Session 8: Steadfast & Immovable: The Enduring Legacy of Spurgeon's Influence

Spurgeon's Last Session and the Story Behind His Influence

And it's bittersweet to think this is the last session because, as I said in the previous session, there's so much more we could talk about with Spurgeon, so many great stories, and he has a very well-documented life, so you'll be able to find a lot on your own that I haven't even been able to share with you, but thank you for being here.

Somebody asked me about the start of my interest with Spurgeon. The truth is, in the early 1990s, I edited John MacArthur's book, Ashamed of the Gospel, which is an extended critique of pragmatic and seeker-sensitive church growth models.

And early in the process, just after we had begun choosing some sermons from the Grace to You catalog, the sermons John MacArthur had preached, to use as the basis for this book, I basically take his sermons and turn them into book chapters.

So we went through to pick out the important texts that dealt with pragmatism and all of that, and starting to get it ready. And someone gave John MacArthur a short excerpt from one of Spurgeon's sermons, and the quotation fit the theme of this book that John MacArthur was writing so well that he passed it on to me and asked me to include it and try to work it into the first chapter of the book.

It pretty much summarized the message of the book. And the excerpt was undocumented. It was just a clipping with no clue about what source it came from. And so I went on a quest to verify that, first of all, that Spurgeon actually said this, and where did it come from so I could document it.

That was 1992. That was long before Google. And it was a few years before anyone had digitized all of Spurgeon's sermons. So it wasn't really an easy task for me to find this source. I ended up reading more Spurgeon than I had ever read before.

I should mention that as a brand new Christian going to a Baptist church, I had heard Spurgeon's name from the preacher, and I knew he was an important figure. And I think before I ever went to college, that first year after I was saved, I'd probably been a Christian for less than six weeks, I somehow got a hold of a catalog of Christian books from Christian book distributors, or one of those.

And I went through it, and I ordered a bunch of books on evolution, and scriptural studies, and things like that. I was trying to get started well as a Christian. And one of the things I noticed was a collection of Spurgeon sermons on prayer.

There was another book, there was a Spurgeon sermons on the crucifixion. And so I ordered a couple of books of Spurgeon's sermons, just two books that were thin paperbacks with maybe 12 sermons each in them.

But they were photocopies, photostats of the original published sermons. So they hadn't been edited in any way, they were in small print because paper was scarce, and they needed to print with small type when they were publishing Spurgeon's sermons.

And whoever edited the original sermons, oh, and of course Spurgeon himself edited them a lot, they didn't use a lot of paragraph breaks. So if you look at any of Spurgeon's earliest sermons, they're very small type, lots of blocks of text with very few paragraph breaks.

And it was hard for me as a 17 year old to really get into that.

So when the books came,.

I started reading a Spurgeon sermon. The first one I remember very well, it was a sermon from the book of Job, based on a text from the book of Job about prayer. The sermon was called Order and Argument in Prayer.

And it was taken from a verse where Job says, he's gonna, he's sort of miffed because he's being attacked from all sides, and he's not sure why. And so he tells his bad counselors that he's going to go before God and lay out his case.

And the way he says it is, I will order my argument before him. And Spurgeon took that text and said, when you go to prayer, you need to order your arguments. You need to have in mind what you're gonna say.

You don't just barge into the presence of God with a bunch of demands. You need to think through what you're going to say. It's actually a pretty good sermon as I read it now. But when I was 17, I was intimidated by the language and the thickness of the prose and all of that.

I read about three pages of it and put it aside and said, I really don't see what people see in Spurgeon. And I didn't read much Spurgeon then for another almost 20 years. And it wasn't until I was editing this book by John MacArthur that he gave me this snippet from Spurgeon's sermons, and I had to go on a quest to find out the source, and it forced me to read Spurgeon.

And now, 20 years later, I'm, what would I be, 37. I'm reading these sermons and thinking, this is some of the most profound material I've ever read. No wonder people like Spurgeon. And so I ended up reading all these sermons.

I found dozens more places along the way where Spurgeon was saying exactly the same kinds of things John MacArthur wanted to say in Ashamed of the Gospel. And so I copied all of them and I recorded the documentation and I took them to John and said, we need to work all of these into this book.

And he read it and said, yeah, great, do it. So, and I finally found the source of that original excerpt in a collection of articles and sermons that Spurgeon had published during the downgrade controversy.

Preaching the Word as Spurgeon's Ministry Philosophy

And in fact, these were sermons and magazine articles and things that Spurgeon had written about the controversy that had been collected by a man named Bob Ross, not the painter, but Bob Ross, who lived in Houston, Texas, who became the most important publisher of Spurgeon in the 20th century.

He is the one who resurrected all the sermon collections and published them in America. So if you buy a volume from the Metropolitan Tabernacle Library today, you're most likely going to get one of Bob Ross's printings, his Pilgrim Press, I think, in the Houston area.

Anyway, Bob Ross had read tons of Spurgeon and he collected all of these things about the downgrade from Spurgeon's own pen and put them in a single little thin paperback book called The Downgrade. I have copied all of those sermons in digital form and put them on my website.

So they're on the front page of the original Spurgeon archive which you'll find if you just do a search for Spurgeon and The Downgrade. You'll find this entire collection of brilliant material in which Spurgeon is railing against people who think it's the duty of ministers to follow the drift of today's culture and stay in step with the times and he's arguing against everything that John MacArthur wanted to argue about.

And as I read The Downgrade documents, I realized that John MacArthur is fighting the very same battle that Spurgeon was fighting 100 years ago. It's the same thing. It's the drift of these churches and John MacArthur was getting the same kind of pushback.

Spurgeon was saying the same thing and also Spurgeon was making the point that this is a cycle that never ends in church history. It happens again and again and here we are in our generation seeing it happen and this was all amazing to me, realizing for the first time that this was the final conflict in Spurgeon's life.

He was fighting the very same trends of pragmatism and man-pleasing that John MacArthur was taking on in Ashamed of the Gospel. And in the end, we wound up weaving the story of Spurgeon and The Downgrade into John MacArthur's book Ashamed of the Gospel.

And if you haven't read that book, you must. It is still as timely as ever. It was written in 1992. But if you read it, you will not only be challenged to think differently about the church and the mission of the church today, you'll also learn a lot about Spurgeon's philosophy of ministry, which was pretty simple.

And by the way, it was that study of Spurgeon and The Downgrade that first sort of sparked my interest and ignited my passion for Spurgeon. It was only three years after that that I discovered the World Wide Web and began putting Spurgeon online.

So all of that happened really without any planning from me. It was just a providence of God that brought me to all of that. And like John MacArthur, when Spurgeon dealt with the issue of ministry philosophy, he would always begin by pointing to 2 Timothy 4, verse 2.

Preach the word, in season, out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all long-suffering and doctrine. Which, if you think about it, this is not a complex philosophy of ministry. But it's a pretty fair summary of the Apostle Paul's philosophy as well, who said, I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

He said, Christ sent me to preach the gospel, and not with words of eminent wisdom, but so that the cross of Christ would not be emptied of its power. Paul said in Colossians 1 .25 that the stewardship given to him by God is simple, namely, to make the word of God fully known.

He told the Ephesian elders, I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. And that, in a nutshell, was the heart and soul of Spurgeon's ministry philosophy too. You can study all of the advice he ever recorded about being a pastor and pursuing faithful ministry, and you can't help noticing that Spurgeon's ministry philosophy always began and ended with the mandate to preach the word of God faithfully.

Spurgeon's Doctrine of the Church and the House of God

Now, I've been reading and cataloging Spurgeon pretty regularly since the 1990s, but I hadn't really thought about trying to organize all of Spurgeon's ecclesiological convictions into one presentation until a few years ago when they asked me to do a breakout session at the Shepherd's Conference on Spurgeon's doctrine of the church.

And my initial thought was, there'll be an abundance of material to draw from because Spurgeon, after all, had a college for training pastors, and his lectures in that context were transcribed and collected in an excellent volume called Lectures to My Students.

And so I figured he'd have a lot to say about the church, including a philosophy of ecclesiastical governance and church polity and guidelines for deacons and elders, biblical ecclesiology, church membership, maybe even church planting and the church's role in missions.

But when I actually looked into it, I discovered Spurgeon's lectures from the pastor's college are still dominated about lectures on preaching and private devotions, and the pastor's ordinary conversation, the pastoral call to ministry, and the preacher's choice and handling of texts for sermons.

Those are all good and helpful topics, all tied in one way or another to the preaching ministry. But the truth is you get very little insight into Spurgeon's convictions about church polity or the role of deacons and elders or the practice of church discipline or the ministry philosophy at the Metropolitan Tabernacle or any other ecclesiological matters like that.

You occasionally can glean Spurgeon's ideas on those topics from things he says in his sermons, but the places where he discusses what the church should be and how it should function aren't always obvious and they're fairly rare.

So if you want a document that explains what church polity was like at the Met tab in Spurgeon's time, Spurgeon's brother James wrote an article titled The Discipline of the Church at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in the February 1869 version of the Sword and the Trowel.

And it's about all the practice of discipline and pastoral leadership, shepherding, church membership, matters like that. And I've put a complete copy of that article in a PDF that I formatted so it'll actually fit on your iPad.

Let me give you a URL if you want to look it up. This is a shortened URL, so it's short. It's, I used the Google shortener, so it's goo .gl slash capital W lowercase d capital N capital N numeral seven lowercase p.

If you didn't get that, you'll have to listen to the tape because I'm not going to do it again. But go to that URL and you'll find this article. It's an interesting article. You'll find a modern blog post that's analyzing James Spurgeon's Sword and Trowel article at spurgeon .org if you Google this, meaningful membership at Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle.

That's an article that was written by Jeff Chang. Jeff spelled G-E-O-F-F, Chang, C-H-A-N-G. He's the author. But I think it's fair to say that Charles Spurgeon's strongest views on the church and ministry philosophy and all the issues that are typically related to the pastor and his duties, his character, his public testimony, and above all, his preaching, I think those things are obvious.

Spurgeon never referred to the Metropolitan Tabernacle as my church.

He wouldn't do that.

He had a very keen sense that the church belongs to Christ and he as the shepherd is merely a caretaker of something that did not belong to him. And in a conference for ministers, he said this, quote, it's a very delightful thing to feel that all the work we are doing is Jesus Christ's work.

All the sheep we have to shepherd are his sheep. The souls we have to bring to him were bought with his blood. The spiritual house that is to be built for is his habitation.

It's all his.

He said, I delight in working for my Lord and master because I feel a blessed community of interest with him. That is not my Sunday school. It's my Lord's. And he says, feed my lambs. It's not my church, but his, and he cries, feed my sheep.

And then in a sermon at the Tabernacle, he said this, a true church is a very precious thing. It's not a mere human society banded together for certain objects, but it is a community which God himself has formed and over which he watches with an unsleeping eye.

It's a flock he cares for so that heaven and earth shall be ransacked, but what he will have preventer for, but what he will have preventer for them. This flock is so well preserved that at the last, the great shepherd will say of them, thou gavest me, I have lost none.

He preached a sermon titled, What Should a Church Be? And that was in 1878. That was 24 years after he came to London. It's sermon number 1427, if you want to look it up. It was a sermon on 1 Timothy 3 .15, where Paul tells Timothy, these things I write unto you that you may know how you ought to behave yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and the ground of truth.

And Spurgeon began by stressing the point once more that the church is the house of God. It doesn't belong to us. He says this, the church is the house of God and in God's own house, a man ought to be on his best behavior, for it is no light thing to draw near to the Lord.

A poor man who is called to visit a prince or a king will anxiously inquire how he ought to act. We poor creatures that we are, when we are admitted to the church, which is the house of God, should inquire what conduct will be decorous and desirable in those who are admitted into the presence of the great king.

It's quite clear from things Spurgeon said throughout his ministry that he would not appreciate the relaxed informal atmosphere of most churches today, where the lights are dimmed and the music's loud and people wear their flip flops and shorts to worship on Sunday.

He opposed anything that smacked of entertainment in the gathered meetings of the church. He despised the notion that preachers needed to get their sermon topics from the headlines in the newspaper. He had nothing but scorn for pastors who thought they needed to study what's timely and preach on that.

You'll see that very clearly if you read Ashamed of the Gospel, John MacArthur's book, or sample what Spurgeon himself wrote during the downgrade controversy. And he had some famous, fairly public conflicts with pastors who believed differently, who thought they ought to follow current fashions in order to stay relevant.

Spurgeon and Joseph Parker on Ministry, Style, and Public Image

And the best known of these is the one I want to talk about. Joseph Parker, pastor of London's famous City Temple. I showed you a picture of it. It's still there today. In fact, the last time I was in London, I stayed within two blocks of there.

And what I want to do for most of this hour is tell you the story of the conflict between Spurgeon and Parker as a way of contrasting the ministry philosophies and the biblical outlook of these two men.

There were many remarkable similarities between them, but the differences, the things that actually set them against one another, are some of the most important features of Spurgeon's philosophy of ministry.

And because Spurgeon himself was so focused on the preaching ministry, that's where a lot of my comparison is going to focus. Joseph Parker, if you've never heard his name, he was the second most famous pastor in London during all three of the final decades of Spurgeon's life.

And there was a notion among tourists in those days, from the outlying provinces of the United Kingdom and visitors from America as well, the lore among tourists said that if you came to London, you were there for two Sundays, you needed to go to the Met tab and hear Spurgeon the first Sunday, and then go to the City Temple and hear Parker on the following week.

And in fact, my pastor I mentioned before I came to Grace Church was Warren Wiersbe, and he said this, he wrote in a book, if I were in London on the Lord's Day and had already heard Spurgeon preach, I would hasten to the City Temple and sit there at the feet of Joseph Parker, whose congregations were second in size only to those of Spurgeon.

And lots of tourists actually did do just that, and City Temple kept a section of reserved seats for American visitors who wanted to hear Joseph Parker. He was that famous. And I admit, I don't have a very high opinion of Parker, and I'm going to explain why, but he did occasionally dispense nuggets of wisdom and biblical insight.

And also, if you want pointers in your style of delivery or the craft of public speaking, Joseph Parker can most likely teach you. He was a very good public speaker. Like Spurgeon, he had an uncanny gift for communication, and by all reports, he was a captivating speaker.

Once a frustrated man who wanted to be a pastor came to Parker and complained because the young man said he'd tried everything, but he couldn't seem to get a church to hire him as their pastor. And Parker's assistant records what happened.

He writes this, this young man was scholarly, studious, well-informed, willing to work, but no church would invite him. So Dr. Parker told him to stand in the corner in his study and preach his best sermon, promising at the end to give him as fair a verdict as he could.

And so the guy preached his best sermon, and at the end of the performance, Dr. Parker said, here's why you can't get a church. For the past half hour, you have not been trying to get something into my mind.

You've been trying to get something off your mind. You're like a man who's anxious to get rid of a sack of coals. Now, Parker was as ingenious in devising practical solutions to common but annoying practical pastoral problems, as you get from that.

He had an electronic switch under his desk that would ring a bell in his secretary's office, and he used it to signal the secretary that Parker wanted to cut a meeting short. So there's a story about that in his biography.

That says this.

On one occasion, a very pale-faced young man went into the vestry, that's the pastor's office, and after a moment of hesitation, he said, I am studying to be a poet. No sooner did I hear those ominous words, says Dr. Parker, than I touched my electric bell with my left foot, in response to which an assistant appeared, and we gracefully got the young budding poet out into the open air with the least possible delay.

One more story about Parker. When he came to London, he was besieged with invitations to speak at this or that event, and people always wanted to know what he charged to speak at events. And so he published this notice in his church's weekly newspaper.

Quote, as an arrangement for self-protection, I am driven to announce the following as my charges for general public service. Preaching on behalf of the salaries of poor ministers, the charge is nothing.

Preaching for ministers whose salaries are less than 100 pound a year, the charge is nothing. Preaching at the opening of chapels, the charge is six volumes of standard literature. Attending tea meetings, the charge is 50 pounds.

That's the 1860, I looked this up, that's the 1860 equivalent of $7 ,700 if you want him at a tea party. Going to bazaars, 1 ,000 guineas. That's today's equivalent, more than half a million dollars. Serving on committees, 2 ,000 pounds.

That's well over half a million. Anyway, the church where Parker preached, City Temple, was a large nonconformist congregation whose history also dates back to the time of the Puritans. No one knows precisely when that church was founded, but it was sometime in the 1500s, which would make it perhaps the still oldest functioning Protestant nonconformist congregation in England.

And it is a congregational church, not a Baptist church like Spurgeon's. Thomas Goodwin, who was an eminent Puritan preacher and author, pastored that congregation in the 1600s. And when Joseph Parker came there in 1869, they were still meeting in a 200-year-old building located in Poultry Street in London's Cheapside District.

So the church was known as the Poultry Church. Parker led the congregation to build a new place, City Temple, nearby, and they moved there, and ever since it's been known as a City Temple Church. City Temple is still in the same location today.

It's right in the heart of central London. City Temple's interior was destroyed by a bombing in the German Blitz during World War II. It was hit with a German incendiary bomb, which is a small device that isn't designed to explode, it's designed to start a fire.

And it burned through the roof and destroyed the main interior of the building, which is the exact same thing that happened to the Metropolitan Tabernacle. So both buildings were rebuilt, but with their original facades.

So you can visit City Temple today. It's in Holborn, London. And from the outside, at least, the building looks exactly the same as it did in Joseph Parker's time. Parker had received an honorary Doctorate of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago.

I think they gave him that degree based on one of his books, because he never traveled to America, much less Chicago. But Parker was eloquent, and he was a gifted writer, and he was quite comfortable among all of the upper class of England.

In short, he was a man of refinement who was held in high esteem by all of London's society. And you can see how that contrasts with Spurgeon, who, like I kept saying, was a bumpkin when he came to London.

But Joseph Parker is best remembered today as the author of a massive work called The People's Bible. It's a set of 27 devotional commentaries that cover the entire Bible. And the content was drawn from more than 1 ,000 of Parker's sermons.

And it does have some helpful insights and some useful sermonic material, but as you read it, you'll find its style is wordy and the prose is dated. And Parker had a reputation for being stylish and sophisticated.

And you know that by contrast, people often commented on how Spurgeon spoke the language of every man. Even they even accused him of using slang. The Parker, or rather Spurgeon was unpretentious and rustic and easy to follow, whereas Parker was eloquent and urbane.

And as a result, Parker's prose sounds flowery to our ears, too flowery, and he doesn't communicate as well as Spurgeon to our ears. Spurgeon's sermons seem almost as timeless as the day they were delivered, and you would not say that about Parker.

Here's a sample of what I mean by Parker's flowery language. I literally picked a paragraph at random from Parker's People Bible. I have a copy of it, and this is what popped up. This is from the opening prayer of Joseph Parker's sermon on Acts 20, which is Paul's message to the Ephesian elders.

Parker prays thusly, quote, "'We will make our hearts familiar with thy love "'before speaking of our sin, "'for then our hearts will utter themselves in hope, "'and our spirits shall be saved "'from the darkness of despair.

"'We will think of the mountain clothed with light, "'of the throne of the heavenly grace, "'radiant with welcomes to sinful penitents. "'We will think of the cross, the light, "'the blood, the triumph.

"'We will remember that there is a fountain "'opened in the house of David for sin and uncleanness, "'and then when we come to tell thee of our guilt, "'we shall feel inspired and quieted "'by all the reality of thy grace.'".

There's nothing heretical there, but you can't imagine Spurgeon laboring so hard to sound so elaborate. It comes across to me as bombastic, and I think it actually softens the truth that he's aiming to communicate, and I suspect that was part of Parker's intent, to dampen the hard truths just a little bit.

That's the way he talked, and in fact, I think that's the major difference, one of the major differences, between these two men and their preaching style. Spurgeon's sermons always have a kind of gravitas that's lacking in Parker.

He wanted to be eloquent. Spurgeon wanted to be clear. Parker once said that the highest compliment he ever received was from an omnibus driver. That was, omnibus was the horse-drawn equivalent of London's city buses today, and this guy pulled up to the stop adjacent to the city temple.

He told a disembarking passenger that he liked Parker. He said, I went there once, and I enjoyed myself so much that I'm going again the first night off I have. We laughed, and we cried, and we had a rare time.

You see, he doesn't make religion so serious. Spurgeon would have been embarrassed to have a comment like that about him, but Parker took it as a high compliment. Joseph Parker was just two years older than Spurgeon.

You probably know that Spurgeon was called a pastor when he was basically a child. He was an amazing prodigy, so although he was two years younger than Parker, Spurgeon was, as always, by far more seasoned and more experienced and more mature than anyone else his age.

So when Joseph Parker started his ministry in London in 1869, Spurgeon had already been there some 15 years, and Spurgeon's congregation had already settled into the Metropolitan Tabernacle more than eight years before Parker built the city temple.

And Spurgeon and Parker were friends at first, probably not close friends, but they exchanged pulpits at least on one occasion. I would say they were an unlikely pair. Parker was a suave-looking, swank-sounding lover of eloquence and class, and Spurgeon was the son and grandson of a simple country parson who had no desire to seem more eloquent or sound more intelligent or fashionable than he really was.

Spurgeon himself had very little respect for people who thought it was important to try to impress the world with how cerebral or how highbrow they were. Parker liked to go to the theater and hang out with the Top Hats in London, and that was a matter of concern to Spurgeon.

And finally, in 1887, after they had known each other for at least 18 years, Spurgeon and Parker had another major conflict that ultimately left Parker so angry with Spurgeon that he never really got over it.

1887, that was the year the downgrade controversy began. So this was in that context, but not exactly related to the same thing. What happened was Parker was planning a major conference, and he invited Spurgeon to participate and preach the first sermon, at the opening sermon for this conference.

In Parker's words, this was to be, quote, a public conference between ministers of all denominations gathered from all parts of the country. And from the tone of his invitation, it's pretty clear that Parker thought he was being magnanimous, and he's offering Spurgeon an opportunity that Spurgeon couldn't refuse.

This was gonna be a big deal. But Spurgeon knew, even though Parker didn't mention it in the invitation, that Parker had invited Henry Ward Beecher to come from America to be one of the speakers in the conference.

Now, if you know anything at all about Beecher, you understand how odious that would have been to Spurgeon. Beecher was America's most famous preacher. He was also America's most notorious adulterer. He had committed adultery with the wife of one of his assistant pastors.

And in those days, adultery was as illegal as sodomy, and Beecher was actually put on trial in a court case that became the 19th century equivalent of the trial of O .J. Simpson. Seriously, people worldwide followed details of that trial every day in the newspaper.

The trial began in January of 1875, and it lasted more than six months until June, when it finally ended with a hung jury. And so, Beecher basically got off the hook, and after the trial, he returned to preaching as if nothing had happened.

But just like in the Simpson trial, the whole world knew that Beecher was guilty. The testimony proved it. There's a great biography of Beecher that chronicles that whole case in detail, and it is appalling.

The book is titled The Most Famous Man in America. It's by Debbie Applegate. I think it won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago, and it is a great book. The Most Famous Man in America about Henry Ward Beecher and his adultery trial.

But just 12 years after that scandal had produced six months worth of sleazy international headlines, Joseph Parker wanted to bring Beecher to London to share a platform with Charles Spurgeon. That makes me mad just to think about it.

Spurgeon delicately, but somewhat tersely, said no thanks. In fact, here's the pertinent part of Spurgeon's reply. He wrote, quote, I feel I have no right whatever to question you about your course of procedure.

You are a distinguished man with a line of your own, but your conduct puzzles me. I can only understand a consistent course of action, either for the faith or against it, and yours does not seem to exhibit that quality.

I'm sorry that frankness requires me to say this, and having said it, I desire to say no more. I think that we had better each go his own way in brotherly friendliness, each hopeful of the other. To discuss your procedure would not be wise.

In your letter just received, I greatly rejoice, and if this line of things is to be followed up, you will find me the heartiest of friends, but at this present, I'd better say no more. Yours with the kindest wishes and great admiration for your genius, C .H. Spurgeon.

I think he's more polite than I would have been. But Parker replied with a statement that borrowed language from Matthew 5 .23 and Matthew 18 .15. He said, quote, if thou hast ought against thy brother, go and tell him his fault between thee and thy brother.

And he offered to come and meet with Spurgeon at his house, and Spurgeon replied with a longer letter. Dear Mr. Parker, if I had ought against you, I would see you gladly, but I have no personal offense or no shadow of it.

Your course to me has been one of uniform kindness for which I am most grateful. The question is very different. You ask me to cooperate with you in a conference for the vindication of the old evangelical faith.

I do not see my way to do this. First, I do not believe in the conference, and second, I do not see how I could act with you in it because I do not think your past course of action entitles you to be considered a champion of the faith.

There's nothing in this which amounts to having ought against you. You have no doubt weighed your actions and you are of age. These are not private but public matters, and I do not intend to go into them either in my house or in yours.

The evangelical faith in which you and Mr. Beecher agree is not the faith I hold. Add the view of religion which takes you to the theater is so far off from mine that I cannot commune with you therein.

He had to throw the theater thing in there. I do not feel these are matters in which I have the slightest right to call you to account. You wrote to me and I tried to let the matter go by. You write to me again and compel me to be more explicit, altogether against my will.

I do not now write for any eye but your own, and I most of all desire that you will now let the matter drop. To go further will only make you angry and it will not alter me. I do not think the cooperation sought would be a wise one, and I'd rather decline it without further questioning.

To make this public would serve no useful end. I've told you of the matter alone, and now I must decline any further correspondence, yours with every good wish, C .H. Spurgeon. Parker replied with five words, best thanks and best regards.

But he didn't permanently drop the matter, nor did he respect Spurgeon's desire to keep it private. Two years later, April 24th, 1890, just as Spurgeon's minister's conference was about to begin, and Spurgeon embroiled already in the downgrade controversy, Parker published an open letter in the British Weekly, and I can't read the whole thing because it's long.

I have a copy of it, and it's fascinating to read. I actually have a photocopy of it from the paper itself, but here's enough to give you the flavor of it. Parker said this, when people ask me what I think of Spurgeon, I always ask which Spurgeon, the head or the heart, the Spurgeon of the tabernacle or the Spurgeon of the orphanage?

The kind of Calvinism which the one occasionally represents I simply hate, as I hate selfishness and blasphemy. It's that leering, slobbering, sly-winking Calvinism that says, bless the Lord, we're all right, booked straight through to heaven first class and insured against both collision and explosion.

As for those who've missed the train or been crushed to death, it's not for me to find fault with discriminating grace or arrest the action of divine decrees. So brother, pass the salt and shout hallelujah till you are black in the face.

That kind of Calvinism I will not condescend to hate. It's too far down in its native perdition to allow of a boot to kick it and yet remain a boot's respectability. He said, I will speak frankly as to a brother beloved.

Let me advise you, he's writing directly to Spurgeon here, let me advise you to widen the circle of which you are the center. You are surrounded by offerers of incense, they flatter your weaknesses, they laugh at your jokes, they feed you with compliments.