Spurgeon’s joy was based not only on his own ability to recover, but on God’s ability to replenish. It was a joy that would balm Spurgeon in future controversies when he felt beleaguered and bewildered. The joy Spurgeon had after 1856 was a radical joy—a joy deeply rooted in the soil of the supremacy of the God who was great and grand enough to make good things come out of evil. As Joseph told his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).
The same God who called Spurgeon to London would not abandon him on the banks of the Thames River. On the contrary, God used this horrible event in his life to save the lives of countless others, for the widely circulated negative press put the young pastor’s preaching on England’s radar—and eventually on the world’s.
More Seen Than Clay
At 11:05 pm on January 31, 1892—36 years after the fire—Spurgeon fell into a coma from which he did not awake. During the final year of his life, he had been brought much encouragement by the unity that he saw demonstrated in the various expressions of the church. “During the past year I have been made to see that there is more love and unity among God’s people than is generally believed.”
His earliest sermons were filled with a passion for Christian unity and cooperation, but in the last month of his life, those seeds had fully blossomed. “When our Lord prayed that his church might be one, his prayer was answered, and his true people are even now, in spirit and in truth, one in him. Their different modes of external worship are as the furrows of a field; the field is none the less one because of the marks of the plough.”
After his death, a telegraph alerted the world to Spurgeon’s passing. Evangelicals from differing theological tribes and traditions sent their condolences to Susannah. One scholar has noted, “If every crowned head in Europe had died that night, the event would not be so momentous as the death of this one man.” Over 100,000 people passed by Spurgeon’s coffin at the Norwood Cemetery.
The same newspapers that had once inflicted so much damage upon the young preacher’s ministry now offered recognition of a life well lived for others. In the year following Spurgeon’s death, a new biography of Spurgeon surfaced every month. Some were filled with unpublished conversation with the preacher; others contained letters and recollections of personal encounters and episodes. And yet, for the small group of friends to whom Spurgeon spoke on New Year’s Day Eve, 1891, their pastor’s departing words must have undoubtedly followed them the rest of their lives:
We would have it so happen that, when our life’s history is written, whoever reads it will not think of us as “self-made men,” but as the handiwork of God, in whom his grace is magnified. Not in us may men see the clay, but the Potter’s hand. They said of one, “He is a fine preacher;” but of another they said, “We never notice how he preaches, but we feel that God is great.” We wish our whole life to be a sacrifice; an altar of incense continually smoking with sweet perfume unto the Most High. Oh, to be borne through the year on the wings of praise to God to mount from year to year, and raise at each ascent a loftier and yet lowlier song unto the God of our Life! The vista of a praiseful life will never close, but continue throughout eternity. From psalm to psalm, from hallelujah to hallelujah, we will ascend the hill of the Lord; until we come into the Holiest of all, where, with veiled faces, we will bow before the Divine Majesty in the bliss of endless adoration.
