John Ploughman’s Talk

or

Plain Advice for Plain People

by

C. H. Spurgeon

Pleasant Places Press
Redding, California, U.S.A
2005

This is a republication of an edition that was printed by the Marshall Brothers, Ltd. London, Edinburgh, and New York. Minor style and spelling updates have been made. Additional artwork has been added by Fred Bennett from an edition printed in London by S.W. Partridge & Co. Ltd. The illustrations are marked with an asterisk.*

Preface

In John Ploughman’s Talk I have written for ploughmen and common people. Hence refined taste and dainty words have been discarded for strong proverbial expressions and homely phrases. I have aimed my blows at the vices of the many, and tried to inculcate those moral virtues without which men are degraded. Much that needs to be said to the toiling masses would not well suit the pulpit and the Sabbath; these lowly pages may teach thrift and industry all the days of the week, in the cottage and the workshop; and if some learn these lessons I shall not repent the adoption of a rustic style.

Ploughman is a name I may justly claim. Every minister has put his hand to the plough: and it is his business to break up the fallow ground. That I have written in a semi-humorous vein needs no apology, since thereby sound moral teaching has gained a hearing from at least 300,000 persons. There is no particular virtue in being seriously unreadable.

A pickle jar has these words upon it: “If you like our pickles, try our sauce,” and so I would add, if you like John Ploughman’s Talk, try his Pictures; which is a second volume of the same character as the present.

C.H. Spurgeon.

To the Idle

It is of no more use to give advice to the idle than to pour water into a sieve; and as to improving them, one might as well try to fatten a greyhound. Yet, as The Old Book tells us to “cast our bread upon the waters,” we will cast a hard crust or two upon these stagnant ponds; for there will be this comfort about it, if lazy fellows grow no better, we shall be none the worse for having warned them for when we sow good sense, the basket gets none the emptier. We have a stiff bit of soil to plough when we chide with sluggards, and the crop will be of the smallest; but if none but good land were farmed, ploughmen would be out of work, so we’ll put the plough into the furrow. Idle men are common enough, and grow without planting, but the quantity of wit among seven acres of them would never pay for raking: nothing is needed to prove this but their name and their character; if they were not fools they would not be idlers; and though Solomon says, “The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason,” yet in the eyes of every one else his folly is as plain as the sun in the sky. If I hit hard while speaking to them, it is because I know they can bear it; for if I had them down on the floor of the old barn, I might thresh many a day before I could get them out of the straw, and even the steam thresher ...