The Heritage Collection boasts numerous artifacts, including Spurgeon’s personal belongings like his shirt collar, handkerchiefs, canes, reading glasses, pocket watch, and numerous Bibles with inscriptions and notations.
PASTORS’ COLLEGE DISCUSSION MINUTE BOOKS
The Discussion Minute Books contain records of the formal discussions that the students of the Pastors’ College would have, led by their tutor, on the pressing theological and ethical issues of the day. These notes reveal that Spurgeon was training his students to be not only preachers and pastors but also theologians.
More than 10,000 pages of transcripts of Spurgeon’s sermons and approximately 900 pages of galley proofs are included in the collection.
There are around 100 binders and large scrapbooks filled with chronologically arranged newspaper and magazine cuttings related to Spurgeon.
COLCHESTER PULPIT
This pulpit came from a Primitive Methodist Church in Colchester, England, where Charles Spurgeon was converted on January 6, 1850. The sermon was from Isaiah 45:22, and though the preacher behind the pulpit is unknown, the gospel took hold of Spurgeon’s heart. Recalling his conversion, Spurgeon said, “There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun; and I could have risen that instant, and sung with the most enthusiastic of them, of the precious blood of Christ.”
The collection includes 10 original notebooks that contain nearly 400 sermons that Spurgeon preached in Waterbeach and surrounding areas as a teenager.
THE TREASURY OF DAVID
The Treasury of David is a 7-volume commentary of the Psalms by Charles Spurgeon. This classic work was first published in shorter installments over a twenty- year span in The Sword and the Trowel. In the preface to the first volume, Spurgeon wrote, “The delightful study of the Psalms has yielded me boundless profit and ever- growing pleasure.” The Heritage Collection contains Spurgeon’s original manuscripts and proofs of the Treasury of David.
SPURGEON’S LAST LETTER TO HIS CHURCH
The final weeks of Spurgeon’s life were spent in Mentone, France. Throughout his ministry, Spurgeon wrote many letters to his congregation during his travels, never forgetting his own church. While nobody expected these letters to hold his last words to his church, they are a fitting conclusion to his pastoral ministry. In them, we see Spurgeon’s confidence in God’s sovereign grace, even apart from his own ministry. We see Spurgeon’s call for his people to persevere in the truth of the gospel and we see his evident love for them. In other words, what characterized Spurgeon’s ministry from the very first day continued to his last breath. “If there are any very sad, down-cast, & self-condemned ones among you, I desire my special love to them. The Lord himself looks from heaven to spy out such special characters.”
