This week’s Saturday Spurgeon comes from the preface to Volume 9 0f the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit.
The sermon entitled, “The Warrant of Faith,” has caused some little controversy, and one very absurd pamphlet has been issued in order to disprove it, but the writer was far too ignorant of Scripture and the fundamental principles of all theology, to be worthy of an answer. It is greatly to be desired that those who are led captives by ultra-Calvinistic theories would weigh the arguments of this sermon carefully, and then I pray they would begin to preach the whole Gospel, instead of a part, and preach it freely to sinners in the name of Jesus! The Truth of God is no more to be contained in one rigid system than the ocean in a shell! Divine Sovereignty is a great and undoubted fact, but human responsibility is quite as indisputable. God in His plan of Grace contemplates man as a reasonable being, and not as a stone or a beast. His deeds of Grace never violate the will, but sweetly constrain it to consent. Salvation is all of Grace—but God works by means. Faith is God’s gift, but it is also the act of renewed manhood. Damnation is the result of justice, not of arbitrary predestination. O that the time were here when seeming opposites would be received because faith knows that they are portions of one harmonious whole! Would that an enlarged view of the dispensations of God to man would permit ministers to be faithful to the human race, and at the same time true to the Sovereign Lord of All! The Lord knows with what earnestness of soul this preacher has striven to declare not a part—but the whole of the Counsel of God.
