Companions in the Darkness by Diana Gruver

Author:Diana Gruver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: depression;mental illness;church history;martin luther;hannah allen;david brainerd;mother teresa;martin luther king, jr.;charles spurgeon;william cowper;Christians with depression;depression throughout history;depression in saints;depressed saints;depressed Christian;depression for Christians;depression and the church
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2020-09-16T08:25:42+00:00

DUNGEONS OF DESPAIR: SLANDER AND CATASTROPHE

When Spurgeon’s deacons carried him, only partially conscious, through a private exit that night, he was only twenty-two years old. He didn’t see the seven bloodied corpses on the grass in front of the Surrey Gardens Music Hall or the other twenty-eight people carried to the hospital badly injured. He only heard later the account of those who had maliciously sounded a false alarm, of those who had fallen in the rush and been trampled underfoot.

Can you imagine the grief in the city that night? Can you imagine the realization that those people had come to hear you preach—that the attack had happened on your watch?

Spurgeon’s critics did not spare him in the aftermath of the tragedy. They heaped slander and accusation on his sorrow, blaming him for the lives lost and injured. But this was not the first time he’d come under their harsh words.

Charles Spurgeon had come to London three years earlier, a fresh-faced, nineteen-year-old country boy with a bad haircut. In spite of his rustic manners and no formal theological training, he was a dynamic and dramatic preacher, passionate about the Word of God. Within two years, the two-hundred-member congregation of New Park Street Chapel exploded in size to the point that their building could not contain them. He would remain their pastor for nearly forty years.

He was not popular with everyone, though. He faced harsh criticism and slander in the papers. They misquoted him and attributed words to him he’d never uttered. Some doubted his salvation. Others compared his words “that are smoother than butter” to the deception of Satan.2 One critic called his sermons a “prostitution of the pulpit.”3 I have trouble discerning if these critics were jealous of his popularity, turned off by his unique style (which they called “bad taste” and “vulgar and theatrical”), or giving their genuine estimation.4

It is clear that these attacks hurt Spurgeon keenly. When he was trying to preach the gospel and win souls for Christ, such blatant attacks on his character were agonizing. I can’t help but remember that he was a tender young man, far from home and just learning his way in the world.

During these early years, when his new wife, Susannah, was trying to find a way to comfort him, she carefully printed Matthew 5:11-12 and hung it up in their bedroom. Every morning, as he dressed and walked from the room to begin his day, and every night, as he rested after another day of work, it greeted him: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you” (KJV).

In spite of the slander, Spurgeon now had a congregation in need of a space to hold their growing numbers. They began construction on a new, five-thousand-seat church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and while they waited, they rented spaces to hold the swelling crowds flocking to hear their sensational preacher.

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