“Everybody goes to hear Mr. Spurgeon—at least once.”
That’s how Henry C. Potter opened his account of a Sunday evening at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1877. Potter wasn’t just a casual observer. He was rector of Grace Church in New York, and he wrote up the experience for Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine. The piece has been forgotten, but a friend researching Spurgeon rediscovered it and sent it my way.
Potter’s account is one of the most vivid firsthand descriptions I’ve encountered of Spurgeon in his prime. You feel like you’re there—in the hansom cab, at the door, squeezed into the pew, listening to 7,000 voices sing. And at the end of his commentary, Potter distills Spurgeon’s preaching power into three words that have stuck with me.
The Journey and the Building
The Metropolitan Tabernacle was a long journey from where most visitors to London would stay. You had to cross the Thames and navigate through the neighborhood Dickens had immortalized around the tavern Elephant and Castle, before arriving at a massive stone structure: 208 feet long, 106 feet wide, soaring 89 feet from floor to lantern. It seated 7,000 in two rows of galleries. When Potter visited, on a “thick and drizzling” London evening, every seat was taken.
The interior was shaped like an elongated oval, designed so that every seat was “almost equally good for seeing and hearing,” and the pastor was pushed “into the midst of his audience.” Potter found his way to a reserved seat—secured, he realized, by a contribution he made to Spurgeon’s Orphanage on his way inside—with a clear view of both platform and congregation. A good investment, as it turned out.
The Crowd, the Service, the Prayers
What Potter describes next is almost cinematic. The regular members filter in first, one at a time and in groups. Then the great doors open. The crowd that has gathered on the front steps pours in: “like nothing else in the world so much as some black, fluent mass let into a sinuous and intricate mold, in and out among whose tortuous windings it finds its way until every crevice, every small interstice seems to be solidly full.” At that same moment, the gas lamps come on, and the full immensity of the building reveals itself for the first time.
Then Spurgeon himself appeared, climbing the stairway with a fellow minister. He moved painfully to his seat, visibly compromised by gout. During the prayer, he stood with one knee resting on a chair.
In between songs, Spurgeon read the passage from the Gospel of John that recounts Christ’s encounter with Mary Magdalene after the resurrection. He offered running commentary, and Potter found this the most impressive feature of the whole service. There was, he wrote, “a singular discernment in his comments, and an apt choice of phrase by which a shade of meaning was thrown into strong relief.” Potter wished he could reproduce “the spirit of tenderness and reverence which brooded over the whole.”
Then came a brief prayer—“direct [and] comprehensive” and down-to-earth. It wasn’t a formal collect, but neither was it off-the-cuff. It was a well-crafted prayer “unexpectedly free from anything to offend even the somewhat fastidious taste of a liturgist,” Potter noted. After a hymn came the sermon.
The Preaching
Spurgeon took the pulpit in physical pain. When he preached, he drew chairs to either side and leaned heavily on them.
The text was Psalm 42, and the subject was spiritual depression. Potter acknowledges that nothing in the sermon was novel. The power came from the “directness of illustration, the essentially concrete rather than abstract presentation of the truth, the mingled vigor and tenderness with which, one after another, the preacher sketched the daily sorrows and discouragements of his hearers’ lives.” Spurgeon at this stage of his ministry seemed to be reading only two books: “the volume of human nature and the Bible. But with both these his familiarity was evidently intimate.”
Then there was the voice—“clear, penetrating, and persuasive,” blending what Potter called a “trumpet quality” with a tone of pleading and pathos. And of course, there was the man himself—his face bearing the traces of physical suffering and yet radiating “an expression of simple, unaffected, tender earnestness which rises upon you at once.” No one who watched him could doubt, Potter wrote, that he was “a man whose heart was in his work and who was doing it with absolute and genuinely unconscious self-forgetfulness.” That’s what Potter calls the reality of the man.
The Three Words
“Mr. Spurgeon’s power seemed largely to consist in directness, persuasiveness, and reality. I think it will be owned that these are among the ‘notes’ of good preaching anywhere.”
Directness. Persuasiveness. Reality.
Not a striking appearance. No evident genius. No particular eloquence. Not theological sophistication. What filled that building week after week—what drew bishops and skeptics and the working poor of South London alike—was a preacher who spoke directly, who aimed to move and not merely inform his hearers, and who was real. The congregation could sense that the man behind the sermon meant every word.
Spurgeon’s words carried weight because he was the real deal.
Window Worth Opening
Potter closes with a description of the congregational singing, when thousands of voices in near-perfect tune and time were taught a new hymn verse by verse until the whole mass had caught it and were singing “with the ‘swing’ and fervor of a marching host.” He concludes that Spurgeon is worth hearing, but that next to Spurgeon comes the singing of his congregation.
I love that last observation. The power of the preacher led to the praise of the people. Isn’t that what every preacher longs for? To lean into the preaching to the point of unconscious self-forgetfulness, to be an overflowing fountain of truth, spilling over the listeners we plead with and seek to persuade, with the hope that all the waters of truth will gather again and erupt into a geyser of praise.
I’m grateful Potter wrote down these impressions. Reading this account, I felt stirred by the portrait of this preacher. Very few of us will ever fill a tabernacle, but all of us called to preach can seek to be direct, persuasive, and above all, real.
If you would like my future articles sent to your email, as well as a curated list of books, podcasts, and helpful links I find online, enter your address.
