SPRUE, a tropical disease, prevalent in India, China, Java, and the West Indies. It is described by Sir Patrick Manson as characterized by a peculiar, inflamed, superficially ulcerated, exceedingly sensitive condition of the mucous membrane of the tongue and mouth; great wasting and anaemia; and more or less diarrhoea, with pale and frothy fermenting stools. It is an obscure disorder, and the treatment recommended is rest and milk diet.
SPULLER, EUGÈNE (1835-1896), French politician and
writer, was born at Seurre (Côte d'Or) on the 8th of December
1835, his father being a German who had married and settled
in France. After studying law at Dijon he went to Paris,
where he was called to the bar, and entered into close relations
with Gambetta, collaborating with him in 1868 in the foundation
of the Revue politique. He had helped Emile Ollivier in his
electoral campaign in Paris in 1863, but when in 1869 Ollivier
was preparing to "rally" to the empire he supported the
republican candidate. During the siege of Paris he escaped
from the city with Gambetta, to act as his energetic lieutenant
in the provinces. After the peace he edited his chief's Parisian
organ, the République française, until in 1876 he entered the
Chamber of Deputies for the department of the Seine. He was
minister of foreign affairs during part of the brief Gambetta
administration, and subsequently one of the vice-presidents of
the chamber, serving also on the budget commission and on a
special industrial and agricultural inquiry. His Parisian constituents
thought his policy too moderate on the clerical question,
and he had to seek election in 1885 in the Côte d'Or, which in
later years he represented in the Senate. He was minister of
education, religion and the fine arts in the Rouvier cabinet of
1887, minister of foreign affairs under Tirard (1889-^890), and
minister of education in 1894 in the Casimir-Perier cabinet.
He died on the 28th of July 1896. His published works include
some volumes of speeches and well-known studies of Ignatius
Loyola (1876) and of Michelet (1876).
SPUR (A.S. spura, spora, related to spornan, spurnan, to
kick, spurn; cf. M.H.G. sporn, mod. Ger. Sporn), an instrument
attached to the heel of a rider's boot for the purpose of goading
the horse. The earliest form of the horseman's spur armed the
heel with a single prick. In England the rowel spur is shown
upon the first seal of Henry III., but it does not come into
general use until the 14th century. In the 15th century spurs
appear with very long shanks, to reach the horse's flank below
the outstanding bards. After this time, and until the beginning
of the modern period of costume at the Restoration, they
take many decorative forms, some of which remain in the great
spurs worn by Mexican cavaliers. Gilded spurs were reckoned
the badge of knighthood, and in the rare cases of ceremonious
degradation they were hacked from the knight's
heels by the cook's chopper. After the battle of Courtrai, in
1302, the victors hung up bushels of gilt spurs in the churches
of Courtrai and Maestricht as trophies of what is still remembered
by the Flemings as the Goudensporendag. For another reason
the English named the French rout beside Thérouanne as the
Battle of Spurs.
In architecture, a spur (Fr. griffe, Ger. Knoll), is the ornament carved on the angles of the base of early columns; it consists of a projecting claw, which, emerging from the lower torus of the base, rests on the projecting angle of the square plinth. It is possibly to these that Pliny refers (Hist. Nat. xxvi. 42) when speaking of the lizard and frog carved on the bases (spirae) of the columns of the temples of Jupiter and Juno in the Portico of Octavius; the earliest known example is that of Diocletian's palace at Spalato. In Romanesque work the oldest examples are those found on the bases in crypts, where they assumed various conventional forms; being, however, close to the eye, the spur soon developed into an elaborate leaf ornament, which in French 13th-century work and in the early English period is of great beauty; sometimes the spur takes the form of a fabulous animal, such as a griffin.
SPURGEON, CHARLES HADDON (1834-1892), English
Nonconformist divine, was born at Kelvedon, Essex, on the
19th of June 1834. He was the grandson of an Essex pastor,
and son of John Spurgeon, Independent minister at Upper
Street, Islington. He went to school at Colchester and Maidstone,
and in 1849 he became usher at a school in Newmarket. He
joined the Baptist communion in 1851, and his work at once
attested his "conversion." He began distributing tracts and
visiting the poor, joined the lay preachers' association, and gave
his first sermon at Teversham, near Cambridge. In 1852 he
became pastor of Waterbeach. He was strongly urged to enter
Stepney (now Regent's Park) College to prepare more fully
for the ministry, but an appointment with Dr Joseph Angus,
the tutor, having accidently fallen through, Spurgeon interpreted
the contretemps as a divine warning against a college career.
The lack of early systematic theological training certainly had a
momentous effect upon his development. Broad in every other
respect, he retained to the last the narrow Calvinism of the early
19th century. His powers as a boy preacher became widely
known, and at the close of 1853 he was "called" to New Park
Street Chapel, Southwark. In a very few months' time the
chapel was full to overflowing. Exeter Hall was used while
a new chapel was being erected, but Exeter Hall could not
contain Spurgeon's hearers. The enlarged chapel at once
proved too small for the crowds, and a huge tabernacle was
projected in Newington Causeway. The preacher had recourse
to the Surrey Gardens music hall, where his congregation
numbered from seven to ten thousand. At twenty-two he was
the most popular preacher of his day. In 1857, on the day of
national humiliation for the Indian Mutiny, he preached at the
Crystal Palace to 24,000 people. The Metropolitan Tabernacle,
with a platform for the preacher and accommodation for 6000
persons, was opened for service on the 25th of March 1861.
The cost was over £30,000, and the debt was entirely paid off
at the close of the opening services, which lasted over a month.
Spurgeon preached habitually at the Tabernacle on Sundays
and Thursdays. He frequently spoke for nearly an hour,
and invariably from heads and subheads jotted down upon half
a sheet of letter paper. His Sunday sermons were taken down
in shorthand, corrected by him on Monday, and sold by his
publishers, Messrs Passmore & Alabaster, literally by tons.
They have been extensively translated. Clear and forcible in
style and arrangement, they are models of Puritan exposition
and of appeal through the emotions to the individual conscience,
illuminated by frequent flashes of spontaneous and often highly
unconventional humour. In his method of employing illustration
he is suggestive of Thomas Adams, Thomas Fuller, Richard
Baxter, Thomas Manton and John Bunyan. Like them, too,
he excelled in his vigorous command of the vernacular. Among
more recent preachers he had most affinity with George Whitefield,
Richard Cecil and Joseph Irons. Collected as The Tabernacle
Pulpit, the sermons form some fifty volumes. Spurgeon's
lectures, aphorisms, talks, and "Saplings for Sermons"
were similarly stenographed, corrected and circulated. He
also edited a monthly magazine, The Sword and Trowel; an
elaborate exposition of the Psalms, in seven volumes, called
The Treasury of David (1870-1885); and a book of sayings called
John Ploughman's Talks; or; Plain Advice for Plain People
(1869), a kind of religious Poor Richard. In the summer of
1864 a sermon which he preached and printed on Baptismal
Regeneration (a doctrine which he strenuously repudiated,
maintaining that immersion was only an outward and visible
sign of the inward conversion) led to a difference with the bulk
of the Evangelical party, both Nonconformist and Anglican.
Spurgeon maintained his ground, but in 1865 he withdrew from
the Evangelical Alliance. Subsequently in 1887 his distrust
of modern biblical criticism led to his withdrawing from the
Baptist Union. His powers of organization were strongly
exhibited in the Pastors' College, the Orphanage (at Stockwell),
the Tabernacle Almshouses, the Colportage Association for
selling religious books, and the gratuitous book fund which grew
up under his care. He received large money testimonials
