e cannot do better than place ourselves
under Mr. W. Y. Fullerton's direction. Mr. Fullerton knew Mr. Spurgeon
intimately, and the standard biography of the great preacher is from his
pen. Mr. Fullerton devotes a good deal of his space to an inquiry as to
the sources of Mr. Spurgeon's power and authority. It is an elusive and
difficult question. It is admitted that there is scarcely one respect in
which Mr. Spurgeon's powers were really transcendent. He had a fine
voice; but others had finer ones. He was eloquent; but others were no
less so. He used to say that his success was due, not to his preaching
of the Gospel, but to the Gospel that he preached. Obviously, however,
this is beside the mark, for he himself would not have been so
uncharitable as to deny that others preached the same Gospel and yet met
with no corresponding success. The truth probably is that, although he
attained to super-excellence at no point, he was really great at many.
And, behind this extraordinary combination of remarkable, though not
transcendent, powers was an intense conviction, a deadly earnestness, a
consuming passion, that made second-rate qualities sublime. The most
revealing paragraph in the book occurs towards the end. It is a
quotation from Mr. Spurgeon himself. 'Leaving home early in the
morning,' he says, 'I went to the vestry and sat there all day long,
seeing those who had been brought to Christ by the preaching of the
Word. Their stories were so interesting to me that the hours flew by
without my noticing how fast they were going. I had seen numbers of
persons during the day, one after the other; and I was so delighted with
the tales of divine mercy they had to tell me, and the wonders of grace
God wrought in them, that I did not notice how the time passed. At seven
o'clock we had our prayer meeting. I went in to it. After that came the
church meeting. A little before ten I felt faint, and I began to think
at what hour I had eaten my dinner, and I then for the first time
remembered that _I had not had any_! I never thought of it. I never even
felt hungry, because God had made me so glad!' Mr. Spurgeon lived that
he might save men. He thought of nothing else. From his first sermon at
Waterbeach to his last at Mentone, the conversion of sinners was the
dream of all his days. That master-passion glorified the whole man, and
threw a grandeur about the common details of every day. He would
cheerfully have thrown away his soul to save