Spurgeon Thursday - What Would Charles Say to a Mormon?

Charles Haddon Spurgeon did not have a glowing view of the United States of America. For the first half of his life the U.S. was deeply immersed in the slave trade. After our Civil War the slave trade ended and Republicans put many blacks in office in the south, but the Democrats destroyed this with their militant enforcement arms, the KKK, the Red Shirts, and the White League. Once they took control of the southern governments the Democrats crushed the blacks by instituting Jim Crow laws and lynching.

I'm sure Spurgeon despaired of the violence as much as the slavery that preceded it, and in return the people of the United States were not at all happy with his sermons. And he was well aware of the cults and false religions that arose from the Burned Over district of Western New York. Their antics and false beliefs probably didn't help his opinion of the United States as a whole. He sure knew the Mormons, whom he called "the haggard superstition of the West" but what would he say TO them after reading from their Book of Mormon? We know his opinion of the Book of Mormon was low:

“One of the most modern pretenders to inspiration is the Book of Mormon. I could not blame you should you laugh outright while I read aloud a page from that farrago.” –Charles H. Spurgeon

 He also said this about the Book of Mormon and how it's poison is spreading like wildfire:

Though there never could be a delusion more transparent, or a counterfeit less skillful and more lying upon the very surface, yet this simple pretension to power has been the means of carrying power with it (Sermons of the Rev. C.H. Spurgeon, 1st Series Sermon XVI)

For a moment I imagined what he would say about the man-made drivel called Scientology, but then realized that Scientology is utter nonsense whose only purpose is to show us how true the age old adage is: "there's a sucker born every minute". 

Like Mormonism, Scientology was invented to drive a wedge between us and God, but Mormonism is much more evil, it pretends to worship the One True God, it appears to the world to be Christian until you realize that their god once had a wife and kids and a mortgage and a lawn to cut. The Mormon God is not God but merely a guy who grew superpowers. Joseph Smith decided to make a god that was better than God, a god that you could copy and have your own little acolytes, and in inventing such fell far short of the wonder that is the one True God. I think this is what Spurgeon would say to a Mormon:

Away with your tools

If you make me an altar of stone,
you shall not build it of hewn stones,
for if you wield your tool on it you profane it.
Exodus 20:25

“God’s altar was to be built of unhewn stones, that no trace of human skill or labor might be seen on it. Human wisdom delights to trim and arrange the doctrines of the cross into a system more artificial and more congenial with the depraved tastes of fallen nature; however, instead of improving the gospel carnal wisdom pollutes it, until it becomes another gospel, and not the truth of God at all. All alterations and amendments of the Lord’s own Word are defilements and pollutions.

“The proud heart of man is very anxious to have a hand in the justification of the soul before God; preparations for Christ are dreamed of, humblings and repentings are trusted in, good works are cried up, natural ability is much vaunted, and by all means the attempt is made to lift up human tools upon the divine altar. It were well if sinners would remember that so far from perfecting the Saviour’s work, their carnal confidences only pollute and dishonor it. The Lord alone must be exalted in the work of atonement, and not a single mark of man’s chisel or hammer will be endured.

“There is an inherent blasphemy in seeking to add to what Christ Jesus in His dying moments declared to be finished, or to improve that in which the Lord Jehovah finds perfect satisfaction. Trembling sinner, away with your tools. Fall on your knees in humble supplication. Accept the Lord Jesus to be the altar of your atonement, and rest in Him alone.”

– Charles Spurgeon, Morning by Morning (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2001), 204.