather's library that little Charles obtained his very first copy of Pilgrim's Progress.

And that book became his lifelong favorite for all of his life. If you ask him what's his favorite book, the one he would, besides scripture, that he would never want to give up, he would say without hesitation, Pilgrim's Progress.

Before he was 10 years old, he was also reading and comprehending some of the richest theological works that had ever been written. You think about it, Spurgeon's father and grandfather, both being pastors, and he'd spent his first six years in the grandfather's house, the next four years with his father, reading their books, Puritan works.