In early years he roamed the platform considerably to depict dramatic biblical scenes. He continued to create such biblical episodes and dramatize certain life-situations, often forging conversation between biblical characters or contemporary hearers to suit his purposes. But with maturity came a fullness and poise of greater dimension.

In later years he reserved his considerable dramatic powers, and abilities to caricature and mimic others, for the Friday afternoon Pastors' College lectures which he shared informally with his students. Many of these elements remain preserved also in his Lectures to My Students. Writing when only twelve volumes of Spurgeon's sermons had been released, a contemporary spoke with great delight of the peaks and climaxes, and the pace, pause, and purpose of his sermons, and of the sometimes outstanding responses they evoked:

Mr. Spurgeon touches many springs, aphorism and anecdote, gross, quaint, outrageously grotesque; then again quiet, subjective, profoundly tender and subdued, snatches from unexpected poets, strains of household songs, come lilting along, with troops of quotations from all the sacred poets, versicles of hymns by wholesale, giving a chorus to his own feelings and a relief to the feelings of the people. Travels to and fro in England are always furnishing him with stories of persons and places.

Anecdotes, humorous or pathetic; gushes of rich poetic description, sometimes a sublime sustained exordium; vehement, passionate, over-whelming peroration. They must have been strange scenes, one thinks, sometimes at the Tabernacle. It must have been a fine moment when preaching a new-year's sermon from the text, "To Him be the glory both now and forever, Amen," the invocations of the preacher were met and responded to by the massive thousands thundering back to him again, and again and again, their loud Amens at the close of each passage. "13

The same writer also asserted that Spurgeon's verbal power did not arise for oratorical pyrotechnics but rather from plain, warm, human, Anglo-Saxon sensibilities.14

The Stability of His Doctrine. Theologically, Spurgeon's greatest facility was his ability to declare the paradox of God's will working in conjunction with man's. He allowed for the effectual call of the elect but insisted that this arose only through the free offer of salvation published to all people.

In the tradition of Andrew Fuller and Wiliam Carey, he dared to expound difficult doctrines by dealing in a masterly manner with the truths of election, predestination, atonement, the nature and attributes of God, and the preservation of the saints. He reached into heights and depths of argument and practical illustration well beyond many of his contemporaries, couching his thoughts in concrete and often colloquial images.

But his strength in the espousal of these values lay in the balance with which he expounded them and not in the ideas as they stood alone. He displayed an equipoise in doctrine which stabilized his ministry. He preached the atonement as potential for all and the gospel as an authentic free offer of grace. Yet he also insisted that, from an eternal perspective, the atonement was actually effective only for the elect who responded freely to God's call of grace. He felt that many Calvinists did not hold such a balance.15