MR. SPURGEON'S INDICTMENT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 8090, 3 November 1887, Page 6

MR. SPURGEON'S INDICTMENT.

[by coloncs.] As? oat a oriticism of professional* ifl usually resented as an impertinence, bat when professionals assail one another, those of us who sit apart and watch the fan can often form clearer, because cooler, conceptions ol the bearings of the conflict than those who are heated in the fight. Theologians especially are an "irritable flock," and aa there is more vim in religions men when they begin to curse one another, than is ever found in the nnregenerate, *0 anyone from without who provokes the odium thtologlcum, in questioning the things that art; most surely believed, or the things that believe them, is sure to catch it, That is because in matters of faith every divine is infallible; and as Bishop Cowie once said in one of his happiest inspirations, there are many Popes In every denomination of religion. The Rev. C. H. Spurgeon has laid a series of grave indictments against his own order. It is a bill of many counts, and it would be idle to grapple with them all, but a brief review of the general issue may not be amiss from the independent stand which "Colonus '' is permitted to occupy by the grace of his readers. And first, there is nothing novel in an Indictment of his compeers from the pen of the vigorous and eloquent pastor of the London Tabernacle. When a very young man, just rising into popularity, ha was scarcely more distinguished in his impassioned appeals to unconverted sinners than he was for blackguarding the parsons. , Indeed, it is a feature natural to the rising young popular minister of religion that he invariably reviles all other ministers either aa dumb dogs or blind leaders of the blind. I do not know what has become, a young pastor Guinness, who once enjoyed an ephemeral fame. He and Mr. Spurgeon started pretty nearly about the same time in the race of popularity, and my most vivid reminiscences of both are the prominence which they gave to the inOnue inferiority of all o.hc-r clergymen and ministers of religion. If anyone ransacks his memory he will find that every popular preacher begins that way, and though age usually tempers the asperity of hia remarks, a popular preacher nearly always has a strong tendency to belittle other people engaged in the same work, and the selfconceit of youth is hardly ever wholly eradicated. Indeed the tendency of the avocation is to increase it, and popular preachers just like newtpaper editors, being never contradicted, and hearing only the echo of their own braying, are generally the most egotistical and intolerably self-conceited of the whole community. I do not say that the Kev. C. H. Spurgeon is much worse now than other leading preachers in this respect, for they all do this, and each one always and honestly believes, and does not hesitate to show it, that no cock crows like himself; and I only refer to this as removing any ground for surprise when Mr Spurgeon bemoans the decadence of the ministerial spirit and the general falling away from goodness and faithfulness and Christian zeal, saving only in the case of the pastor of the London Tabernacle. Now, let it not for one moment be supposed that I am going in a feeble way to defend the parsons from the giant blows of the Baptist pastor. No, let them catch all he gives them. They deserve it all and more, I have no doubt. But if they are to be chastised, let them be punished for their deWTvings, and not for the effects of a system of which they are the weak, ii not the innocent victims. That the power of the pnlpit has fallen, is as true as Air. Spurgeon says it. Unless in exceptional cases, such as that of Mr. Spurgeon himself, it baa ceased to command ; bat, although he ia one of the exceptions, that in no way qualities him a3 a judge of the cause of the decadence. That he has been an eminent success as a preacher no one questions. He was gifted by Nature with a great flow of eloquence, and a wonderful magnetic force in the squab Butchbuilt figure that confronts that Bea of faces rising from floor to ceiling in the Tabernacle, and sways them like the wind. For the rest he is a sinoere man, a pious man, a good man, and an enterprising man, as a thousand others are ; but it was those gifts of Nature that made him great, and neither his preaching of orthodoxy, nor staying from the theatres, nor praying for rain, nor believing in a material hell, nor any other minor matter in which he differs from others, had anything whatever to do with it; and bis supposing so, or affecting to believe that the lack of others in these minor matters is the cause of their not all having London Tabernacles, and being great and eminent men, and impressive and useful ministers, is merely a startling illustration of how the mind of an eminent man may be as simple as a child's as to what is passing outside the sphere of its own activities. Because Rev. C. H. Spurgeon is possessed of those eminent natural gifts of persuasive eloquence and magnetic force, he presumes to snub othera who have not been gifted with the same, and to attribute their non-snaceaa to the presence or absence of some qualities over which they may have more or less control, and for which they are responsible. Now what la the principal count in Mr, Spurgeon's indictment? It is that because of their departing from the good old ways of orthodoxy, and "toying with the deadly cobra of another gospel in the form of modern thought," their congregations are thinning, their spiritual life is waning, and they are become feeble in the ministry of religion. He does not say they have thrown J away the Bible ; he dees not say they pro- I feas to ignore its teaching ; but the sin they have committed is questioning the views which two or three hundred years ago were formed as to the meaning of the Bible by men of like passions with ourselves, but infinitely more ignorant and brutalised; men who had still hanging to them the cerements of the tomb of knowledge out of which they had just walked, and *hoae eyes were only blinking in the daylight ifter the long night of spiritual and intellectual gloom from which they had emerged. To suppose that we with our superior advantages, in these days of advance along ..be whole line, are to be bound by what these clumsy searchers after truth conceive to be the meaning of the Word of God, is to insult our common intelligence ; and to say that the commissioned interpreters of God's Word must wane in their spiritual life and become useless teachers of religion if they search for themselves in that fathomless mine of religious truth by the aid of the electric light of advanced intelligence, and that they can be of no usa unlets they accept only what those early searchers found or thought they found by the miserable light of their farthing candles, is almost enough to make Infidels of all society. The Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, in his rigid adherence to the orthodoxy which commended itself to the purblind searchers of centuries ago, must necessarily believe that the babe that has lived so long as to open its little blue eyes and smile but once in sweet and loving recognition, in the tearful face of *ts mother, and then to close them in the )ast still sleep, is taken away by watching levils and plunged in the blue sulphur blazes A a Miltonio hell, there to frizzle and fry and scream in torture and in consoious and nopeless misery through the endless, endless, endless ages of damnation. And why ? Not because the to: dcr little cherub sinned either against its loving mother or its Father in heaven, but because a naked, filthy lubra, four thousand years ago, took a bite out of an apple and gave the rest to her husband ; and they lived to be punished for this dread offence in the Bufferings of millions of million* of their descendants, who, for this act of disobedience, are condemned, all unconscious, and before they were born, to endless ages of woe. This is orthodoxy, and this is what Rev. Mr. Spurgeon believes, and must believe, if he la orthodox ; and he believes that every man that won't believe it, even if he can't believe it, will be takun when ho dies, and plunged head foremost into this same horrid lake of fire, and God and the good angels, and the brothers, and sisters, and fathers, and mothers of the lost will look down exultingly from the battlements of heaven, and rejoice and glory in the sight of that struggling! writhing, screaming mass of beings rolling In agony in that blazing sea for ever. _ _ „ , This is what Rev. 0. H. Spurgeon believes, must believe if be is orthodox, and it is to the worship of that fierce, vindictive, and relentless Being, that causes all this misery as an act of justice, that Mr. Spurgeon would invite poor careworn suffering man. And it ia because ministers of religion do not present God in this frightful light to men, and horrify tha refinement and gentleness of the nineteenth century by tnc bloodcurdling .stories that ware required to /shock And startle, And drive who brute]

creatures of three hundred years ago from sin, they fail in spiritual life, and thin their churches. No, Mr. Spurgeon, bat it is because they are ander a constrained necessity to profess this dreadful belief, and while not believing it, are forced by conventionalism to present it to their hearers ; it is this struggle between their convictions and their lesson, between theiir human nature and this ferocity, between their common sense and the inanity or absurdity of what they are compelled by their ordination vows to teach ; it is this that paralyses the minister in the palpit and makes him take refuge in the puerilities that are doled out; and this orthodoxy which st iles free enquiry into the real teachings of the Bible, and compels men to accept the interpretations of others as their own—this is the very thing that is the paralysis of religion in the pulpit and the death of religion in the pew. Yes, Mr. Spurgeon, there are, no doubt, strong wills, like yours, that can subject their convictions to anything ; and when the old interpreters tell you that there is a literal burning lake of fire, in which those who fib on earth or whistle on the Sabbath are justly fried for ever, you devoutly be. lieve it all. And I am convinced that, leaning over from the battlements of Heaven with a pole sufficiently long, you would feel a holy joy in stirring up the boiling sulphur, all thick and black with sinners, as a man stirs a porridge pot; but when you tell us that ministers who will not preach these horrid fables, foisted on the word of God by our brutal, ignorant, and benighted forefathers, wane in spiritual life and thin their congregations, you show an ignorance of human nature, and of the true condition of things, as dense as your platform triumphs have been brilliant. No, Mr. Spurgeon; if men believed that those who offended God on earth were roasted in a lake of burning sulphur for endless ages, no man could love the Deity. None. A Being bo vindictive, so relentless, would be repellent to our nature, and be would be a bad man that would reverence such a God. Toe same honourable impulse which prompts us to punish a father who has been found subjecting hia child to slow, lingering torture, would make us shrink from and hate a Biins; that would glory in the savage exercise cf unrelenting spite ; and it is only because men too commonly accept with indifference the utterances of the pulpit, c.nd take references to Milton's hell as so much brutum fulmoi, that the hearers do not resent them with indignant fury.

We have too many evidences of the tender love and mercy, the consideratenesr, and the kindness of tae Deity, in the provision be has made for His creatures ; —they meet our eyes so, everywhere we turn them, whether to the clouds and the firmament or to the fields, and the trees, and the herbs around us—for any one to believe in such a furious monster as our forefathers elaborated out of their own brutal natures, and foisted on the Bible ; and it is these false and forced interpretations put upon the Word of God that have paralysed the pulpit and given emptiness to the pews. For why should the Word of Revelation be a sealed bock for ever, any more than that other book of His, the Book of Nature. In this He only gives the secrets up to those that diligently search for them; and the students of science — that is, of God's laws in nature—are every year, and every month, and every day bringing forth some new and startling secret from the seemingly lnnxhauKtible storehouse of God's wise designs. Why should it be otherwise with God's other book, the Book of Revelation ? And it is just as preposterous to say that our stupid forefathers bad exhausted the search for truth in the Book of Revelation, as to say that the old alchemists, calcining, and subliming, with their crucibles and alembics, knew everything of our modern chemistry ; or that the old astrologers were adepts in astronomy, or that Edison has been "toying with the deadly cobra of modern thoughtin bringing out the wonders of electricity whicn the God of Nature bad stowed fay, awaiting the time and season when it was to be brought to the front for the welfare of His creatures.

Rev. C. H. Spurgeon is engaged, like Mrs. Partington, with the broom trying to keep back the coming tide. The advance of knowledge, like that of the tidal wave, is governed by a law that our puny strength cannot repeal, and there ia about equal com mon sense in complaining of the advance of either. The teachers of science are winning startling triumphs every day, because God's Book of Mature is free to all. The teachers of religion are being brushed aside because God's Book of Revelation, though said to be free to all, is closed and scaled against inquiry ; and any seeker professing to have found new truths there is regarded by the high priests of religion as 14 toying with a cobra." There is no doubt that the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon in his indictment of his ministerial brethren has just reversed the truth, and it is the freezing crystal- influence of a dead orthodoxy that has proved the bane of spiritual life in the so<called teachers of religion, and killed for the time the influence of the pulpit.