These qualities inhere in a nature of singular vigor,
intensity, and directness, that sends out words like bullets. Warmth
of feeling combined with narrowness of mind makes him a bigot; but
his bigotry is not the sour assertion of an opinion, but the racy
utterance of a nature. He believes in Spurgeonism so thoroughly and
so simply that toleration is out of the question, and doctrines
opposed to his own he refers, with instantaneous and ingenuous
dogmatism, to folly or wickedness. "I think," he says, in one of his
sermons, "I have none here so profoundly stupid as to be Puseyites.
I can scarcely believe that I have been the means of attracting one
person here so utterly devoid of one remnant of brain as to believe
the doctrine of baptismal regeneration." The doctrine, indeed, is so
nonsensical to him, that, after some caricatures of it, he asserts
that it would discredit Scripture with all sensible men, if it were
taught in Scripture. God himself could not make Mr. Spurgeon believe
it; and doubtless there are many High Churchmen who would retort,
that nothing short of a miracle could make them assent to some of
the dogmas of their assailant. Indeed, the incapacity of our
preacher to discern, or mentally to reproduce, a religious character
differing in creed from his own, makes him the most amusingly
intolerant of Popes, not because he is malignant, but because he is
Spurgeon.
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