“For a man to come shuffling into a College, pretending that he holds his mind open to any form of truth, and that he is eminently receptive, but has not settled in his mind such things as whether God has an election of grace, or whether he loves his people to the end, seems to me to be a perfect monstrosity. ‘Not a novice,’ says the apostle; yet a man who has not made up his mind on such points as these, is confessedly and egregiously ‘a novice,’ and ought to be relegated to the catechism-class until he has learned the first truths of the gospel.”

Spurgeon, Charles H. Lectures to My Students, Zondervan, Grand Rapids. 1954, 39.

Known as the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a baptist minister in London, England from the mid to the late 19th Century. He was the pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle (a mega-church, even by today’s standards), the president of The Pastors’ College, a husband and father, and author of more works than any Christian minister before his time or since.