GOOD AS THE FILMS

Taranaki Daily News, 24 November 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

GOOD AS THE FILMS

MAN CROWDS TABERNACLE. WONDERFUL SPURGEON. Men have just been remembering and celebrating the centenary of a man who filled a church as a-popular film fills a cinema house, who reached an unseen congregation of millions long before the wireless age. He was - Charles . Haddon Spurgeon. Had he lived he would be 100 years last. June. ; - . The son of a minister, ,he preached his first sermon at 16; at 18 he Was a Baptist pastor; at 20 he was ? offered a pulpit in London; and a few months later all London was talking of him. No chapel could hold the throng which crowded to listen to his sermons; he filled the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, and in the end they built him his own great Tabernacle. It cost £31,000 and every p’enny had been subscribed when he had been preaching there a month. Three times a week he preached, and nearly 7000 people - pressed in every time to. hear him. He spoke at the Crystal Palace at the time of the Indian Mutiny and 24,000 came to listen. But this was nothing to the size of .his unseen congregation. He had the biggest unseen congregations before the days of wireless. Once a week-a sermon of his was printed, till the sermons ran into thousands and their copies into a hundred millions, to find their way all over the world. HIS PENNY SERMONS. For half a century a shop in Paterndster Buildings existed on the sale of these sermons at a penny each. They were reproduced in newspapers; they were translated into many languages. But when his publishers sent a boy late one night through a snowstorm to deliver the proofs of one of them he could spare the time to write asking them "please to’ blow somebody up for sending the poor little creature here late to-night in all this snow, with a parcel much heavier than he ought to carry,” and then he added: "There was no need at all for it. Do kick somebody for me. so that it may not happen Humour and homely speech forced home the fervour of his sermons. He was no actor carrying people on a wave of emotion, but a deep thinker whosa printed word would send a man down on his knees. But his creed was that of the old Puritans, as narrow as the gate of heaven seemed to him. “How is it,” he once said to Dr. Clifford, that most broadminded of all preachers, “that though you see me once a week I cannot make you see as I do?”

"I listen to you once a week,” said Dr. Clifford, “but' I ’ read the Bible every day.” Yet Spurgeon’s sermons were not

bought only by Nonconformists. High Churchmen and Low, Roman. Catholic and Evangelical, read them, sure that no sermons they could preach were aS rich in thought as these. The city man and the shop assistant, the coalheaver and the duchess, bought his penny sermon as now they buy their penny papers; and just as the crowd waits outside the cinema to-day so they would wait outside Spurgeon's Tabernacle at the end of last century. On his tomb at Norwood it is said that he "being dead, yet speaketh.” For years that was ’true; and- still--his sermons are read, and there are many to say that none are finer yet. But his influence has died down like the lull after a great storm, and we are left wondering at the power of this man.

THE CHILDREN’S FARM

£lOOO FROM THE PRINCE. At a meeting in London recently of the Child Emigration Society the Prince of Wales slipped a cheque for £lOOO into the Secretary’s hand, . • - But a hundred such cheques are needed before the Society can carry out its great scheme ! of starting another three schools like the Fairbridge Farm School of Western Australia. Readers have heard of Kingsley Fairbridge, one of the early Rhodes Scholars, who at 23 started the scheme of sending slum children to the Dominions to be trained in farming. — Building boys is, better than mending men, he used to say. If orphans and children from crowded homes could be taken out to some such land as Australia, to live on a model farm and learn all about it, they would, he believed, grow up happy and healthy, well able to look after themselves, and just the sort of people Australia needs to fill its vast empty spaces. Kingsley Fairbridge died in proving the great worth of his scheme; but he proved it. The farm school in Western Australia called after him has trained about a thousand children. Of these only six have been sent back as failures. About 700 are at work on farms spread all over Australia, and another 300 are still at the school enjoying a happy training, living in comfortable little cottages with a foster-mother to look after each small family.

In 1932 and 1933, in spite of the depression, a thousand farmers were in need of helpers from this school, but only a hundred were trained and ready to leave. That shows the need for the three more schools which it is hoped to start. Girls are also trained at the Fairbridge School, which combines .an excellent all-round education with the land. work. Many an Australian farmer boasts of a wife who is a real help to him because she is an old Fairbridge girl. The schenu has proved itself the one completelj successful form of emigration to-day, and we hope the Society will soon get th< rest of its £lOO,OOO.