Spurgeon lived with depression most of his adult life. Early in his ministry, Asiatic cholera swept through the tenement section of London around New Park Street church. Young Spurgeon , seeing friends fall one by one, was seized with despair until he saw a note in a shop window that read, “Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation, there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”
As crowds grew at New Park Street Chapel, the congregation was forced to larger and larger facilities to accommodate them. On one occasion, when ten thousand people had gathered to hear him preach, someone suddenly cried “Fire!” A terrible panic followed in which seven were killed and scores injured. It is said that Spurgeon’s depression deepened and that he never fully recovered.
Spurgeon wrote, “The tongue of the taught belongs only to those who also are men of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
“In the days of his greatest preaching in the Tabernacle, Spurgeon was often in despair and even thought of quitting, for he felt that his illness kept him too often from the pulpit.”
Spurgeon lists several causes for depression. He wrote, “The times most favorable to fits of depression, I have experienced, may be summed up in a brief catalogue. “
“First among them I mention the hour of great success. When at last a long-cherished desire is fulfilled, when God has been glorified greatly by our means, a great triumph achieved, then we are apt to faint….”
Second, “In the midst of a long stretch of unbroken labour, the same affliction may be looked for. The bow cannot be always bent without fear of breaking. Repose is as needful to the mind as sleep to the body….”
Third, “Before any great achievement, some measure of the same depression is very usual. Surveying the difficulties before us, our hearts sink within us…. This depression comes over me whenever the Lord is preparing a larger blessing for my ministry.”
Fourth, “This evil will also come upon us, we know not why, and then it is all the more difficult to drive it away. Causeless depression is not to be reasoned with…. If these who laugh at such melancholy did but feel the grief of it for one hour, their laughter would be sobered into compassion.”
Speaking of human pride and suffering Spurgeon said, “Our wine must needs be mixed with water, lest it turn our brains. My witness is, that those who are honored by their Lord in public have usually to endure a secret chastening, or to carry a secret chastening…lest by any means they exalt themselves….” And again, “By all the castings down of His servants God is glorified….”
“The refiner is never far from the mouth of the furnace when the gold is in that fire, and the Son of God is always walking in the midst of the flames when His holy children are cast into them.”
“…it is only felt affliction which can become blest affliction. If we are carried over every stream, where would be the trial and where the experience, which trouble is meant to teach us?”
“The Lord frequently appears to save His heaviest blows for His best-loved ones…the Gardener prunes his best roses with most care.”
“Discipline is sent to keep successful saints humble, to make them tender towards others, and to enable them to bear the high honours which their heavenly Friend puts upon them.”
“There is always a merciful limit to the [disciplining] of the sons of God. Forty stripes save one were all that an Israelite might receive….”
“If the Christian did not sometime suffer heaviness he would begin to grow too proud, and think too much of himself, and become too great in his own esteem.”
“Another reason for this discipline is, I think, that in heaviness we often learn lessons that we never could attain elsewhere.”
“Men will never become great in divinity until they become great in suffering. ‘Ah!’ said Luther, ‘affliction is the best book in my library,’ and let me add, the best leaf in the book of affliction is that blackest of all the leaves, the leaf called heaviness, when the spirit sinks within us, and we cannot endure as we could wish.”
“And yet again; this heaviness is of essential use to a Christian, if he would do good to others.”
“There are none so tender as those who have been skinned themselves. Those who have been in the chamber of affliction know how to comfort those who are there.”
“He may make His sons of thunder anywhere; but His sons of consolation He must make in the fire, and there alone.”
Depression often results from too much study and too little exercise. Spurgeon said, “I confess that I frequently sit hour after hour praying and waiting for a subject, and that is the main part of my study. Almost every Sunday of my life I prepare enough outlines of sermons to last me for a month.”
Jesus said to His weary disciples, “Let us go into the desert and rest awhile.” Spurgeon said, “…The Lord Jesus knows better. He will not exhaust the strength of His servants prematurely and quench the light of Israel. Rest time is not waste. It is economy to gather fresh strength.”
“…infirmities may be no detriment to a man’s career of special usefulness; they may even have been imposed upon him by divine wisdom as necessary qualifications for his peculiar course of service. Some plants owe their medicinal qualities to the marsh in which they grow….”
“Pain has, probably, in some cases developed genius, hunting out the soul which otherwise might have slept like a lion in its den.”
“How low the spirits of good and brave men will sometimes sink…but the [pain] is as real as a gaping wound, and all the more hard to bear because it lies so much in the region of the soul that to the inexperienced it appears to be a mere matter of fancy and imagination. Reader, never ridicule the nervous and hypochondriacal, their pain is real—it is not imaginary….The mind can descend far lower than the body…flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways and die over and over again each hour.”
It is said that many times Spurgeon came home from meetings at the great tabernacle exhausted and in great depression. Then Susanna, Spurgeon’s wife, would read to him from Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, at which he would weep and she would weep with him. (Richard Day, The Shadow of the Broad Brim, p.p. 113, 114)
