Spurgeon's Depression as Pulpit

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 together — they were originally one psalm. Notice the refrain that comes three times: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God."

Read 2 Corinthians 4:7-12 — Paul's famous "treasure in jars of clay." "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed."

Read 1 Kings 19:1-9 — Elijah, the day after the greatest spiritual victory of his life, fleeing into the wilderness, asking God to take his life, sleeping under a broom tree. The angel does not give him a sermon. The angel gives him food and lets him sleep.

Reflection

On October 19, 1856, twenty-two-year-old Charles Spurgeon was preaching in the Surrey Music Hall to a crowd of around ten thousand people. Someone in the gallery — no one ever proved who or why — shouted "Fire!" In the panic that followed, seven people were trampled to death and dozens more were injured. Spurgeon, watching it from the pulpit, broke. He could not preach for weeks afterward. For the rest of his life, depression returned in seasons, sometimes mild, sometimes paralyzing, sometimes coinciding with the gout that crippled him physically. He would not preach for two or three Sundays at a time. He would write his wife from convalescence in the south of France, describing waves of darkness that came over him with no apparent trigger.

This is the man who built the largest church in Victorian England, founded a pastors' college, ran an orphanage, and produced a sermon series that has never been out of print. He was not a marginal figure with a private sorrow. He was the most famous Protestant preacher in the world, and he was depressed.

And what makes Spurgeon extraordinary — what makes him still useful to us a century and a half later — is that he refused to hide it.

Lecture 11 of his Lectures to My Students is called "The Minister's Fainting Fits." He delivered it to young men preparing for the pulpit. He could have said anything. He could have given them a manly speech about perseverance. Instead he opened by telling them: "Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down." He goes on for thousands of words. He describes the bodily causes of depression — overwork, inadequate sleep, the pressure of pastoral life. He describes the spiritual costs. He gives the famous line: "The mind can descend far lower than the body, for in it there are bottomless pits. The 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."

This is not the language of a man who has it all together. This is the language of a man who has decided that hiding his condition would be a worse betrayal of the gospel than naming it.

There is a category older Christian writers used that we have mostly lost: Christian melancholy. It is not exactly clinical depression — Spurgeon almost certainly had what we would now diagnose as recurrent major depression with a strong somatic component — but it overlaps. It names a kind of soul-darkness that visits believers, sometimes for reasons we can identify and sometimes for none, and that does not respond to "snap out of it" or "have more faith." The Puritans wrote about it. Luther wrote about it from his own experience. The Psalms are full of it. Modern Christians, having forgotten the category, often experience their depression as proof that something is wrong with their faith. Spurgeon would have told them otherwise.

Notice how Psalm 42 works. The psalmist is not in a good place. "My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, 'Where is your God?'" He remembers a time he could lead the procession to the house of God; now he cannot. He hears the taunt "Where is your God?" and he does not have a quick answer. What he does instead is preach to his own soul: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him."

This is not denial. He says "I shall again praise him" — again. He is not praising him right now. He is locating his hope in a future tense. And he is doing it three times, because once is not enough. Christian melancholy often requires saying the thing more than once, into a soul that is not currently in a position to feel it.

This is what Spurgeon did, week after week. He preached truth he was not always feeling. He told his soul to hope when his soul was not, in the moment, hopeful. And he came to believe — this is the strange thing — that his depression was not an obstacle to ministry but part of its raw material. He once said, "I would go into the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary." A pastor who has never been depressed cannot reach a depressed parishioner the way one who has been depressed can. The wound becomes the entry point.

Paul says it in a different idiom in 2 Corinthians 4: "We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us." The clay is not removed. It stays cracked. The point is that the treasure is visible because the clay is cracked. A vessel of polished gold would hide the light. A jar of clay shows it through the fractures.

If you are in a depressive season right now — chemical, situational, postpartum, grief-driven, the long ache of chronic illness, the kind that has no name — there are some things this tradition wants to say to you.

First, your depression does not disqualify you. Spurgeon, Luther, Cowper, the psalmist, and Elijah all had it. So have many faithful Christians sitting in pews around the world this Sunday. You are not, in this, an outlier. You are in a long line.

Second, you do not have to feel hope to confess it. Psalm 42 confesses hope as a future tense, not a present state. "I shall again praise him" is theology, not feeling. Saying it does not require feeling it.

Third, you may, in time, find that the depression itself becomes useful. Not pleasant. Not chosen. But useful — in the sense that the wounded healer reaches the wounded in ways the unwounded never can. Spurgeon's congregations heard him preach out of his depression and were comforted in their own. Your suffering may yet become the place from which you, in turn, comfort someone.

Fourth, get medical help if you need it. Spurgeon went to physicians, took the available treatments, and traveled to warmer climates when his body needed it. There is no Christian virtue in refusing care. The category of "spiritual" depression and the category of "clinical" depression are not enemies. They overlap, and treating the body is part of caring for the soul.

The man who said "kiss the wave that throws you against the Rock of Ages" said it because he had been thrown against the Rock so many times he knew its shape. The Rock did not move when his soul was in turmoil. It will not move when yours is.

Going Deeper

Take Psalm 42 and read it aloud, slowly, three times today — morning, noon, and night. Pay attention to the refrain. The psalmist preaches to himself; you are allowed to do the same. Speak it not as a feeling but as a confession of fact: "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God." The feeling may not come today. The truth is true anyway.