"I cultivate my flowers and burn my weeds." ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon
1. Where in Scripture do you find that smoking a cigar is a sin?
2. What proof do you have that C.H. Spurgeon “knew” that cigar smoking was injurious to his health.
3. What proof do you have that Spurgeon over ate and did not simply have a gland problem or slow metabolism?
Spurgeon said,
The condition of your body must be attended to...a little more...common sense would be a great gain to some who are ultra spiritual, and attribute all their moods of feeling to some supernatural cause when the real reason lies far nearer to hand. Has it not often happened that dyspepsia has been mistaken for backsliding, and bad digestion has been set down as a hard heart?
4. So on your specific charges of Spurgeon’s specific error (sin) what specific proof do you have to make your charge? I am not saying that CH Spurgeon was without sin. After all, his eschatology was not A-Mil.<img src="/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
As Charles Spurgeon said long ago, "There is no point of biblical interpretation and application where men make greater mistakes than the relationship which exists between the Law and the Gospel."
On October 19, 1856 he preached for the first time in the Music Hall of the Royal Surrey Gardens because his own church would not hold the people. The 10,000 seating capacity was far exceeded as the crowds pressed in. Someone shouted, "Fire!" and there was great panic in parts of the building. Seven people were killed in the stampede and scores were injured.
Spurgeon was 22 years old and was overcome by this calamity. He said later, "Perhaps never soul went so near the burning furnace of insanity, and yet came away unharmed." But not all agreed he was unharmed. The specter brooded over him for years and one close friend and biographer said, "I cannot but think, from what I saw, that his comparatively early death might be in some measure due to the furnace of mental suffering he endured on and after that fearful night."
Spurgeon also knew the adversity of family pain. He had married Susannah Thomson January 8 in the same year of the calamity at Surrey Gardens. His only two children, twin sons, were born the day after the calamity on October 20.
Susannah was never able to have more children. In 1865 (nine years later), when she was 33 years old she became a virtual invalid and seldom heard her husband preach for the next 27 years till his death. Some kind of rare cervical operation was attempted in 1869 by James Simpson, the father of modern gynecology, but to no avail. So to Spurgeon's other burdens were added a sickly wife and the inability to have more children, though his own mother had given birth to seventeen.
He also knew unbelievable physical pain. Spurgeon suffered from gout, rheumatism and Bright's disease (inflammation of the kidneys). His first attack of gout came in 1869 at the age of 35. It became progressively worse so that "approximately one third of the last twenty-two years of his ministry was spent out of the Tabernacle pulpit, either suffering, or convalescing, or taking precautions against the return of the illness." In a letter to a friend he wrote, "Lucian says, `I thought a cobra had bitten me, and filled my veins with poison; but it was worse,-it was gout.' That was written from experience, I know."
For over half his ministry Spurgeon dealt with ever increasingly recurrent pain in his joints that cut him down from the pulpit and from his labors again and again. The diseases finally took his life at age 57 while he was convalescing in Mentone, France.
Charles Spurgeon: Preaching Through Adversity
