Recollections of a Long Life: An AutobiographyCuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Religion
Recollections of a Long Life: An Autobiography
Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Clergy -- United States -- Biography; Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard), 1822-1909
He generally maintained an even flow of evangelical thought, but
sometimes he rose into a burst of thrilling eloquence, as he did in Mr.
Beecher's church, when he made his noble appeal for Union between
England and America. From his youth he was fond of street preaching. I
have seen him gather a crowd, and hold them attentively while he sowed a
few seeds of truth in their hearts.
I wish I had the space to describe some of the foregatherings that I
have had with my twin brother in the Gospel. We visited Italy together,
preached to "the Saints that are in Rome," and went down into that room
in the sub-basement of St. Clement's where Paul is believed to have held
meetings with them that were of Caesar's household. We roamed out on the
Appian Road, over which the great Apostle entered the Eternal City. So
conscientious was my brother Hall in his teetotalism that though tired
and thirsty, he never would touch the weak, common wine of the country,
lest his example might be plead in favor of the drinking usages. We
once went up to Olney and sat in Cowper's summer house, and entered John
Newton's church, and the old sexton told Dr. Hall that he had been
converted by "Come to Jesus." We went together to Stonehenge, and as we
passed over Salisbury Plain we recalled Hannah Moore's famous shepherd
who said: "The weather to-morrow will be what suits me, for what suits
God, suits me always." We spent a very delightful couple of days in
rowing down the romantic river Wye, stopping for lunch at Wordsworth's
Tintern Abbey. In his home he was a hospitable Gaius, with open doors
and hearts to friends from all lands. He had the merry sportiveness of a
schoolboy, and when our long talks in his study were over, he would
seize his hat and the chain of his pet dog, and cry out: "Come, brother,
come, and let us have a tramp over the Heath." He was a prodigious
pedestrian, and at three score and ten he held his own over a Swiss
glacier, with the members of the Alpine Club. He had hoped to equal his
famous predecessor, Rowland Hill, and preach till he was ninety; but
when he was near his eighty-sixth birthday he was stricken with
paralysis, and never left his bed again. Those last two weeks were spent
in the "Land of Beulah," and in full view of "The Celestial City." When
asked if he suffered pain, he replied: "I have no pain, and nothing to
disturb the solemnity of dying." On the morning of February fourteenth
he passed peacefully over the river, and, as Bunyan said of old
Valiant-for-the-Truth, "The trumpets sounded for him on the other side."
No monarch on his throne is so to be envied as he who now wears that
celestial crown.
Can anything new be said about Charles H. Spurgeon? Perhaps not, and yet
I should be guilty of injustice to myself and to my readers if I failed
to pay my love tribute to the most extraordinary preacher of the pure
Gospel to all Christendom whom England produced in the last century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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