Charles Spurgeon Trusts Christ

The wind cut across the fields outside Colchester that morning and drove the snow straight into our faces. I had left the cottage early with my brother to clear the lane, but by the time we reached Artillery Street the drifts already reached the sills of the little chapel. Only a handful of us made it inside. We stamped our boots on the stone floor and shook the flakes from our coats while the stove struggled against the cold.

A young man came in last. He looked no more than fifteen, coat soaked at the shoulders, hair dark with meltwater. He took the nearest bench without looking round and sat with his hands clenched between his knees. I had never seen him before. Most of our regular dozen were missing, blocked by the same storm that had kept our own preacher at home.

We waited. The minutes passed with only the sound of the wind against the single window. Then one of the older men rose, thin and uncertain, and climbed the three steps to the pulpit. He carried no notes. His voice shook when he announced the text from Isaiah: look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth. He repeated the words twice, as though afraid they would slip away from him.

He spoke plainly after that. Looking required no strength, he said, no learning, no money. A child could do it. A dying man could do it. He pointed to the cross as though it stood in the room with us, described the blood and the nails and the rising again, and kept coming back to the single command. Look. The congregation stayed quiet. We had heard sermons before, but this one carried no flourishes and no pauses for effect.

The stranger on the bench never moved his head. His shoulders stayed rigid, yet something in his posture changed when the preacher reached the part about the Saviour sweating blood. His eyes, which had been fixed on the floorboards, lifted. He stared at the empty space above the pulpit rail as though he saw the figure the thin man described.

The preacher finished sooner than expected. He stepped down without a closing prayer. A few of us stood to leave, but the young man remained seated. I stayed too, pretending to fasten my coat. After a moment he rose and walked to the back of the chapel where a single candle still burned on a shelf. He stood there alone for several minutes. When he turned, his face had lost the tight, hunted look it carried when he arrived. He nodded once to the thin preacher, who was still putting on his scarf, and stepped out into the snow.

I did not see him again for years. Reports reached us that a boy from the villages had begun to preach in small rooms and then in larger halls. His name was given in the papers as Charles Spurgeon. He spoke of the same text that had been read that morning in Artillery Street. He told crowds that a man need only look, and that looking had been enough for him when the snow kept him from every other door.

The chapel itself stayed small. The thin man who preached never sought another pulpit. He returned to his trade and attended when he could. I kept my seat near the back on most Sundays, and sometimes, when the stove was lit and the room filled with twelve or fourteen voices, I thought of the stranger who had walked in wet and left changed. The words had not altered between that day and this one. Only the number of people willing to hear them had grown.

Spurgeon’s sermons began to appear in print. Copies reached Colchester. In one of them he described the exact bench and the exact snow and the exact moment the burden lifted when he trusted the promise spoken by a man whose name he never learned. He never returned to the chapel, but the account he gave matched what we had seen. The thin preacher read the printed words once and said nothing more about them.