WISDOM — To Win Souls – Charles Spurgeon

We are not wide enough awake in doing good. Pardon the reference, for the sake of the lesson; it shall be borrowed from Dr. Marigold’s cart. When a Cheap-jack has a little knot of people round his van, he eyes them all, and feels sure that the man who is standing over there is a butcher, and that yonder young lad has more money than brains, and that the girl near him is out with her sweetheart and is soon to be married; now, mark, he will hold up the exact articles which are likely to attract these customers, and in his harangue, he will have jokes and telling sentences which will turn butcher, and lad, and lass into purchasers. He cares not a jot for elegance, but very much for force. He knows that his trade will be better pushed by homely remarks and cutting sentences than by the prosiest prettiness’s which were ever delivered; and he gains his end, which is more than those of you will do who talk to people about their souls with as much richness of diction as—

” The girl who at each pretty phrase let drop.
A ruby comma, or pearl full stop.
Or an emerald semicolon.”

Dr. Marigold is sharp and shrewd, because self-interest makes him so, and his extemporary observations are so partly uttered and adroitly arranged, that he wins the attention of all, and the custom of many. Would to God that preachers and other workers for God had a tithe as much common- sense as Cheap-Jack, and were half as earnest to bring men to Jesus Christ as Cheap-Jack is to bring them to buy that tea-tray and set of real China ! that we were as wise to win the ear and heart of the particular case with which we have to deal, as he is in extorting a laugh and compelling the attention of the passer-by !