Excerpt from The Essex Lad Who Became England's Greatest Preacher: The Life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, for Young People

The chief aim of writing and reading this book is to help young boys and girls to become as nearly like this Essex boy in spirit and life as can be. What he was or did sprang from his inner being, as a most godly disci ple of our Lord Jesus Christ. His very heart and soul found their life not in his creed, but in his love to Jesus and in cheerfully doing what his Master bade him to do. His hand was constantly blessing some one because he loved all men, so that love with him was life. Above all things else he prayed to be as exact a copy of Christ as he could be, both as a personal Christian and a preacher of the gospel. Thus, taking Christ as his only model, his faith, his hope, and his love were bright, tender, and lively, and made all his outer life real and earnest. True work in the cause of God followed as naturally from his hands as fruit from a healthy tree or as streams from a liv ing spring. He thought nothing of being poor or of moving in lowly circles, nothing of being meanly spoken of or wrongly treated, if men were saved by his toils and God was honored by his work. No matter how little or weak or forsaken any poor child was, he looked upon him in pity and tried in every way to lift him up. Lon don is a great city of four millions of people, and when he saw so many thousands of children there, hungry, in rags, and homeless, his eyes melted in tears. All his powers were put forth to get them bread and clothing and homes, and after that he daily sought by every winning act to make them true Christians.

A great many people, some of them ministers and some private disciples of the Lord Jesus, wish that they were as great and as good as Mr. Spurgeon was and they are trying to copy him, but they meet with dead failure.

The very fact that they take him for a model shows that they feel that they are small and mean when they com pare themselves with him. They fail, and ever will, be cause they only imitate his way of doing things, without the spirit, the life, and the purity which he drew from his inmost soul. Any person who tries to imitate Mr. Spur geon will be bitterly disappointed, unless he is a real Spurgeon in character to begin with. Men may copy his faults and weaknesses, just as the scholars of Plato, with out his wisdom, made humps on their shoulders because he had a crooked back but that was all. If the young readers of this book would like to do Spurgeon's work, they must first use his constant prayer, breathe his humil ity, and become full of the Holy Spirit.

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