How strangely sad it is that some, knowing so much, practise so little. I am afraid that some of you know the gospel so well that for this very reason it has lost much of its power with you, for it is as well-known as a thrice-told tale. If you heard it for the first time, its very novelty would strike you, but such interest you cannot now feel. It is said of Whitefield’s preaching that one reason for its great success was that he preached the gospel to people who had never heard it before. The gospel was to the masses of England in Whitefield’s day very much a new thing. The gospel had been either expunged from the church of England and from Dissenters’ pulpits, or, where it remained, it was with the few within the church and was unknown to the masses outside. The simple gospel of ‘believe and live’ was so great a novelty, that when Whitefield stood up in the fields to preach to his tens of thousands, they heard the gospel as if it were a new revelation fresh from the skies. But some of you have become gospel-hardened. It would be impossible to put it into a new shape for your ears. The angles, the corners of truth, have become worn off to you. Sundays follow Sundays, and you come up to the Tabernacle; you take your seats and go through the service, and it has become as mere a routine with you as getting up and dressing yourselves in the morning. The Lord knows that I dread the influence of routine upon myself; I fear lest it should get to be a mere form with me to deal with your souls, and I pray God to deliver you and me from the deadly effect of religious routine. It would be better if some of you would change your place of worship, rather than sleep in the old one.

C. H. Spurgeon and Terence Peter Crosby, 365 Days with Spurgeon (Volume 3), (Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2005), 160.