This is an excerpt from a sermon preached by C. H. Spurgeon on the collapse of Overend, Gurney and Company, (known as "the bankers' bank") which collapsed in 1886 leading to the collapse of over 200 other companies. It is amazing and disturbing to see how history does repeat itself. The financial troubles are a demonstration of the foolishness of atheism and the belief that you can have morality without Christianity. It is also implied that this will soon effect the modern "Mega Churches" built on financial wealth, the prosperity gospel, and Godlessness. I hope you will read this. Spurgeon preached this sermon on the morning of January 10th 1869. Tell me it doesn't sound like something from the news we have been hearing for the last two years.
Proverbs 16:2 "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits."
"During the last two years, some of the most notable commercial reputations have been hopelessly destroyed. Men in the great world of trade, who were trusted, around whose characters there hovered no cloud of suspicion, nor even the shade of doubt, have proved themselves reckless of honesty and devoid of principle."
"The fiery trial has been too much for the wood, hay, and stubble of many a gigantic firm. Houses of business which seemed to be founded upon a rock, and to stand as fast as the commonwealth of England itself, have been shaken to their foundations and have caved in with a tremendous crash. On all sides we see the wrecks of great reputations and colossal fortunes. There is wailing in the palace of sham, and desolation in the halls of pretense. Bubbles are bursting, windbags are collapsing, paint is cracking, gilt is peeling off."
"Probably we have more of this to come, more revelations still to be made of apparent wealth which covered insolvency, as a rich paper may cover a mud wall; crafty schemes which duped the public with profits never made, and tempted them to advance to deeper speculations, even as the mirage of the desert mocks the traveler."
"We have seen in the public prints, month after month, fresh discoveries of the modes of financing adopted by the villainy of this present age, to accomplish robbery respectably and to achieve felony with credit. We have been astonished and amazed at the vile tricks and shameless devices to which men of eminence have condescended. And yet we have been compelled to hear justifications of gigantic frauds, and have even been compelled to believe that the perpetrators of them did not consider themselves to be acting disreputably, their own previous success and the low state of morality together, having lulled them into a state in which conscience, if not dead, thoroughly asleep."
"Some ages may have been great in science, others in art, and others in war, but our era overtops every other in the proficiency of it's rascals; this is the classic period of chicanery, the golden age of fraud. Let a man have a base heart and a seared conscience and a plausible mode of address, and let him resolve upon deluding the public out of millions, he need not travel to learn the readiest method, he can find examples near at home, among high professors and the great ones of earth."
"My brethren, these noises of falling towers on the right, these sounds of crumbling battlements on the left, these cries of the shipwrecked everywhere along the costs of trade, have not only awakened within me many thoughts relative to themselves and the rottenness of modern society, but they have made me muse upon similar catastrophes evermore occurring in the spiritual world. Unrecorded in the journals and unmoored by unregenerate men, there are failures and frauds, and bankruptcies of soul, most horrible to think upon. There is a spiritual trading just as pretentious, and apparently just as successful, as your vaunted limited liability juggle, but really just as rotten and as sure to end in hopeless overthrow."
"Speculation is a spiritual vice as well as a commercial one. Trading without capital is common in the religious world, and puffery and deception are everyday practices. The outer world is always representative of the inner; the life which clusters round the Exchange illustrates that which gathers within the church; and if our eyes were opened, and our ears were able to hear, the sights and sounds of the spirit world would far more interest us and sadden us than the doings which begin in the directors' boardroom and end we know not where"
"We should see at this moment colossal religious fortunes melting into abject spiritual poverty. We should see high professors, much reverenced and held in esteem, brought into shame and everlasting contempt. We should see the wealthy in divine matters, whom men have unwisely trusted as their guides and counselors as to their souls' best interests, unmasked and proved to be deceitful through and through."
"I seem at this moment to be peering into the world of spiritual things, and I see many a Babel tower tottering and ready to fall; many a fair tree decaying at the heart; many a blooming cheek undermined by disease. Yes, a sound comes to my ear of men in the church, apparently rich and increased in goods, who are naked and poor and miserable, and great men whose towering glories are but a fading flower."
"There ever have been such, there are many now, and there will be to the end. the supply of deceivers is sure to be maintained, since the text tells us that all the ways of men are clean in his own eyes; there is a propensity in nature which leads men, even when they are most wrong, to judge themselves most right."
"The text at the same time the terrible conclusion to which all self-deception will certainly come, for the judgment of man concerning himself is not final, and there comes a day when the Lord who weigheth the spirits will reverse the verdict of a perjured conscience, and make the man to stand no longer in the false light which his conceit has thrown around him, but in the true light, in which all his fancied glory shall vanish as a dream."
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