posted by Phil Johnson
The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "The Incomparable Bridegroom and His Bride," a sermon preached on Sunday evening, 10 June 1866, at the Met Tab.
his afternoon, I was reading a sermon by a certain divine, whose subject of discourse was, why the working-classes do not go to a place of worship, and the preacher seems to have made up his mind that, whatever is preached in this Tabernacle, is especially obnoxious to laboring men and women. The reason he gives why the working-classes do not attend places of worship is that we preach such dreadful doctrines.
It is very remarkable that places where these truths are preached are crowded, while places where the opposite things are proclaimed are often empty! It is curious, if the doctrine of the gospel is such a very horrible thing that it drives people away, that at the places where it is preached there are more people than can get in, whereas where some of the modern doctrines are declared, you may see more spiders than people! It is a singular circumstance, certainly, yet one for which we can easily account.A Socinian minister was once asked by one who preached Evangelical truth, "If I, who proclaim doctrines which you say are obnoxious to common reason, have my place full, and you, who preach such pretty, reasonable doctrines, can get nobody to hear you, do you not think it is because the people have an idea that what I teach is true, and that what you preach, though it is very pleasant and palatable, is not true, and therefore they do not care to hear it?"
It is not by altering our testimony that we are to hope to win an audience, and it is not by hiding the light of the gospel under a bushel that you or I shall discharge our obligations to our Lord. We must speak up for Christ, and so speak up for Him that men will be moved to ask us the question, "What is thy Beloved more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us?"
2 comments:
Interesting to see how liberal churches were already dying in Spurgeon's day.
Sinners don't like liberal churches: they're places where being confident of the lie of the historical Gospel is of no bigger sinful profit than that to stand in a place that resembles a Christian temple and still have no reason to be convicted of one's sin and come to believe in Christ Jesus. Pubs, house-parties, pagan ecological activist meetings, semi-marxist NGO conferences are funner places for disbelieving the truth of salvation and to sin more spectacularly -- but perhaps not as less.
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