Charles Spurgeon: Remembering the Prince of Preachers

Charles Haddon Spurgeon has no feast day on any church calendar, and he would have been the first to say he wanted none. He is remembered instead the way Reformed and Baptist Christians remember all their faithful dead: not by candle or procession, but by opening the books.

That is not a loss. It is the point. Spurgeon spent his pulpit years warning London against exactly the kind of veneration a feast day implies, and the absence of one is itself a fact worth understanding, and a door into who he actually was.

Does Charles Spurgeon have a feast day?

No. Charles Haddon Spurgeon holds no place on the Catholic or Orthodox calendars of saints, and Baptist and Reformed churches keep no calendar of saints' days at all, so there is no date set aside for him in the way Rome sets aside a day for Francis of Assisi or Constantinople for John Chrysostom.

The reason is doctrinal, not accidental. Spurgeon was a Particular Baptist, heir to a Puritan and Reformed tradition that reads the veneration of saints, the keeping of holy days beyond the Lord's Day, and the elevation of any minister above the ordinary priesthood of believers as departures from the plain teaching of Scripture. He preached often against what he saw as empty ritual crowding out the gospel, and he held, with the wider Reformed tradition, that Christ alone mediates, and that the church has one Head, not a calendar of them. To give Spurgeon a feast day would be to do to him precisely what he spent forty years telling the Church of England and the Church of Rome not to do to anyone.

That does not mean he is forgotten. It means he is remembered on the terms he would have recognized: through his words, still read at the hour he wrote them to be read, rather than through a saint's day he never sought and would have declined.

When Spurgeon is remembered

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born on the nineteenth of June, 1834, in Kelvedon, Essex, the son and grandson of Nonconformist ministers, and he died on the thirty-first of January, 1892, in Menton, on the French Riviera, where he had gone seeking relief from the gout and kidney disease that shadowed his last two decades. Neither date is a liturgical feast. Both are widely noted, informally and without ceremony, by pastors, publishers, and readers who mark the day a sermon or a devotional entry falls on the calendar.

Spurgeon's death anniversary in particular has become something like an unofficial commemoration among Baptist and Reformed churches, especially in Britain. Some congregations read from his sermons on or near the thirty-first of January. Many more simply note the date in passing, the way a family might note the anniversary of a grandfather's passing without any formal rite attached. The nearest thing to a living, dated Spurgeon observance is not a feast at all but a habit: opening Morning and Evening, the devotional he wrote to be read one entry per day, morning and evening, straight through the year, so that whatever today's date happens to be, Spurgeon has already written something for it. That habit, quietly kept in tens of thousands of households, is closer to how Reformed Christians actually honor a faithful pastor: not by asking his intercession, but by continuing to sit under his teaching.

His life ended amid extraordinary public grief for a Nonconformist minister. Some sixty thousand people filed past his coffin at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and roughly a hundred thousand lined the two miles of London streets for his funeral procession to West Norwood Cemetery. That was never sainthood. It was a city recognizing what it had lost: a voice that had preached to it, fed it, and argued with it in print every week for three decades.

What to read for it

The fullest way to keep Spurgeon's memory, on his birthday, on the anniversary of his death, or on any ordinary day, is to read the life whole, because no single sermon explains a man who preached ten thousand of them. The Prince of Preachers tells that life in three volumes, each answering a different question about him.

Born to Preach opens before the Metropolitan Tabernacle existed, before London had heard his name, with a boy raised among Puritan bookshelves who walked into a small Colchester chapel one snowbound morning and walked out converted, having heard a lay preacher take as his text Isaiah's plain command, look unto me. The Sword and the Trowel carries him into the pulpit that would seat six thousand, through chronic pain, recurring depression, and the Downgrade Controversy that cost him his denominational home, and shows a man who kept preaching grace while enduring more suffering than most congregations ever knew. Words That Will Not Die follows what happened after the coffin closed: sermons still printed, Morning and Evening still opened at breakfast tables, a legacy that never needed a feast day to keep moving.

Readers who want to begin without cost can start with the free Invitation volume of The Prince of Preachers, and readers who want every life the house keeps, across every tradition it publishes, will find the whole shelf through membership.