Page 7 - Spurgeon

in so short a time. Here is a mere youth, a perfect stripling, only twenty-one
years of age, incomparably the most popular preacher of the day. There is
no man within Her Majesty’s dominions who could draw such immense
audiences; and none who, in his best efforts, can so completely hold the
attention, and delight the minds of his hearers. Some of his appeals to the
conscience, some of his remonstrances with the careless, constitute specimens
of a very high order of oratorical power. When pronouncing the doom of
those who live and die in a state of impenitence, he makes the vast
congregation quake and quail in their seats. He places their awful destiny in
such vivid colours before their eyes that they almost imagine they are already
in the regions of darkness and despair.”
At the beginning of his sixth year in London, at the age of only twenty-
five, he saw God’s hand put forth to establish their great new House of God,
which was to be thronged with thousands upon thousands of seeking souls
and convinced believers for the succeeding thirty-one years of his ministry -
an average of 5,000 people every Sunday morning and evening.
Spurgeon named the new church ‘The Metropolitan Tabernacle’ after
the great Tent of Meeting of the wilderness wanderings of Israel. The Christian
life was a pilgrim life; earth was their lodge, and Heaven their home. It was
set up, in all its immensity, to the glory of God, and for the blessing and
salvation of souls.
Not only on Sundays was the Tabernacle filled, but on Thursday evenings
also the congregation often overflowed into the top gallery. “How many
thousands have been converted here,” he exclaimed at the prayer meeting
on May 26, 1890. “There has not been a single day when I have not heard
of two, three or four having been converted; and that not for one, two or
three years, but for the last ten years.” Mighty were the prayer meetings
held on Monday nights, when the large number of praying people felt the
power of the Holy Spirit in their midst.
While they were worshipping with him the glory of the Lord shone round
about them, and this has never been to the same extent their experience in
listening to any other man. Never again will they listen to a preacher at
whose word God will become so near, so great, so terrible, so gracious;

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