ot "won over to Christ" by preaching, it was
idle to bait the hook with mere sensationalism. Yet by a strange irony
his closest friends, in announcing his death to his flock, actually
improved on the extravagance of the Salvationists. Here is a copy of the
telegram that was affixed to the rails of the Metropolitan Tabernacle
the morning after his decease:

Mentone, 11.50.
Spurgeon's Tabernacle, London.

Our beloved pastor entered heaven 11.5 Sunday night.
Harrald.

This Harrald was Mr. Spurgeon's private secretary, but he writes like
the private secretary of God Almighty. A leading statesman once said he
wished he was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay was cocksure of
everything; but what was Macaulay's cocksureness to the cocksureness of
Harrald? The gentleman could not have spoken with more assurance if
he had been Saint Peter himself, and had opened the gate for Pastor
Spurgeon.

We take it that Spurgeon expired at 11.5 on Sunday night. That is the
_fact_. All the rest is conjecture.

How could his soul enter heaven at the very same moment? Is heaven in
the atmosphere? He who asserts it is a very bold speculator. Is it out
in the ether? If so, where? And how is it our telescopes cannot detect
it? If heaven is a place, as it must be if it exists at all, it cannot
very well be within the astronomical universe. Now the farthest stars
are inconceivably remote. Our sun is more than 90,000,000 miles distant,
and Sirius is more than 200,000 times farther off than the sun. There
are stars so distant that their light takes more than a thousand
years to reach us, and light travels at the rate of nearly two hundred
thousands miles per second!

It is difficult to imagine Spurgeon's soul travelling faster than that;
and if heaven is somewhere out in the vast void, beyond the sweep of
telescopes or the register of the camera, Spurgeon's soul has so far
_not_ "entered heaven" that its journey thither is only just begun. In
another thousand years, perhaps, it will be nearing the pearly gates.
_Perhaps_, we say; for heaven may be a million times further off, and
Spurgeon's soul may pull the bell and rouse Saint Peter long after the
earth is a frozen ball, and not only the human race but all life has
disappeared from its surface. Nay, by the time he arrives, the earth may
have gone to pot, and the whole solar system may have vanished from the
map of the universe.

What a terrible journey! Is it worth