Sunday 26 May 1940 was, at the request of His Majesty King George VI, observed as a National Day of Prayer for deliverance at a time when Britain was staring military disaster in the face. The British Expeditionary Force in northern France and Belgium had been surrounded by the rapid German advance and pushed back to an area around Dunkirk. Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 4 June 1940:

The whole root and core and brain of the British Army, on which and around which we were to build, and are to build, the great British Armies in the later years of the war, seemed about to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious and starving captivity.

The King and Queen were present for the main service at Westminster Abbey with the Prime Minister. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang, gave an address. By a series of providences, including strategic mistakes by the German command and the helpfulness of the weather, what became known as ‘the miracle of Dunkirk’ unfolded over the coming days.

A second National Day of Prayer was held on Sunday 8 September, when the Royal Air Force had taken a pounding from the German Luftwaffe, and Britain seemed to be on the verge of a defeat that would leave the way open for invasion. On this occasion Dr Lloyd-Jones gave a brief address at Westminster Chapel. The previous day had seen the beginning of the Blitz, the horrific German bombing campaign on civilian London. However this shift of direction gave relief to the fighter bases and enabled the RAF to regroup successfully for the climactic weeks of the Battle of Britain.

Spurgeon and sin

It was events much further from home that prompted the previous national day of prayer. In 1857 after the Indian Mutiny the government had proclaimed a day for ‘a Solemn Fast, Humiliation and Prayer before Almighty God; in order to obtain Pardon of our Sins, and for imploring His Blessing and Assistance on our arms for the Restoration of Tranquillity in India.’

The Indian Mutiny was regarded as a national disaster – a sense which Spurgeon sharpened into the conviction that it was a blow from God’s rod of chastisement against Britain for her sins. The episode proved a severe dent to the self-confidence of an increasingly prosperous and victorious nation.

When The Spectator asked for the cause of the ‘moral healthiness’ so evident in the nation, it concluded: ‘the chief distinction of this generation has been the revival of religious earnestness’. Mid-Victorian Britain was a society which still bore the imprint of the mighty acts of God in the Great Awakening of the previous century and the so-called ‘Forgotten Revivals’ near the beginning of the nineteenth-century.

There certainly seem to be more explicitly biblical convictions lying behind the 1857 call to prayer than those in 1940. The Emeritus Professor of History at Swansea University, R. T. Shannon, has written that ‘…mid-Victorian Britain was a religious society in a deeper and completer sense than any western country since the Reformation’. There had already been days of national fasting and humiliation in 1853 (for a cholera epidemic) and in 1854 (for the Crimean War).

Fast Day service

Spurgeon’s fame was already such that he was the automatic choice to lead the nation’s devotions at the Fast Day service, held at the Crystal Palace in London, on the evening of Wednesday 7 October 1857. Spurgeon was only twenty-three. It was one of the largest congregations he would ever preach to – 23,654 souls.

Spurgeon visited the Crystal Palace to test the acoustics while workmen were erecting the seating. ‘Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world!’ he cried out. One of the workmen was converted as a direct result of hearing the words.

On the occasion itself Spurgeon was almost overwhelmed by the task. Before the service began he requested one of his deacons ask his young wife to move to a position so that he could not see her because it made him nervous. Spurgeon was exhausted from the ordeal of public prayer and preaching in such a setting. He went to bed that Wednesday night and when his wife woke him again it was Friday morning!

In the course of his prayer Spurgeon made reference to God’s great deliverances for Britain from the Spanish and later the French under Napoleon:

…not Israel itself could boast a nobler history than we, measuring it by God’s bounties. We have not yet   forgotten an armada scattered before the breath of heaven, scattered upon the angry deep as a trophy of what God can do to protect his favoured isle. We have not yet forgotten a fifth of November, wherein God discovered divers plots that were formed against our religion and our commonwealth. We have not yet lost the old men, whose tales of even the victories in war are still a frequent story. We remember how God swept before our armies the man who thought to make the world his dominion, who designed to cast his shoe over Britain, and make it a dependency of his kingdom.

God wrought for us; he wrought with us; and he will continue to do so… Cradle of liberty! Refuge of distress! Storms may rage around thee, but not upon thee, nor shall all the wrath and fury of men destroy thee, for God hath pitched his tabernacle in thy midst, and his saints are the salt in the midst of thee.

…But O Lord, it is ours this day to humble ourselves before thee. We are a sinful nation… For all our rebellions and transgressions, O God have mercy upon us! … Lord save us. Lord, arise and bless us! … God save the Queen! A thousand blessings on her much-loved head! God preserve our country. Bless England, O our God. Shine, mighty God, on Britain shine…

But the corollary of such privilege, such a blessed status, is that the nation is exposed to judgement. Spurgeon preached from ‘Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it’ (Mic. 6:9):#

I feel persuaded that there are such things as national judgments, national chastisements for national sins – great blows from the hand of God, which every wise man must acknowledge to be, either a punishment of sin committed, or a monition to warn us to a sense of the consequences of sins, leading by God’s grace to humiliate ourselves, and repent of our sin…

Now it is an opinion published by authority – and who am I that I should dispute the great authorities of England? – that one part of the reason for this dreadful visitation, is the sin of the people of England themselves… O Britain, weep for deeds which thy governors have not yet strength of mind to stop…

It is impossible for me today to enter into all the sins of illiberality, of deceit, of bigotry, of lasciviousness, of carnality, of covetousness, and of laziness which infest this land…

And we can certainly recognise modern Britain in these words:

Was there ever an age when the merchants of England had more fallen from their integrity?

We can trust none in these times. Ye heap up your companies, and ye delude your myriads; ye gather the money of fools; ye scatter it to the winds of heaven, and when the poor call upon you ye tell them it is gone: but where?

Spurgeon’s concern however is not so much for the nation but for the church:

I am afraid that it is the church that has been the greatest sinner… For many and many a year pulpits have never condescended to men of low estate… The churches themselves slumbered; they wrapped themselves   in a shroud of orthodoxy and slept right on; and, whilst Satan was devouring the world, and taking his prey, the church sat still, and said, ‘Who is my neighbour?’

Tim Curnow is a member of the editorial board of The Evangelical Magazine.