1 Timothy 4:11-16 These things command and teach.… Mr. Spurgeon began his remarkable career early enough to preach with a juvenile face many astonishingly effective sermons. His fiftieth anniversary, just celebrated, recalls an anecdote worth repetition. Mr. Spurgeon was asked, in what to most preachers would have been salad days, to deliver a discourse in a near village. Accordingly he went. On meeting the pastor, whose name was Brown, that good old gentleman was sadly disconcerted at his supply's youthful appearance. "Well, well," said he to Mr. Spurgeon, "I really did not dream that you were only a boy. I would not have asked you to preach for me if I had thought so." "Oh! well," said Mr. Spurgeon, laughing, "I can go back." But Mr. Brown would not permit this, and into the pulpit his boyish guest ascended. How he comported himself is thus narrated: "Mr. Brown planted himself on the pulpit stairs. Mr. Spurgeon read a lesson from the Proverbs, and upon coming to the passage, 'Grey hairs are a crown of glory to a man,' he said he doubted that, for he knew a man with a grey head who could hardly be civil. But the passage went on to say: 'If it be found in the way of righteousness,' and that, he said, was a different thing. When he came down from the pulpit Mr. Brown said to him: 'Bless your heart, I have been thirty years a minister, and I was never better pleased with a sermon; but you are the sauciest dog that ever barked in a pulpit'; and they were always good friends afterwards." Parallel Verses KJV: These things command and teach. |
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