Heritage: Spurgeon on Reason

                                                                                                                                                                        Vol. XIII, No. 3, March 2000

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon was the greatest Baptist pastor of the last half of the nineteenth century, leading from London's Metropolitan Tabernacle. Here is a quote from Spurgeon which pungently addresses the fallen human tendency to rely on mankind's reason rather than God's revelation. Everything Spurgeon says below is many times more pertinent today. TCP]

"I used to hear that evangelical writers produced platitudes; I believe they did, but surely they never wrote more watery trash than is produced in the present day in opposition to the orthodox faith, but then you see it is given out in such a latinized jargon that its obscurity is mistaken for profundity. If you have the time and patience to read a little of what is written by the modern-thought gentlemen, you will not be long before you are weary of their word-spinning, their tinkering of old heresies into original thought, and their general mystifying of plain things. It only needs a man of power to smash them up like potters' vessels, but then the result would only be pieces of pottery. "Show us a man worth following," say we, "and when you do we will not follow him, but fight with him: at the present we are not likely to leave Calvin and Paul and Augustine to follow you."