Charles H. Spurgeon

If I turn to the pages of history to find out the best men who ever lived, do you know where I find them? Not among those who were called “respectable” in there time … I see great names, Erasmus and others, mighty and learned men, but on a dirty thumbed page I see the name of Luther associated with such epithets as these – “dog, adulterer, beast,” and everything else that the malice of Rome could suggest. And I say, “Ah, this is the man whom God has chosen, for he went without the camp.” That list of great divines and of schoolmen and of theologians, you may wipe them all out without much regret! But this man, “without the camp,” he is somebody … Turn to another list of archbishops, bishops, deans, rural deans, rectors and curates … There is nothing special about any of them. At last I find a picture by Hogarth – a caricature of a man preaching with devils coming out of his mouth, and underneath it is written, “Fire and brimstone.” I look at the portrait and I say, “See, it is Mr. Whitefield.” Ah! There is the man of the age, depend upon it, that man all black, charged with crimes that Sodom never knew … this man here that is abused, that is laughed at, that is mocked; this is the man who is somebody.

Courtesy of Wicket Gate