If Watts was a great painter, he was assuredly a greater man, and one really felt in his presence the vastness of the possibilities of the race. But as a small human individual one also felt very small indeed. That is the effect of the Puritan. Probably most people felt small when they met Milton. But I can imagine that nobody could be in the same room with Shakespeare without feeling great.
I have remarked in another place that the man who takes his religion too seriously stands suspect of not quite believing in it. Those who are never troubled with doubts are prone to a wild hilarity which often exposes them to the charge of irreverence and coarse handling of sacred things. Since Nonconformity has widened, and new theologies have been propounded, it has become almost oppressively refined. When it was very narrow and dogmatic, and assured of itself, its chief exponents were often condemned as vulgar people. They were not really vulgar; they were only so much on terms with their belief that they could take liberties with it and all things.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a man of that type. He was an unlearned man, and if he had been learned it is not at all likely that he would have been a profound or exact thinker; it is much more probable that he would have been dulled into mere mediocrity. But if he did not know much of bookish things, he knew a good deal about things in general, and he knew (or thought he knew) absolutely one thing in particular, namely, that he was right in his conception of the purpose of Providence. It was this certitude, rather than any ingrained coarseness, that made him so boisterous and rollicking in his dealings with the most solemn subjects. He looked on “soul-saving” with the same sense of reality that a bricklayer looks on bricklaying, and he joked about it as a bricklayer jokes when anything funny is suggested to him by an incident in his work.
Spurgeon did not survive long into the Nineties, but his influence did not altogether cease to count till the end of the decade. By the new century it was dying, and to-day it is dead—at any rate, so far as the high places of Nonconformity are concerned. The name Spurgeon is Dutch, and the great preacher was a Hollander in his remote origin; he descended from a refugee who came to this country to escape the Alva persecution. Spurgeon’s father was an Independent Minister, and he himself was “converted” by the Primitive Methodists, but at an early age he embraced the Baptist faith, and he preached as a Baptist his first sermon, delivered at sixteen, in a Cambridgeshire cottage. His family wished him to have some sort of “college” education, but he went his own way, believing then as always that practical work in “soul-saving” was more important than scholarship.