IN DEFENCE OF SPURGEON

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21627, 23 April 1932, Page 18

IN DEFENCE OF SPURGEON

THE “DOWN GRADE” CONTROVERSY DR' T. R. GLOVER CHALLENGED. (From Our Own Corresponded!.) LONDON, March 15. In The Times series of specially-con-tributed copyright articles entitled “ Fifty Years,” there appeared last Friday one by Dr T. R. Glover, who is a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, University lecturer in ancient history, and in 1924 was president of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Hs article deals with the life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon under the headings of “ Nonconformity Old and New: the Defeat of Spurgeon,” and some of his statements have led to violent objections. The Rev. H. Tydeman Chi 1 vers, pastor of Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, was sharply critical of Dr Glover in a sermon on Sunday morning.

In the course of his article, Dr Glover writes: —

“Nature had given him (Spurgeon) a squat, ugly exterior, and made amends by adding a marvellous voice and the supreme gift of oratory. He was an untrained man, without, the discipline of ordered study, but he read enormously and remembered. Everyone knows how often Catholic and Calvanist have been able to live in the profoundest sense of God’s love while holding tenets (or thinking they held them) which others found strangely incompatible with the central, belief. Spurgeon was of this stamp. A large-hearted human creature, he maintained an orphanage and (in a rather amateur way) he trained young men for the Baptist ministry. It is, unhappily, no strange thing that a groat man, who attempts too 'lunch, will prefer _at last the homage and tattle of admirers to challenge from independent minds. “In 1887 the storm broke upon the Baptist Union of this country. Spurgeon launched his ‘ Down-grade Controversy.’ Baptists, he said—people told him so, and he believed it—were abandoning the Bible and the evangelical faith and ‘ gping downhill at breakneck speed,’ The Baptist Union Council asked quietly for evidence and begged him to see old friends, but nothing served. The council then gravely voted that, as no evidence was forthcoming, the chprges ought not to have been made—moderate enough, one would think. Spurgeon flung out of the union, dissolved his students’ conference (for his stronger men would not stand with him), formed a new one of the residue, and for five years, till his death, carried on a jihad against the Baptist Union. The man was ill. I reipembor (for my father was personally attacked, and I was not a child) asking the aged Frederick Trestrail, who, in extreme old age (and great girth), kept a clear head and a lively humour, if he thought the trouble came from Spurgeon’s gout. No, he said, abruptly, it was Satan. Well, gout, conscience; and Satan make queer alliances in us all. The tiling was not done in a corner; the whole Protestant world watched, and the Baptists bore the brunt of it.” MR CHILVERS’S CHAMPIONSHIP. The Rev. H. T. Chilvers, on Sunday, said that Dr Glover had gone out of his way to violate all Christian courtesy and the canons of gentlemanlinesa by criticising Charles Haddon Spurgeon, his work and memory. Why was it, Mr Chilvers asked, that Dr Glover, of Cambridge, thus presumed to speak of a servant of God who, in a brief life, was used to the salvation and uplift of multitudes beyond, perhaps, any other since apostolic days? God gave Spurgeon a great soul, and if it was encased in what Dr Glover called an “ ugly exterior ”, it held the sacred treasure of the Gospel, which he so powerfully preached with that wonderful voice, and the power was seen to be of God and not of a fascinating exterior, of 'which some, jealous of Spurgeon’s success, made a boast. Spurgeon was a man ot God. He influenced high and low, rich and poor, trained and untrained. As a Calvinistic evangelical preacher and expositor he carried the clay for the evangel, established for his time the religious thought according to the Bible, and whenever the cloven foot of error, in the garb of a boasted intellectualism, or in whatsoever form, approached him, it was glad to escape overcome and defeated before the mighty sword of truth that he wielded. Not until Spurgeon’s voice was silenced in death did the challengers have any real courage to voice themselves, as Dr Glover had now done.

Dr Glover spoke of the Down-Grade movement as to suggest must shamefully that Satan and gout in Spurgeon launched it, and said things that gave an untrue and wrong impression. Dr Glover prided himself on being an historian and yet, in regard to the main point in the DownGrade controversy, he was utterly wrong in his statements. He asserted that Spurgeon withdrew from the union after the vote of censure had been passed. Actually Mr Spurgeon withdrew three months before the resolution, was passed by the council of the union. This was vouched for by Dr Fullerton and Sir James Merchant in their biographies ot Spurgeon and Clifford. Moreover, the ultimate issue was that the union ,a few months later adopted a “ declaration of faith” which actually met Spurgeon’s requirements, so that in this sense his protest was triumphant and Spurgeon was not defeated.

SPURGEON NOT DEFEATED. It was the truth, the doctrines of Grace, the whole Bible which Mr Spurgeon upheld and loved. Dr Glover was constantly finding that the theory of the modernist, which he represented, got nowhere, and this was why be raised Spurgeon from the dead that he might stab him. Dr Glover said in his article that he wished that ministers would leave the Old Testament alone and preach from the New Testament. Was that the best thing be bad to say to ministers? If Mr Spurgeon were there and Dr Glover said anything like that Spurgeon would wither him up in five minutes. Dr Glover at last had come out into the open and could not new be numbered any longer with Evangelicals. It was well he should show bis true colours. Dr Glover had a right to his own beliefs, but he had no right to say untrue and imgeiitlemanly things against a great and gracious man in the religious and theological world. It was utterly false to speak of the “ defeat- of Spurgeon.” Mr Spurgeon was not defeated; neither were the truths for which he stood. They had not yet been overcome by university intellectualism or by rationalistic modern thought. The challenge of Spurgeon in his presentation of truth had not won the day and never would. At the close of Mr Chilvers’s statement the congregation sang “All Hail the Power of Jesu’s Name, and at the end of the service the organist played the Halleluiah ClioTus. SPURGEON’S CENTENARY. The Rev. M. E. Aubrey, general secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, follows up the report of Mr Chilvers’s sermon by a letter to The Times.

So far ns the Baptist Union is concerned (he writes), the unhappy chapter of Mr Spurgeon’s later relations with the union has long since been almost forgotten. Such is the veneration of Baptists for the man whose life and work were among the greatest gifts of Providence to the church of our faith and order that, as long ago as 1905, Spurgeon’s statue was placed in the vestibule of the Baptist. Church House, and his portrait occupies a place of honour upon its walls. The union is already taking steps to celebrate worthily in 1934 the centenary of his birth, and we hope we may have the privilege of co-operat-ing in this endeavour with the church at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and with the authorities of some of those institutions ho founded, the college and the orphanage. in the record and present work of which Mr Chilvers takes so large and so justifiable a pride. *