The Heritage of C. H. SpurgeonThe life of Spurgeon is a constant testimony to the Puritan legacy and its influence in his service to Christ. Due to rather stringent economic conditions, at eighteen months of age Charles was sent north to live with his grandparents in Stanbourne, Essex, northeast of London. The grandfather, James, was a staunch congregational Puritan pastor. At the age of 6, little Charles one day happened into an old musty room in the manse at Stanbourne. The room exuded the odor of old leather-bound theological volumes. Most 6-year-olds would have executed a hasty exit. But not Charles; he thought he had discovered a gold mine. Being already well able to read, he delved into the new-found treasure and picked up a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It fascinated him—actually, he read it over one hundred times during his life. The Bunyan classic became something of the Puritan pattern for his own spiritual pilgrimage. That was the atmosphere in which Charles’s early spiritual experience took place. Therefore, it is understandable why at the age of fifteen Charles was deeply under the conviction of sin and desperately seeking salvation. His conversion story, which he loved to share in his preaching, was typical of the Puritan approach. His search for Christ culminated one Sunday, January 1850, in a little primitive Methodist church in Colchester. An illiterate preacher looked at him and said, “Young man, look to Jesus.” Spurgeon said, “I looked and I lived.” It was a very dramatic experience and set him on the Puritan quest for biblical knowledge and ultimately to biblical preaching.
Four years later, at the age of nineteen, after a two-year pastorate in Waterbeach near Cambridge, Charles Spurgeon was called as a minister of the historic and prestigious New Park Baptist Church in Southwark, South London. John Rippon, Benjamin Keach, and theologian John Gill had been his illustrious predecessors at this significant church. So the “boy preacher” began his London ministry of nearly four decades. His first sermon at the New Park Street Church was heard by a mere eighty people. In six months, two thousand were being crammed into the old church building, while up to one thousand a Sunday were being turned away unable to get in. Soon the Metropolitan Tabernacle was constructed and Spurgeon preached to six thousand worshipers every Lord’s day. It became the largest evangelical congregation in the world at its time. Although Spurgeon died in Mentone, France at the relatively young age of fifty-seven, the world has rarely seen a more productive, theologically-oriented pulpit ministry. Not only that, he started over twenty different social and evangelistic ministries through his great church. Two hundred new congregations emerged out of the ministry. The Pastor’s College, which continues to this day, has trained thousands of men and women for ministry. The Stokwell Orphanage also carries on. Above all, the personal appeal of Spurgeon’s writings and pulpit style blesses multitudes to the present hour. Permeating it all was his Puritan legacy. If Spurgeon was not “The Last of the Puritans,” he certainly was one of the best.
