Baptist Heritage

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) was England's best-known preacher for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1854, just four years after his conversion, Spurgeon, then only 20, became pastor of London's famed New Park Street Church (formerly pastored by the famous Baptist theologian John Gill). The congregation quickly outgrew their building, moved to Exeter Hall, then to Surrey Music Hall. In these venues Spurgeon frequently preached to audiences numbering more than 10,000—all in the days before electronic amplification. In 1861 the congregation moved permanently to the newly constructed Metropolitan Tabernacle.

"Mr. Spurgeon's magnum opus, The TREASURY OF DAVID, which occupied over twenty years of the author's busy life, is too well known to need any lengthy description. The comments and expositions abound in rich, racy, and suggestive remarks, and they have a strong flavour of the homiletic and practical exposition with which Mr. Spurgeon is accustomed to accompany his public reading of Holy Scripture. There is an intensity of belief, a fulness of assent to the great points of Calvinistic orthodoxy which our author would not be true to himself if he attempted to conceal. The brief introductions are very well done, and the abundant apparatus criticus, the list of hundreds of writers on the Psalms, whose meditations have been laid under contribution to enrich the work, render this commentary one of the most voluminous in existence. At all events, the volumes will be an encyclopaedia of reference." — [British Quarterly Review]

"We are convinced that Mr. Spurgeon is doing an inestimable service to the Church in compiling this work. The years will come when as a preacher he will be a tradition, and grandfathers will describe to their son's children the visits they paid to the Metropolitan Tabernacle, the style and character of the sermon, the impression produced by the man and the crowd of hearers, and the story will lose none of its interest in the telling; but such fame slowly, steadily diminishes, and surely fades into the faintest possible outlines. It will be impossible for future generations to estimate the influence which Mr. Spurgeon, as a man of speech and action, exerted in his own day; nor will the innumerable volumes of sermons which have been issued, and still continue to appear, present any fair means by which a critical judgment of his mental vigour can be obtained. Mr. Spurgeon, like every great man, is so much more than his works; but we believe that this "Treasury of David" will do more to win the admiration of future generations, and to sustain its author's reputation than any other of the multiplied works to which he has set his hand. It will live. There is nothing like it in the English language, and it supplies a desideratum which most ministers have felt. We trust that Mr. Spurgeon will be spared in fulness of strength to complete what must be regarded by all thoughtful judges as his magnum opus." — [The English Independent]