Charles Haddon Spurgeon not only pastored the largest church in the world, he founded an orphanage, a pastors’ college, operated 21 mission halls, and led in other great ministries to the poor of London. He also published more sermons and wrote more materials than any other Englishspeaking evangelical preacher of his day, or since.
His 135 books (plus another 28 which he edited) total about twenty-three million words, or the equivalent of the 27 volumes of the 9th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica! About 4,000 of his sermons remain in print today and are still among the best-selling volumes by any religious author, living or dead. The majority of these are in the magnificent New Park Street Pulpit and Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, recently reprinted by Pilgrim Publications.
But he must have preached at least three or four times as many; he was busy throughout the week outside of the Tabernacle, and preached there twice on Sunday and once during the week, while only one of these sermons was usually published in the weekly “Penny Pulpit.”
The publishers were able to keep selecting one hitherto unpublished sermon from the many manuscripts left behind each week right up into 1917, 25 years after his death.
This collection, Able to the Uttermost, is a further twenty sermons which may right be called the Forgotten Sermons of C. H. Spurgeon. They were printed in 1922 from hitherto unpublished manuscripts after the final official one was issued on May 10, 1917.
Here then we have a slightly enlarged view of the great preacher. His presentation, insight, warmth of spiritual realism, and uplifting of the substitutionary atonement are in view on almost every page.
It is fitting that such a volume should be re-issued soon upon the heels of the sesquicentennial year of his birth (1834). Some 500 more ‘Forgotten Sermons’ have recently been discovered which have never yet been published in volume format. Our hope is that the reception given to this volume may be such that publication of these will also be encouraged.
Craig P. Skinner, Ph.D.
Professor of Preaching Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary Mill Valley, California Author of LAMPLIGHTER AND SON — The Forgotten Story of Thomas Spurgeon and His Famous Father, C. H. Spurgeon ; Broadman Press, 1984 — (Sesquicentennial Edition).
