It is with great pleasure, as usual, that I pick up another Iain Murray volume from Banner of Truth. This one, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism, is different from the others I’ve read in a couple of ways. First, it’s a paperback. (I pause here to direct a frown in the Banner’s direction. It was never published in hardcover, so I couldn’t even track down a used copy, as I often do, and I can't set it next to my cloth-bound Murray volumes on the shelf.) Second, it turns our critical eye one hundred and eighty degrees from its usual orientation, away from the Arminians, and toward the hyper-Calvinists.

Murray begins with a little biographical information, and comments on the remarkable scope of Spurgeon’s influence. Spurgeon’s preaching ministry in London spanned thirty-seven years, from 1854–1891. During that time, “If we take into account [Murray writes] both his spoken and written words, it is estimated that each weak his ‘congregation’ amounted to about a million people.” Beginning in 1855, his sermons were published weekly, and also compiled in annually, the 63rd and final volume published twenty-five years posthumously. And that was just his preaching. In addition, he published “about 50 other works and edited 28 volumes of The Sword and Trowel.” His publishers, Passmore and Alabaster, were kept busy — and in business — with publishing Spurgeon’s works alone. Murray writes:

   The obvious question is, how could any man retain such influence over so many people through such a long period? How can we account for the enduring interest? How could a man speak so often, and write so much, without losing his freshness and his appeal? It is true Spurgeon possessed unusual gifts, and that he worked very hard, but we cannot get anywhere near the real answer if we think merely in terms of what he was or did. The explanation lies in the Book that was in his hands, the Book that was his constant companion, and which he lived to preach and study. All the blessing he attributed to that source. His own thoughts, his own opinions, would have achieved nothing:
   ‘“The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul”; nothing else but the living Word of God will convince, convert, renew and sanctify. He has promised that this shall not return unto him void; but He has made no such promise to the wisdom of men, or the excellency of human speech. The Spirit of God works with the Word of God . . . All his paths drop fatness; but man’s paths are barrenness.’
   In possessing the Bible Spurgeon believed that the church has an inexhaustible source of light and heat. What he said once of John Bunyan could be equally said of himself, ‘Prick him anywhere and his bloodline is bibline’. The content of his sermons and his books is plain, you might say, ordinary, Scripture. The energy of his prayerful adherence to Scripture is the true explanation of his work:
   ‘The Bible is a wonderful book . . . You can use it for a lamp at night. You can use it for a screen by day. It is a universal book; it is the Book of books, and has furnished material for mountains of books; it is made of what I call bibline, or the essence of books . . . This one book is enough to last a man throughout the whole of his life, however diligently he may study it.’

—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 12–13.