Our good friend and gospel minister from England, Eric W. Hayden, once pastor at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and the most knowledgeable Spurgeon historian alive today, writes: “In many of Spurgeon’s published volumes of sermons there appear ‘expositions of Scripture’ following certain sermons. These appear in the volumes published after his death in 1892, the publishers probably wanting to fill up space since they were making use of sermon material that had not been revised by Spurgeon himself. It will be noticed that the sermons from 1893 onwards are slightly shorter, in many cases, than the ones published prior to 1892. “Commenting on a typical service at the Tabernacle in which Spurgeon preached, a newspaper man reported that the ‘preliminaries’ took about fifty-five minutes, and then the preacher preached for about fifty to fifty-five minutes, thus the service was comprised of two equal halves.”

A part of the “preliminaries” was “the Bible reading in which Spurgeon freely commented upon each verse as it was read. It is these comments that are printed in the later volumes of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit.”