Favor of the Lord

In 1854, young Charles Spurgeon shared these lines from "Of Marriage," a poem from Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, with the woman who would become his wife, Susannah Thompson.

Seek a good wife from thy God, for she is the best gift of His providence;
Yet ask not in bold confidence that which He hath not promised;
Thou knowest not His good will: be thy prayer then submissive thereunto,
And leave thy petition to His mercy, assured that He will deal well with thee.
If thou art to have a wife of thy youth, she is now living on the Earth;
Therefore think of her, and pray for her weal.

Spurgeon indeed received favor from the Lord (Prov. 18.22). They married in 1856. After a honeymoon in Paris, Spurgeon years later wrote to his wife a line that seems like a gracious version of something out of Forget Paris.

Charles Ray, Mrs. C.H. Spurgeon, reports it thus:

A brief honeymoon of ten days was spent in Paris, and as Mrs. Spurgeon had often been to that city before and was a good French scholar, she acted as cicerone to her husband. Together they visited the various churches and palaces and museums, the lady finding a new interest in all these familiar places on account of “those loving eyes that now looked upon them” with her. Years afterwards during one of C. H. Spurgeon’s frequent visits to the French capital he wrote to his wife, “My heart flies to you as I remember my first visit to this city under your guidance. I love you now as then, only multiplied many times.”

Before they were married, Susannah began to help her future husband by, under his direction, collecting wisdom from the works of Thomas Brooks. This project resulted in great fruition as a book published later and entitled Smooth Stones From Ancient Brooks: Being a Collection of Sentences, Illustrations, and Quaint Sayings, From the Works of That Renowned Puritan, Thomas Brooks (1860). This is mentioned both as a singular instance of her role as a godly help-meet, and as an example of their shared love of Puritan literature.

Susannah became an invalid at age 33, but she aided her husband all her life in various capacities, most especially in her loving encouragement of his life and ministerial labors, and through her support of the Book Fund for ministers who were too poor to purchase books for their libraries, which became an invaluable resource for such pastors in need. She was "an angel of God" to her husband, in his words, and after a life of love together, when he died in 1892, she cabled a message to her son Thomas who was in Australia, "Father in Heaven Mother resigned." He died in his beloved French Riveria, in Menton, known as "the pearl of France." In her grief, she found peace in the magnificent botanical Hanbury gardens of La Mortola, Italy, overlooking the Mediterranean. She was later to write:

There amid the olive-groves and rose-covered terraces the dear Master taught me His estimate of true affection by recalling to my mind His own words to His disciples, 'If ye loved Me, ye would rejoice, because I go to the Father,' and thus He made me understand that the thought of my darling’s everlasting bliss must overcome and banish my own selfish grief and sorrow.

They were reunited upon her death in 1903.