In giving out the notices for the week, Mr. Spurgeon thanked the regular attendants of the church for having complied with the request he had made on the preceding Sabbath morning, and “stopped away at night,” thus leaving more room for strangers. “I hope still more of you will stop at home this evening,” he concluded in a tone of jolly fellowship the people appeared to comprehend and like. He was clearly thoroughly at one with his flock.
At night we also “stopped away,” but not at home. After much misdirection and searching, we found the alley—it was nothing better—leading to Dr. Cummings’s church in Crown Court, Long Acre. It was small, very small in our sight while the remembered roominess of the Tabernacle lingered with us,—plain as a Primitive Methodist Chapel in the country; badly lighted, and the high, straight pews were not half filled. The author of “Voices of the Dead” and “Lectures upon the Apocalypse” is a gray-haired man a little above medium height. His shoulders were bowed slightly—the bend of the student, not of infirmity; his features were clear-cut and spirituelle. He preached that night in faith and hope that were pathetic to us who had read his prophecies—or his interpretation of Divine prophecy—as long ago as 1850, and recalled the fact that the time set for the fulfilment of some of these had passed.
His text was Rev. i. 3: “_Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things that are written therein—for_ THE TIME IS AT HAND!”
He believed it. One read it in every word and gesture; in the rapt look of the eyes so long strained with watching for the nearer promise—the dayspring—of His coming; in the calm assurance of mien and tone, the dignity of a seer, whom Heaven was joined with earth to authenticate. He spoke without visible notes; his only gesture a slight lifting of both hands, with a fluttering, outward movement. We listened vainly for some token in his spoken composition of the epigrammatic, often antithetical style, that gives nerve and point to his published writings. The interesting, albeit desultory talk was, he informed us, the first of a series of sermons upon the Apocalypse he designed to deliver in that place from Sabbath to Sabbath. He had been diligently engaged of late in recasting the horoscope of the world. That was not the way he put it. But he did say that he had reviewed the calculations upon which his published “Lectures” were based, and would make known the result of his labors in the projected series.