The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858. Charles H. Spurgeon

very top of the fashion; you shall not see me in anything differing from the accepted style of the present day. May I not, when I am arrayed in court dress, and have decorated myself as etiquette demands, come in before her Majesty? See, I will doff this plume, I will not shake this tomahawk, I renounce these garments. The moccasins I cast away for ever; I am an Englishmen in dress, as well as name.” He comes to the gate, dressed up like one of our own countrymen; but the gates are still shut in his face, because the law required that he must be born in the country; and without that, whatever his dress might be, he could not enter the palace. How many are there of you, who do not barely take the Christian name upon you, but have adopted Christian manners; you go to your churches and your chapels, you attend the house of God, you take care that there is some form of religion observed in your family, your children are not left without hearing the name of Jesus! So far so good; God forbid that I should say a word against it! But remember, it is bad because you do not go further. All this is of no avail whatever for admitting you into the kingdom of heaven, unless this also is complied with — the being born again. Oh! dress yourselves never so grandly with the garments of godliness; put the garland of benevolence upon your brow, and gird your loins with integrity; put on your feet the shoes of perseverance, and walk through the earth an honest and upright man; yet, remember, unless you are born again, “what is of the flesh is flesh,” and you, not having the operations of the Spirit in you, still have heaven’s gates shut against you, because you are not born again.

      5. “Well,” this Indian says, “I will not only adopt the dress, but I will learn the language; I will put away my brogue and my language that I once spoke in the wild prairie or in the woods, far away from my lips. I shall not talk of the Shu-Shuh-gah, and of the strange names by which I have called my wild fowl and my deer, but I will speak as you speak, and act as you act; I will not only have your dress, but precisely your manners, I will talk just in the same fashion, I will adopt your brogue, I will take care that it shall be grammatically correct; will you not then admit me? I have become thoroughly Anglicised; may I not then be received?” “No,” says the keeper of the door, “there is no admittance; for unless a men is born in this country, he cannot be admitted.” So with some of you; you talk just like Christians. Perhaps you have a little too much fanaticism about you; you have begun so strictly to imitate what you think to be a godly man, that you go a little beyond the mark, and you gloss it so much that we are able to detect the counterfeit. Still you pass among most men as being a down right Christian. You have studied biographies, and sometimes you tell long tales about divine experience; you have borrowed them from the biographies of good men; you have been with Christians, and know how to talk as they do; you have caught a Puritan twang, perhaps; you go through the world just like professors do; and if you were to be observed, no one would detect you. You are a member of the church; you have been baptized; you take the Lord’s supper; perhaps you are a deacon, or an elder; you pass the sacramental cup around, you are just all that a Christian can be, except that you are without a Christian heart. You are whitewashed sepulchres, still full of rottenness within, though garnished fairly on the outside. Well, take heed, take heed! It is an astonishing thing, how near the painter can go to capture the expression of life, and yet the canvas is dead and motionless; and it is equally astonishing how near a man may go to appear to be a Christian, and yet, through not being born again, the absolute rule shuts him out of heaven; and with all his profession, with all the trappings of his professed godliness, and with all the gorgeous plumes of experience, yet must he be borne away from heaven’s gates.

      6. You are uncharitable, Mr. Spurgeon. I do not care what you say about that; I never wish to be more charitable than Christ. I did not say this; Christ said it. If you have any quarrel with him, settle it there; I am not the maker of this truth, but simply the speaker of it. I find it written, “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” If your footman should go to the door, and deliver your message correctly, the man at the door might abuse him ever so much, but the footman would say, “Sir, do not abuse me, I cannot help it; I can only tell you what my master told me. I am not the originator of it.” So if you think me uncharitable, remember you do not accuse me, you accuse Christ; you are not finding fault with the messenger, you are finding fault with the message; Christ has said it — “Unless a man is born again.” I cannot dispute with you, and shall not try. That is simply God’s word. Reject it at your peril. Believe it and receive it, I entreat you, because it comes from the lip of the Most High.

      7. But now note the manner in which this regeneration is obtained. I think I have no one here so profoundly stupid as to be Puseyites. {a} I can scarcely believe that I have been the means of attracting one person here, so utterly devoid of every remnant of brain, as to believe the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. Yet I must just hint at it. There are some who teach that by a few drops of water sprinkled on an infant’s brow, the infant becomes regenerate. Well, granted. And now I will look at your regenerate ones twenty years later. The champion of the prize ring is a regenerated man. Oh! yes, he was regenerated, because in infancy he was baptized; and, therefore, if all infants in baptism are regenerated, the prize fighter is a regenerate man. Take hold of him and receive him as your brother in the Lord. Do you hear that man swearing and blaspheming God? He is regenerate, believe me, he is regenerate; the priest put a few drops of water on his brow, and he is a regenerated man. Do you see the drunkard reeling down the street, the pest of the neighbourhood, fighting everyone, and beating his wife, worse than the brute. Well, he is regenerate, he is one of those Puseyite’s regenerates — oh, goodly regenerate! Notice the crowd assembled in the streets? The gallows is erected, Palmer {b} is about to be executed; the man whose name should be execrated through all eternity for his villainy! Here is one of those Puseyite’s regenerates. Yes, he is regenerate, because he was baptized in infancy; regenerate while he mixes his strychnine, regenerate while he administers his poison slowly, that he may cause death, and infinite pain, all the while he is causing it. Regenerate, truly! If that is regeneration, such regeneration is not worth having; if that is the thing that makes us free of the kingdom of heaven, truly, the gospel is indeed a licentious gospel; we can say nothing about it. If that is the gospel, that all such men are regenerate and will be saved, we can only say, that it would be the duty of every man in the world to get rid of that gospel right away, because it is so inconsistent with the most common principles of morality, that it could not possibly be of God, but of the devil.

      8. But some say all are regenerate when they are baptized. Well, if you think so, stick to your own thoughts; I cannot help it. Simon Magus was certainly one exception; he was baptized on a profession of his faith, but so far from being regenerated by his baptism, we find Peter saying, “I perceive that you are in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” And yet he was one of those regenerates, because he had been baptized. Ah! that doctrine only needs to be stated to sensible men, and they will at once reject it. Gentlemen that are fond of a superficial religion, and like ornament and show; gentlemen of the high Beau Brummel {c} school, will very likely prefer this religion, because they have cultivated their taste at the expense of their brain, and have forgotten that what is inconsistent with the sound judgment of a man cannot be consistent with the word of God. So much for the first point.

      9. Neither is a man regenerated, we say, in the next place, by his own exertions. A man may reform himself very much, and that is well and good; let all do that. A man may cast away many vices, forsake many lusts in which he indulged, and conquer evil habits; but no man in the world can make himself to be born of God; though he should struggle ever so much, he could never accomplish what is beyond his power. And, notice that if he could make himself to be born again, still he could not enter heaven, because there is another point in the condition which he would have violated — “unless a man is born of the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” So that the best exertions of the flesh do not reach this high point, the being born again of the Spirit of God.

      10. And, now we must say, that regeneration consists in this, God the Holy Spirit, in a supernatural manner — notice, by the word supernatural I mean just what it strictly means; supernatural, more than natural — works upon the hearts of men, and they by the operations of the divine Spirit become regenerate men; but without the Spirit they never can be regenerated. And unless God the Holy Spirit, who “works in us to will and to do,” should operate