Between Man and Beast by Monte Reel

Author:Monte Reel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385534239
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

IF PAUL wasn’t sure what to make of what he’d witnessed at that altar, London’s cultural critics knew exactly how to assess Spurgeon’s lecture: as a mockery deserving ridicule.

Spurgeon had been criticized before, but never like this. By delving into the subject of the gorilla, the press said, the evangelist was blurring the lines between theology and theater, between the sanctified and the secular. The fact that he’d invited Layard, the politician, onstage was a sign of a disturbing new trend. According to one reviewer, it seemed that elected officials were now required “to eat dirt and lick the shoes of their constituencies” by pandering to people like Spurgeon, who had a firm grip on the hearts and wallets of his electorate.

“Of course such an exhibition is a disgrace to London,” declared an article in the Literary Budget. “It is a lamentable disgrace that one of our largest halls can be filled with people ready to listen to a fellow whose sole claim to attention has been his willingness to practise the easiest and most evil form of all buffoonery, that of making jokes over the Bible and burlesquing the inculcation of its truths. One very slight and indirect consequence for good, however, it is possible to detect in these his secular escapades. They have completely vulgarized the practice of amateur lecturing. Now that Spurgeon has taken to lecturing, every young gentleman, who has had a fancy for it, must give it up. He has followed a fashion and destroyed it.”

Other reviews were no less devastating. Spurgeon was perplexed by the reaction. He’d been injecting emotion and drama into his sermons for years, but never had he been the subject of so much public scorn. In the weeks following the lecture, he fell ill, but the abuse continued, unabated. Two weeks after the lecture, with Spurgeon too sick to deliver his Sunday sermon, his church’s leaders unanimously passed the following resolution:

That the members of this church, constantly refreshed by the gospel ministry of their beloved Pastor, and deeply obliged to him for the lectures he gives upon secular and social subjects, have noticed, with sincere regret, and heart-felt sympathy with him, the scandals heaped upon his name by the public press, and beg to express to him their most loving confidence, their strong desire to endure with him a full share of his reproach, and their full determination, by God’s help, to bear him constantly on their heart in prayer.

The support buoyed Spurgeon, and a week later he wrote to a friend that the outrage over his gorilla exhibition only strengthened his belief that conceding any ground to the cultural critics would be unforgivable.

“This work of my Institution is of God; lectures are a part of the necessary plan, they do good, I have a call to this work, so all this opposition is a spur to increased zeal,” he said.

For decades after this lecture, Spurgeon poured that zeal into an international fight against a relaxed, liberal reading of Scripture.

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