It's been too long...here is some more Spurgeon

We started a family habit of reading at the dinner table on Saturday nights after dinner excerpts from Sermons of Charles Spurgeon. Zeb enjoys the time enough that he starts pointing at the book on other nights wanting daddy to read again. Well, he did it again Sunday night and I was willing to indulge his desires. I even let him thumb through the book to pick one. He picked a great one (yes, it is not that hard a task to pick a great sample from Spurgeon). I wanted to share this one as it once again shows how many troubles of this world are so timeless. I particularly liked the remarks toward the press. Enough of my intro...on to the Spurgeon excerpt. Enjoy.

It would positively alarm many of our sober orthodox Christians, if they could once have an idea of the utter ignorance of spiritual things that reigns throughout this land. Some of us, when moving about here and there, in all glasses of society, have often been led to remark, that there is less known of the truths of religion than of any science, however recondite that science may be. Take as a lamentable instance, the ordinary effusions of the secular press, and who can avoid remarking the ignorance they manifest as to true religion. Let the papers speak on politics, it is a matter they understand, and their ability is astonishing, but, once let them touch religion, and our Sabbath-school children could convict them of entire ignorance. The statements they put forth are so crude, so remote from the fact, that we are led to imagine that the presentation of a fourpenny testament to special correspondents, should be one of the first efforts of our societies for spreading the gospel among the heathen. As to theology, some of our great writers seem to be as little versed in it as a horse or a cow. Go among all ranks and classes of men, and singe the day we gave up our catechism, and old Dr. Watts' and the Assemblies ceased to be used, people have not a clear idea of what is meant by the gospel of Christ. I have frequently heard it asserted, by those who have judged the modern pulpit without severity, that if a man attended a course of thirteen lectures on geology, he would get a pretty clear idea of the system, but that you might hear not merely thirteen sermons, but thirteen hundred sermons and you would not have a clear idea of the system of divinity that was meant to be taught.