illed library; he showed me
fifteen stately volumes of his printed sermons which have since been
more than doubled, besides several of his works translated into French,
German, Swedish, Dutch and other languages. The most interesting object
in the library was a small file of his sermon notes, each one on a half
sheet of note paper, or on the back of an ordinary letter envelope. When
I asked him if he "wrote his sermons out," his answer was: "I would
rather be hung." His usual method was to select the text of his Sunday
morning sermon on Saturday about six or seven o'clock, and spend half an
hour in arranging a skeleton and put it on paper; he left all the
phraseology until he reached the pulpit. During Sunday afternoon he
repeated the same process in preparing his evening discourse. "If I had
a month assigned me for preparing a sermon," said he to me, "I would
spend thirty days and twenty-three hours on something else and in the
last hour I would make the sermon, and if I could not do it then I
could not do it in a month."

This sounds like a risky process, but it must be remembered that if
Spurgeon occupied but a few minutes in arranging a discourse he spent
five days of every week in thoroughly studying God's Word--in thorough
thinking--and in the perusal of the richest old writers on theology and
experimental religion.

He was all the time, and everywhere filling up his cask, so that he had
only to turn the spigot and out flowed the pure Gospel in the most
transparent language. A stenographer took down the sermon, and it was
revised by Mr. Spurgeon on Monday morning. He told me that for many
years he went to his pulpit under such nervous agitation that it often
brought on violent attacks of vomiting and produced outbreaks of
perspiration, and he slowly outgrew that remarkable sort of physical
suffering.

Twenty years ago Mr. Spurgeon exchanged Helensburgh House for the still
more elegant mansion called "Westwood" on Beulah Hill, near Crystal
Palace, Sydenham. It is a rural paradise. At each of the visits I paid
him there, he used to come out with his banged-up soft hat, which he
wore indoors half of the time, and with a merry jest on his lips. On my
last visit, accompanied by my brother Hall, I found him suffering
severely from his neuralgic malady, but it did not affect his buoyant
humor. When I told him that my catarrhal deafness was worse than ever,
he replied: "Well, brother, console yourself with the thought