CHARLES H. SPURGEON SERMONS
- Charles H. Spurgeon sermons has been used by more preachers than any other preacher I think. I remember on of my first experience preaching outside my home church was in North Caroline, at my father's friends church. That Sunday Morning I preached a sermon that Charles Spurgeon had preached. I was only about 17 years old. I had no idea of the impact of Charles Spurgeon. I knew that Dad had a set of his sermons in his own library and I was reading the sermons. So I thought it would be good to take on of the sermons and try to preach it. Of course I had not been to seminary and had little idea about the art of preaching. But that was the beginning of my learing to preach.
Simply recording Spurgeon's messages was a labor-intensive process in those days before electronic sound-capture was commonplace. Spurgeon spoke extemporaneously, without the use of a manuscript. (He normally took only half a used envelope or a similar scrap of paper into the pulpit with him, containing just a handwritten, bare-bones outline.) Two or three stenographers would record his words as he spoke. Their transcriptions would be compared and combined, insuring that very few words were missed. Then either Spurgeon himself (usually), his trusted secretary (especially in later years), or another qualified editor (beginning around the turn of the century) would edit the transcript for publication. I own several pages of edited transcripts with emendations scrawled into the margins by Spurgeon's own distinctive hand, and he was a meticulous editor. (It is some consolation to me as a rather halting preacher to see that some of the stunning eloquence of the published sermons was added during the editorial process. All that genius wasn't straight off the top of Spurgeon's head when he preached-though much of it was.) The task of editing and proofreading sermons was a massive one, and the stress of so many relentless deadlines no doubt complicated Spurgeon's frequent health problems. It may well have hastened his death.
