On April 28, 1858, in the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, a sermon was given on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society, which was probably the most memorable in its history, for on a Wednesday morning the great building was thronged. On several other occasions Mr. Spurgeon preached again for the Missionary Society, and in 1870 he spoke for the Bible Translation Society.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1858 he visited Ireland, and the minister of my own church, Dr. James Morgan, of Fisherwick Place, who heard him three out of the four times he preached in Belfast, my native city, wrote:

I was not disappointed, although the mass of the people were. When he preached in the Botanic Gardens he was well heard of seven thousand persons. He was well received, and deserved to be so for his plain, honest and good preaching and deportment. I much question if his influence was as good as that of Mr. Grattan Guinness, who preceded him by a few months. There was a great contrast between them. Mr. Spurgeon was gay, lively and humorous; Mr. Guinness was solemn and earnest, and very reserved. Mr. Spurgeon is by far the abler man, yet were there a poll tomorrow in Belfast for the two, it would be in favor of Mr. Guinness.⁴

In February, 1860, while the great tabernacle was being built, Mr. Spurgeon, after spending a week in Dublin, paid a visit to Paris. It was arranged by the Rev. William Blood, who escaped from the burning of the "Amazon." The visit was so great a success that a special pamphlet giving a description of it was published. Mr. Spurgeon was then preaching each Sunday at Exeter Hall, and the Paris visit was therefore strictly limited as to time. He preached three times in the American Chapel, and twice in the Oratoire. Each evening he was invited to the residence of some person of position in the city, and these salon gatherings were as remarkable as the public services. He also visited the college at Passy and addressed the missionary students there. Neither Scotland nor Ireland had given him such a genial reception. Dr. Frederic Monod wrote that "Mr. Spurgeon is a new proof that God does nothing by halves. If He calls one of His servants to special work, He gives him the special endowments necessary for it." Dr. Grand-Pierre wrote, "One would willingly hear him during two hours at a time. Among the requisites to oratory which he possesses, three particularly struck us—a prodigious memory, a full, harmonious voice, and a most fruitful imagination. Mr. Spurgeon is in reality a poet." And M. Prevost-Paradol, a distinguished writer of the time, a Roman Catholic, declared that he was "the most natural, and, we would willingly say, the most inspired orator we have ever had the pleasure of hearing."

At this time we find a verdict calmly given that "his name is the most popular in Christendom," and a shrewd judge of men declared that "he acts in everything as if he had been the first actor, and as if this were the first age of Christian society, with neither ancestry nor precedent." Indeed, a High Church critic, on being asked where he would put Spurgeon, seeing that his ministry was so manifestly blessed of God, declared that he was like Melchizedek, without predecessor and without successor. He was the man most talked about everywhere, beloved and despised according to circumstances. Bishop Wilberforce, on being asked whether he did not envy the Nonconformists their possession of Spurgeon, gave the caustic answer, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's ass."

At the end of April, 1863 a visit was paid to Holland, where Mr. Spurgeon preached in the chief cities with much acceptance, sometimes speaking for two hours at a stretch. In conversation long afterward, though he lamented that he found it difficult to approach individuals on spiritual matters, he told me that one of his most encouraging interviews was when he visited the Queen of Holland, and talked with her heart to heart. This was on Friday morning, April 24. There may be put alongside that the greeting of a peasant woman, who came with much emotion, gripping his hand at the door of the Dom-Kirk at Utrecht, and said, "Oh, Mr. Spurgeon, God bless you! If you had only lived for my soul's sake, you would not have lived in vain!"

The months of June and July, 1860 were given to a Continental tour; Mr. Spurgeon's first holiday in seven years. Belgium, the minor German states, and Switzerland were visited. The chief interest lies in his visit to Geneva, where he preached twice in Calvin's pulpit. "The first time I saw the medal of John Calvin, I kissed it," he says. "I preached in the Cathedral of St. Peter. I did not feel very comfortable when I came out in full canonicals, but the request was put to me in such a beautiful way that I could have worn the Pope's tiara if they had asked me. They said, 'Our dear brother comes to us from another country. Now when an ambassador comes from another country, he has a right to wear his own costume at court, but as a mark of a very great esteem, he sometimes condescends to the weakness of the country which he visits, and will wear court dress!' 'Well,' I said, 'yes, that I will, certainly; but I shall feel like running in a sack.' It was John Calvin's cloak, and that reconciled me to it very much."

Among the books he most valued were Calvin's works; in the first volume of Calvin's commentaries in his library is written, "The volumes making up a complete set of Calvin were a gift to me from my own most dear and tender wife."

It may be said of Spurgeon, as of Calvin, that "nowhere does the whole personality stand out in such clear relief as in his sermons." The style of preaching was also very similar. The following estimate of Calvin with slight changes might have been written of Spurgeon:

He was a born preacher. For years the spacious church of St. Pierre in Geneva was thronged, not once or twice, but several times a week to hear him. He was the star of the Genevan pulpit, but his words carried far beyond the city in which they were spoken. Seldom has any man addressed a wider audience or received a more grateful response. His sermons became models and standards for hundreds of pastors who were confined to such help as their publication supplied.

Admiral Coligny, warrior, diplomatist, and saint, was not the only one who made them his daily provender. It was on John Calvin's sermons on Ephesians that John Knox stayed his soul as he lay on his deathbed.

There is something of a perennially modern note in Calvin's preaching. He was not afraid to risk the charge of vulgarizing his theme by the use of the picturesque language of colloquial social intercourse. Whatever enabled him to grip the people's attention and penetrate to their consciences and hearts was legitimate. Much of his preaching was familiar talk poured forth by a man whose humanism could accord with a love for popular speech. If vernacular and classical alternatives presented themselves, the vernacular commonly received the preference.

Proverbs tripped from his tongue as though coined on the spot for the occasion, and gave agreeable piquancy to his words. Illustrations and metaphors he drew from all sources, sometimes surprising by their unexpectedness, coming from the lips of such a man. An early translation, reproducing the flavor of the original, represents him as saying, "We would fain live in pleasure that God should dandle us like little cockneys." Often he indulges in quite dramatic passages, making the characters with whom he is dealing express themselves in racy soliloquy or dialogue. Instead of making Moses, on receiving the order to ascend the mountain, point out how fatiguing and dangerous that would be for one of his years, Calvin pictures him as exclaiming, "That's all very fine! And I'm to go and break my legs climbing up there, am I? Of all things in the world! That's a fine prospect!"

Beza tells us that he despised ostentatious, pretentious eloquence. He held it wrong to seek to give brilliance and charm to God's Word by embellishment of language and subtleties of exposition. In his case the man was the style, and the man shaped the style. All was nervous, spirited, earnest, eager, mostly level to the intelligence of the humblest man who came to hear him, with that throb of suppressed passion often beating through it which touches the fringes of one's consciousness as the sound of a distant . . . drum.⁵

These paragraphs, as we have said, might almost have been written of Spurgeon. And not only did he resemble the great Reformer in style, and in the number of sermons he preached—Calvin is supposed to have preached between three and four thousand—his heart was established in the same faith in God's sovereignty. "I can recall the day when I first received those truths into my soul," he says, and from his diary we know that day was April 7, 1850, "when they were, as john Bunyan says, burnt into my heart as with a hot iron; and I can recollect how I felt that I had grown on a sudden from a babe into a man, that I had found, once for all, the clue to the truth of God. One week-night, when I was sitting in the House of God—I was not thinking much about the preacher's sermon, for I did not believe it—the thought struck me, 'How did you come to be a Christian?' I sought the Lord. 'But how did you come to seek the Lord?' The truth flashed across my mind in a moment. I should not have sought Him unless there had been some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him. I prayed, thought I; but then I asked myself, 'How came I to pray?' I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. 'How came I to read the Scriptures?' Then in a moment I saw that God was at the bottom of it all, and that He was the Author of my faith; and so the whole doctrine of grace opened up to me, and from that doctrine I have not departed." "And his Calvinism was no nineteenth-century Laodicean compound."⁶

Mr. Spurgeon was among the most eager celebrants of the tercentenary of Calvin's death on May 27, 1864. He agreed with John Knox, who said that in Geneva, in Calvin's day, was "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on the earth since the days of the apostles."

Preaching in Leeds for the Baptist Union in a Methodist Chapel on a memorable occasion, he read the tenth chapter of Romans. Pausing at the thirteenth verse, he remarked, "Dear me! How wonderfully like John Wesley the apostle talked! 'Whosoever shall call.' Whosoever. Why, that is a Methodist word, is it not?"

"Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!" came the responses.

"Yes, dear brothers," the preacher added, "but read the ninth chapter of the epistle, and see how wonderfully like John Calvin he talked—"That the purpose of God according to election might stand.'" Smiles on the faces of those that had before been silent were the only response to this utterance. "The fact is," continued the preacher, "that the whole of truth is neither here nor there, neither in this system nor in that, neither with this man nor that. Be it ours to know what is scriptural in all systems and to receive it."

Wherever he went, people thronged him to hear the word of life. Thousands gathered in Parker's Piece in Cambridge, and the desire to speak to him was so great that friends with clasped hands had to form a circle round him to make it possible for him to walk to the house where he was being entertained. Under Cheddar Cliffs he preached to thousands who had gathered from all parts of the district. At Trowbridge so great was the desire to hear him that, having preached in the afternoon and evening, he held another crowded service at ten o'clock at night. At Risca, in South Wales, he preached three sermons one after the other, and on a later visit, in the open air nearby, he again preached to thousands, the people swaying beneath the word like corn in the summer winds. At Abercarne, where some twenty thousand people gathered, some great persons were present in their carriages who attempted to get near the speaker, upon which the preacher cried that "four horses and a carriage would occupy the ground of fifty people, so the horses and carriages must remain where they are." A similar scene took place at Melbourne, near Cambridge, when the service was to be held in a field. When Spurgeon arrived the field was half covered with vehicles, and he made a request that the horses should be taken from the carriages. "We cannot edify the horses, but the carriages will be a great comfort to the occupants."

At Castleton, in South Wales, there were enormous crowds in the open air. At Naunton, near Cheltenham, the experience was repeated. At Dunnington the hymn-sheets used for the services are preserved yet. Pepphard, near Caversham, was the scene of another great conventicle. "He do put the spade in deep, don't he?" said one of his village hearers. At Ogbourne St. George, near Marlborough, the service was to have been in the open air, but the weather became wintry, so a wealthy farmer had a tent erected; then there came a heavy fall of snow, but, nothing daunted, the farmer cut up a rick of straw, and made a path with it from village to tent, about a quarter of a mile distant. At Lymington a large booth, holding nearly three thousand people, was crowded. At Swansea, although it was midnight when he arrived, hundreds of persons welcomed him at the railway station. The next morning was wet, so he preached two sermons in chapels, instead of one in the open air, and after the weather cleared he preached again in the field to thousands of hearers. At Carlton, in Bedfordshire, there were open-air sermons afternoon and evening, with tea between in chapel, schoolroom, and booth.

At the opening of City Road Chapel, Bristol, the crowd in the afternoon was so great, and those outside so unruly, that the service had to be concluded after a brief address. After a subsequent visit in 1868 in connection with the Baptist Union meetings he was announced to preach on Thursday evening, October 15, and so great was the demand to hear him that the evening before he promised to preach also at nine on the next morning. Colston Hall was again crowded. At Halifax six thousand persons gathered in a large wooden structure three times in one day, and as the crowds were dispersing in the evening, some boards gave way, and the people in one of the galleries were thrown against each other; there were screams from the frightened folk, but fortunately no worse consequence than two broken legs. The entire structure, overloaded by snow, and beaten by a boisterous wind, fell three hours afterwards. The timbers were split to shivers so completely that most of it was rendered useless for building. It came very near to a disaster more tragic than that at the Surrey Music Hall. Little wonder that Spurgeon was always nervous thereafter about a crowd. Persons he feared not at all; a multitude of people made him tremble. But then it is the racehorse, not the carthorse, that trembles on the verge of the task.

At Bradford the largest building was too small; at Birmingham crowds of six thousand gathered; the secretary who dispersed the tickets had so many applications that his doorbell was broken. Stockton-on-Tees gave a worthy greeting to its visitor. Dudley and Wolverhampton were not behind in enthusiasm. Liverpool, which offered a Welsh as well as an English audience, seems to have fired the heart of the preacher to new earnestness for the rest of the year. At some of these places collections were taken for the new tabernacle; the gifts of the people at all of them were generous; at two village places Mr. Spurgeon, preaching for poor pastors, was unconventional enough to ask an offering to purchase the minister a new suit of clothes. At Cheltenham he met Grattan Guinness, then in his prime, for the first time, both of them preaching in the town the same evening. Guinness was at that time "bidding fair to rival the renowned Mr. Spurgeon as another modern Whitefield." Brownlow North was also spoken of as "The Northern Spurgeon."