The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. The following excerpt is from C.H. Spurgeons Autobiography, volume three, pages 143-144.
"Certain of our charitable neighbours
accuse me of having 'a parson manufactory,' but the charge
is not true at all. I never tried to make a minister, and should fail if I
did; I receive none into the College but those who profess to be ministers already.
It would be nearer the truth if they called me 'a parson-killer,' for a
goodly number of beginners have received their quietus from me; and
I have the fullest ease of conscience in reflecting upon what I have so done."
One brother I have encountered—one did I say?—I have met ten, twenty, a hundred brethren, who
have pleaded that they were quite sure that they were called to the
ministry—because they had failed in everything else!
This is a sort of
model story:—“Sir, I was put into a lawyer’s office, but I never could
bear the confinement, and I could not feel at home in studying law.
Providence clearly stopped up my road, for I lost my situation.”
“And what did you do
then? “Why, sir, I was induced to open a
grocer’s shop.” “And did you prosper?” “Well, I do not think, sir, I was
ever meant for trade; and the Lord seemed quite to shut up my way there, for
I failed, and was in great difficulties.”
“Since then, I have done a little in
a life-assurance agency, and tried to get up a school, beside selling tea;
but my path is hedged up, and something within me makes me feel that I
ought to be a minister.”
My answer generally is, “Yes, I see;
you have failed in everything else, and therefore you think the Lord has especially
endowed you for His service; but I fear you have forgotten that the ministry needs the very best of men, and not those who cannot do anything else.”
A man who would succeed as a preacher would probably do right
well either as a grocer, or a lawyer, or anything else. A really valuable
minister would have excelled in any occupation. There is scarcely
anything impossible to a man who can keep a congregation together for years,
and be the means of edifying them for hundreds of consecutive Sabbaths;
he must be possessed of some abilities, and be by no means a fool or a
ne’er-do-well.
Jesus Christ deserves the best men to preach His gospel, and not the
empty-headed and the shiftless.
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