hell.” I found that sentence unforgettable, and I’ve used it as a plumbline to test my own preaching many times. When Spurgeon’s future wife first heard him preach, she wasn’t very impressed. Susannah Thompson was distracted by the teenage preacher’s badly trimmed hair and blue polka dot handkerchief. But she couldn’t forget his description of the church as “living stones in the Heavenly Temple perfectly joined together with the vermilion cement of Christ’s blood” (Mrs. C. H. Spurgeon, Pilgrim Publications,