Spurgeon’s Conversion, with the Help of the Puritans
Hear then, O sinners, hear as you would live. Why should you willfully deceive yourselves, or build your hopes upon sand? I know that he will find hard work that goes to pluck away your hopes. It cannot but be unpleasant to you, and truly it is not pleasing to me. I set about it as a surgeon when about to cut off a mortified limb from his beloved friend, which of necessity he must do, though with an aching heart. But understand me, beloved, I am only taking down the ruinous house, which otherwise will speedily fall of itself and bury you in the ruins…O sinner, let the Word convince you now in time, and let go your false and self-deluding hopes, than have death open your eyes too late, and find yourself in hell before you are aware. [Alarm to the Unconverted, page 23]
The effect that such a book would have had upon a person is shown in the adolescent life of Charles Spurgeon. He was saved when he was 15 years old, being converted under the sermon of a lay preacher in a Primitive Methodist church at Colchester in the snow of January 16, 1850.[1] The path to his conversion was one full of difficulty. Before his conversion, Spurgeon obtained a copy of Alleine’s Alarm and began reading it on his own. He would seek solitary places and read it looking for cheer but “feeling my soul plowed more and more, as though the Law, with its ten great black horses, was dragging the plow up and down my soul.”[2] He said that the cruelties of the Inquisition are compared as small when weighed next to the wretched conscience of a man.
The book itself is close to 83,000 words and a modern printing runs to 148 pages. The author, Joseph Alleine, died in 1668 at the age of thirty-four, bruised beyond recovery from his harsh treatment under the 1662 Act of Uniformity. An Alarme to Unconverted Sinners was published in 1671, posthumously, and the work has never been out of print. Edmund Calamy the younger, annalist of seventeenth-century Dissent, claimed in 1702 that “fifty thousand copies were sold under this title, thirty thousand at one impression,” and that “no book in the English tongue (the Bible only excepted) can equal it for the number that hath been dispersed."[3] The book has been reprinted over five hundred times, sometimes under many different titles, the most popular of which is A Sure Guide to Heaven. It deeply influenced George Whitefield, and John Wesley included it in the Christian Library, calling Alleine “the English Rutherford.”[4]
What exactly did this book teach? The book is divided into seven chapters:
1. Mistakes about conversion;
2. The nature of conversion;
3. The necessity of conversion;
4. The marks of the unconverted;
5. The miseries of the unconverted;
6. Directions to the unconverted;
7. The motives to conversion.[20]
Alleine states the purpose for why he wrote the book in the preface: “I am not baiting my hook with rhetoric, nor fishing for your applause, but for your souls. My work is not to please you, but to save you.”[5] The author wished to give alarm to sinners about their unconverted state so that they may be saved.
With sustained and extreme pathos, Alleine churns out one logical set of arguments after another, explaining the marks of the converted and the unconverted, calling on his hearers to examine themselves and to see which one they were. The engine behind Alleine’s effort is the knowledge that everlasting souls will spend eternity either in sweet communion with the Trinity or they will face the unquenchable wrath of God. “Unconverted souls call for earnest compassion and prompt diligence to pluck them as brands from the burning.”[6] The urgency of the task requires men to plead with blood-earnest appeals for sinners so that they would see the trouble of their situation and trust in Christ as the only one who can save. “I would write to them in tears, I would weep out every argument, I would empty my veins for ink.”[7] The weeping and wooing of the author is not a mere style but a means to incite alarm to unconverted sinners to realize their dire peril and turn to Jesus.
O miserable wretch! What stupidity and senselessness have surprised you! Oh let me knock and awake this sleeper! Who dwells within the walls of this flesh? Is there a soul here, a rational, understanding soul; or are you only a senseless lump?[8]
The urgency of the task requires men to plead with blood-earnest appeals for sinners so that they would see the trouble of their situation and trust in Christ as the only one who can save.
Spurgeon’s Travail of Soul
Alarm was not the only book Spurgeon began to read and re-read during this time. He also mentioned John Bunyan’s, Grace Abounding, Richard Baxter’s, Call to the Unconverted, and Philip Doddridge’s, Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul.[9] Spurgeon said he searched these books because he hunted for the way of salvation. The effect unfortunately was the same when he read all of these books: “And how they plowed me, and brought tears into my eyes—but I found no rest to my soul.”[10] He read the books in the morning because he was afraid that soon the distractions of the day would evaporate the concern he had for his eternal state. Sometimes he cared deeply about his standing before God and surrounded himself with books intended to awaken him and make him alert after the stupor of sleep. Other times he wished to “escape from the mercy of God and be permitted to ‘enjoy myself.’” It was a time of great contradictions and travail of soul. “I was hot today and cold tomorrow.”[11]
Spurgeon also looked back on this period of agony as a time of hope, when the ray of light began to shine in his soul. It was a time of violence, and he was trying to seize the Kingdom, hammering at the gates of heaven “until it seemed as if they would split the golden bolts rather than be turned away!”[12] He kept his copy of Alarm under his pillow and read it when he first awoke, hoping to whip himself up into enough repentance to merit heaven. “Oh, how I hoped that would break my heart!”[13] He believed that if he felt badly enough he would have a heart ready to be accepted by God. The problem was that he was still too inwardly focused, constantly checking to see if his heart was alarmed enough to be fit for salvation. “I think I might have read [those books] to this day and not been a whit the better if I had not something better than alarm.”[14] What was necessary was for someone to turn Spurgeon’s boyhood eyes away from himself and to look to Christ. This was what he heard on that cold, January day: “It was from that precious text, ‘Look unto Me and be you saved, all you ends of the earth.’ Then I got light!”[15]
The dramatic turn away from introspection, which these books elicited in his heart, and the surprise at the ease and simplicity of salvation seemed to have made Spurgeon feel chagrined. Books like Alleine’s Alarm gave him to despair, but the free gospel gave him hope and liberation. In one sermon he seems to say that these human books hindered his salvation because they gave him no comfort: “Then I read Alleine’s Alarm…these only plowed my heart more and more. But the comfort which I got came out of God’s Word.” In this same sermon, he then called on his unregenerate hearers to search the Scriptures and to sit under a preaching ministry, and he even seems to discourage his hearers from reading such books as Alarm: “Turn you away from all human books to the Divine Book, and from all human helpers to Him!”[16] Human books like Alarm could only bring despair, but the Bible would give them comfort.
In another sermon, he accused some Puritans of unscriptural views of hell. He criticized these men for focusing on inducing horror in the judgment of God by picturing gross and corporeal images—pictures that once terrified a little boy in Colchester.
The old Puritan preachers, such men as Alleine, who wrote the Alarm, and others of his class, always gave a very gross picture of the world to come, Spurgeon claimed in one sermon in 1861. They could never represent it except by brimstone, flames, and dancing fiends, and such like horrors.[17]
Spurgeon’s main criticism of Joseph Alleine’s Alarm was that the Puritan laid out the reality of God’s justice but failed to sufficiently point his readers to Christ. “I refer…to Alleine and Baxter, who are far better preachers of the law than of the gospel.”[18]
These sermons are not a full picture. As stated in [the first article]. There are other times when Spurgeon admits that these torturous books were used by God to plow the field of his heart in order that it might be ready for the seed of the gospel.
Our heavenly Father does not usually make us seek Jesus till He has whipped us clean out of all our confidences! He cannot make us in earnest after heaven till He has made us feel something of the intolerable tortures of an aching conscience which is a foretaste of hell![19]
After saying this in the sermon, Spurgeon wished to prompt the memory of his audience of what it was like to be under the conviction of sin before they were saved, and he asks them to recall when they awoke in the morning and read such books as Alleine’s Alarm or Baxter’s Call. “Oh, those books, those books in my childhood—I read and devoured them when under a sense of guilt.”[20] He said that they were like sitting at the foot of Sinai. “The first commandment shall say, ‘Crush him! He has broken me!’ The second shall say, ‘Damn him! He has broken me!’”[21] The Law was the means by which Spurgeon was driven to Christ. It was necessary for him to be brought to a position where he despaired of his good works. He needed to be pulled down before he could be lifted up; he needed to be emptied before he could be filled. For this reason, he was thankful for those books.
The “law work” that Spurgeon underwent has not occurred without precedent in the Christian life. It is a necessary step before conversion. The Puritans knew the significance of the withering power of the Holy Spirit to convict of sin. One of the works of the Spirit is to convince men of their unworthiness of salvation. The Spirit assures men of God’s fitness to judge them based upon His holy standard in the Law. The Spirit “comes to make sin appear as sin, and to let us see its fearful consequences. He comes to wound so that no human balm can heal: to kill so that no earthly power can make us live.”[22] Spurgeon knew this as true because he experienced it first hand, and he was a good student of the Puritan model of evangelism.
In the next article, we will see how being schooled in the world of the Puritans changed Spurgeon and his preaching.
Read More:
Part 1: The Book that Spurgeon Hated, yet Loved
Part 3: Spurgeon at the School of Puritan Evangelism
Part 4: Spurgeon: The Art of Wooing Souls
ENDNOTES
[1] Spurgeon, Charles H. Autobiography: The Early Years. Edinburgh: Banner, 1962., xviii.
[2] Spurgeon, No. 3070, "A Visit to Christ's Hospital." Metropolitan Tabernacle, London.
[3] Wallace, Dewey. Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660-1714. Oxford: University Press, 2011, 122
[4] Alleine, Joseph. An Alarm to the Unconverted. Edinburgh: Banner, 1978.
[5] Alleine, Alarm, 16.
[6] Alleine, Alarm, 15.
[7] Alleine, Alarm
[8] Alleine, Alarm, 96.
[9] Spurgeon, No. 1889, "The Blood of Sprinkling (Second)." Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 28 Feb. 1886.
[10] Spurgeon, No. 2424, "The New Song on Earth." Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 17 July. 1887.
[11] Spurgeon, No. 3527, "The Divided Heart." Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 14 April. 1872.
[12] Spurgeon, No. 252, "Holy Violence." Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 15 May. 1859.
[13] Spurgeon, “Holy Violence”
[14] Spurgeon, “Holy Violence”
[15] Spurgeon, No. 3318. “How to Read the Bible.” Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 21 June. 1866
[16] Spurgeon, “How to Read the Bible”
[17] Spurgeon, No. 410, "Not Now, But Hereafter!" Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 22 Sept. 1861.
[18] Spurgeon, No. 531, "The Warrant of Faith." Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 20 Sept. 1863.
[19] Spurgeon, No. 128, "The Uses of the Law." Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. 19 April. 1857.
[20] Spurgeon, “The Uses of the Law”
[21] Spurgeon, “The Uses of the Law”
[22] Spurgeon, No. 1708. “The Holy Spirit’s Threefold Conviction of Men.” Metropolitan Tabernacle. London, 25 Feb. 1883