The Journal of Baptist Studies 8 (2016)
C. H. SPURGEON: A FULLERITE?1 By G. Stephen Weaver, Jr. Andrew Gunton Fuller (1799–1884), son of Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), lived to the age of 85. In 1831, he gathered his father’s writings and published them in five volumes. This set was later revised by Joseph Belcher and published in three volumes by the American Baptist Publication Society in 1845. Both these sets included a biographical memoir of Fuller by his son. Near the end of his life, in 1882, he published a biography of his father in the “Men Worth Remembering” series published by Hodder & Stoughton. 2 He apparently sent a copy of this biography to the most famous Baptist English preacher of the latter nineteenth century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892). Spurgeon responded with a letter that reveals how highly Spurgeon regarded Andrew Fuller as a theologian:3 Venerable Friend, I thank you for sending me your Andrew Fuller. If you had lived for a long time for nothing else but to produce this volume, you have lived to good purpose. I have long considered your father to be the greatest theologian of the century, and I do not know that your pages have made me think more highly of him as a divine than I had thought before. But I now see him within doors far more accurately, and see about the Christian man a soft 1
This paper was originally presented at a mini-conference on “The Legacy of Andrew Fuller (1754–1815),” sponsored by The Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, on February 6, 2015. 2 Andrew Gunton Fuller, Andrew Fuller, Men Worth Remembering (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1882). 3 It was used in advertisements for the Fuller volume in subsequent publications by Hodder and Stoughton. See William Mackergo Taylor, John Knox (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884), 215
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