“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.

“Therefore, let your sermons be flowing, let them be clear and lucid so that by suitable disputation you may pour sweetness into the ears of the people, and by the grace of your words may persuade the crowd to follow willingly where you lead. But if in the people, or in some persons, there is any stubbornness or any fault, let your sermons be such as to goad the listener, to sting the person with a guilty conscience. ‘The words of the wise are as goads’ (Ecclesiastes 12:11). Even the Lord Jesus goaded Saul when he was a persecutor. Consider how saltutary was the goad which made of a persecutor an apostle, saying: ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the goad’ (Acts 9:5).”

Ambrose, Saint Ambrose Letters: 1-91; trans. Sister Mary Melchior Beyenka, Fathers of the Church, Inc., New York. 1954, 78.

As his pastor and mentor, God used Ambrose in the life of Augustine plant the seeds that would eventually blossom into the life and work of the man that gave us such works as Confessions, City of God, and his letters to Pelagius. Though it is less recognized and certainly less acclaimed, Ambrose’s surviving body of work is more extensive than even that of his disciple, Augustine.

“There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings it to a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Preface), Cambridge University Press, 1964, pp. ix-x