5 - Many Magdalenes
Redeemed and Redeeming
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2022
Summary
On Sunday morning, 7 October 1855, the renowned Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) delivered a sermon on conversion to his congregation at New Park Street Chapel in Southwark, London. He extolled the virtues of converting sinners and ensuring their salvation. The principal means for saving sinners, he declared, was through preaching. He went on, somewhat melodramatically and not a little immodestly, to tell of the effects of one of his sermons. It was a Sunday night, he declared, not long ago, when
A poor harlot determined she would go and take her life on Blackfriars Bridge. Passing by these doors one Sunday night, she thought she would step in, and for the last time hear something that might prepare her to stand before her Maker. She forced herself into the aisle, and she could not escape until I rose from the pulpit. The text was, ‘Seest thou this woman?’ I dwelt upon Mary Magdalene and her sins; her washing the Saviour’s feet with her tears, and wiping them with the hair of her head. There stood the woman, melted away with the thought that she should thus hear herself described, and her own life painted. Oh! to think of saving a poor harlot from death, to deliver such an one from going down to the grave, and then, as God pleased, to save her soul from going down to hell! … When I thought of this text yesterday, I could only weep to think that God should have so favored me.1
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mary MagdaleneA Cultural History, pp. 215 - 256Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022