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HOW TO GET STRONG
in connection with this immense chapel comprised the Stockwell Orphanage; a Pastors' College, where hundreds of young men were trained for the ministry under his care; more than twenty chapels were founded by him in London alone; and the Golden Lane Mission; his sermons were published weekly, and yearly volumes were issued for many years; which had an enormous circulation, and were translated into many languages; he also wrote John Ploughman's Talk, which had a circulation of three hundred and fifty thousand; The Saint and His Saviour; and many other books; besides editing a monthly magazine, The Sword and the Trowel; he died in 1892.
The London Times of February 1, 1892, said: "By the death of Mr. Spurgeon English nonconformity has been deprived of a remarkable man; a man of striking power and strong personality; a man who has left upon the religious life of his generation a mark deeper if less wide than that which will be left by his contemporary of the Salvation Army.… It was as a renter and a preacher of sermons that Mr. Spurgeon exercised most powerful influence. An American author wrote of him that the chief sources of his power lay 'in his wonderfully original, natural, and impressive delivery; his marvellous command of simple, precise, idiomatic Saxon language; and his red-hot earnestness and simpleness of purpose.' … In politics Mr. Spurgeon exercised an active influence. A man of his oratorical strength, who was in the habit of addressing huge congregations, who did not shrink from alluding to the events of the day, could hardly fail to be a power; and the trenchant attack which he made upon Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy of 1886 was a serious blow to the influence of that sometime leader of the Liberal party.… The liveliness of his discourses is systematic and deliberate; witness the preface to the first volume of sermons published in 1856, in which the preacher says 'he is not quite sure about a smile being a sin; and, at any rate, thinks it less crime to cause momentary laughter than a half-hour's slumber.' On this principle he preached throughout a tolerably long life, with the result that he obtained hearers in thousands, when scholarly men could not obtain them by hundreds or even by scores; and had an almost unbounded influence over large bodies of men and women, chiefly in the lower middle classes. This eloquent and energetic preacher, who was almost worshipped by his immediate followers; who was the personal friend of Presi-402
