MR. SPURGEON AND THE MIDDLE-CLASS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."
SIE,—Y011 crown your sum-up of the middle-class appreciation of Mr. Spurgeon with,—" They let him talk English instead of Pulpit without any audible protest." Allow me, as a middle- class person, to protest that the one sole cause of Mr. Spurgeon's success as a preacher has always appeared to me the simple fact that he talks English, and that he believes in what he talks about, which it seems to me no one ever did or could believe, who would talk about it such intolerably agonising twaddle as that you dignify by the term "Pulpit." I do not mean to accuse of wilful hypocrisy a large body of exceptionally respectable men ; but it does appear to me that they deceive themselves,—that they wish to believe in Christianity on the side of its comfortable promises, but that they wish not to believe it on the side of its inconvenient precepts ; and the effort to keep for themselves and present to their congregations the pleasant assurances of Christianity, whilst they ignore its (in their opinion) impracticable precepts, results in such unreal twaddle as to any truthful, earnest soul is simply agonising torture. And it seems to me that congregations only sit and endure these false, make-believe exhortations because they also want only to comfort themselves with Christianity, are only too glad that the clergyman or minister does not insist on its very inconvenient virtues. And the utter indifference to Christianity of the greater bulk of working-men arises from this,—that such unreality is quite intolerable to men who toil and suffer in the hard, stern realities of life.
And the spread of infidelity, for it does spread, appears to me to be caused, not so much by scientific doubt, nor by solvent Biblical criticism, nor by active atheistical propagandism, nor by any one thing at all so much as by this hateful, intolerable, unendurable inanity,—" Pulpit."
And I implore yon—if, as I hope, you, Spectator, are in earnest Christian—publish my letter, though I am both humble and unknown; in the hope, perchance, that some young preacher, not yet stereotyped into dead dulness, may, reading my warn- ing and imploring entreaty, think if it were not better to do as Spurgeon does in this one thing, and "talk English."—I am,
Sir, &c , ONE WHO IN SPITE OF " PULPIT " HAS ENDEAVOURED TO BE A CHRISTIAN.
[We entirely agree that clergymen should talk English, and not "Pulpit." We thought we said so last week, but some of our readers have misread the sentence.—En. Spectator.]
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