Can a Christian Be Depressed? — Spurgeon on the Minister’s Fainting Fits
⏱ 12 min read
You ask the question quietly, usually at the end of a long evening, after the dishes are away and the house is finally still. Can a Christian be depressed? You ask it because the answer you have been given by most of the loud voices is no — that real faith lifts the weight, that joy is a fruit of the Spirit and therefore the absence of joy is a fruit of something else, that the believer who cannot get out of bed has a theology problem and not a body problem. You have heard variations on this for years. None of them have fitted you. The depression has not lifted because you have been told it shouldn’t be there.
This is a slow read with a Victorian preacher who knew the weight you are carrying because he carried it himself — for decades, openly, in front of thousands. Charles Spurgeon, the most-read English-language preacher of the nineteenth century, preached on a Sunday morning and then sometimes could not get out of his chair on the Monday afternoon. He gave the lectures gathered in Lectures to My Students with a chapter inside them called The Minister’s Fainting Fits — a chapter the wider Christian world has, in the main, declined to read. We are going to read it.
If you came to this page looking for a verse to throw at the depression to make it leave, this is not that page. The contemplative companion this article keeps gesturing toward — the Devotionals on Anxiety, the 140-day slow form — is not a cure either. It is a way of staying with God while the dark is in the room. That is what Spurgeon’s lectures teach. That is what we are going to slow down with.
Spurgeon’s answer, before we say anything else
The man preached every Sunday to six thousand people. He had read more theology by twenty-five than most pastors read in a lifetime. He believed every word of orthodox Protestant doctrine, and he believed it warmly. And he wrote, in Lectures to My Students:
“Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy. There may be here and there men of iron, to whom wear and tear work no perceptible detriment, but surely the rust frets even these; and as for ordinary men, the Lord knows, and makes them to know, that they are but dust.” — Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
Read that again, slowly. Notice what he does not say.
He does not say the depressed Christian must repent of depression. He does not say the believer who is cast down has failed a test of faith. He does not say try harder, pray more, read your Bible better. He says — we must at intervals be cast down. Not some of us. The most of us. Not if your discipleship is broken. At intervals. As a rhythm. As a feature of being human and not a bug in your salvation.
The thing he is doing in this passage is small and enormous at the same time. He is normalising the dark months for the believer. He is saying that being cast down is consistent with being a Christian, not a contradiction of it. He is putting the depression and the discipleship in the same room and letting them sit there together without insisting that one of them has to leave.
If that is the only sentence you take from this page, take it. We must at intervals be cast down. You are not outside the faith because you are cast down. You are inside the faith Spurgeon described, in the company he described it in. The Lord, he says, makes us know we are but dust. The depression is one of the ways the dust gets to remember it is dust.
A pause, here, before the next passage. Notice your shoulders. The reading of these last paragraphs may have lowered them by a small amount — or it may have tightened them, if part of you is still arguing with the permission Spurgeon is giving. Let one slow inhale come in. Let one slow exhale go out. The body will catch up to the words at its own pace. You are not behind.
Why the strong ones go down first
The chapter goes on, and Spurgeon does something unusual for a Victorian theologian — he gives the physical reasons for the fainting fits before he gives the spiritual ones. The body, he says, gets tired. The nerves give way. The work wears at the man until the man cannot stand. The depression has, sometimes, a perfectly material cause, and pretending it does not have one is not piety. It is bad observation.
He notices, too, that the bouts come not when the Christian is failing but often when the Christian is doing well. Before a great work, he says, or after a great work. The man who has just preached the sermon of his life walks home and cannot get out of bed for three days. The woman who has just held the family together through the funeral collapses on the Wednesday after, weeping for reasons she could not name to anyone. The depression follows the effort. The dust remembers it is dust most loudly after the dust has done the most.
If you are the woman who keeps getting struck flat after the seasons in which you held the most together, this is not weakness. This is the rhythm Spurgeon described to a roomful of young ministers in 1875. Before a great work, or after. The fainting fits arrive in proximity to the loadbearing, not in opposition to it. (The wider companion read on the long stretch — when the weight does not lift week after week — is a devotional on fear and anxiety for the long stretch, written for the woman who has been carrying the heaviness for more months than she expected to.)
The mistake the cheerful piety makes is to read the fainting fits as a verdict on the faith. Spurgeon read them as a verdict on the body. The body is dust. The dust gets tired. The Christian who has been doing the loving and the holding and the praying is, at some point, going to be cast down — not because the loving and holding and praying was inauthentic, but because the dust that did them is finite. Faith is not the absence of the fainting. Faith is what stays in the room with God while the fainting is happening.
The room Spurgeon kept staying in
Here is the thing about Spurgeon nobody tells you. The man who wrote that chapter wrote, in the same decade, this:
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.” — Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
He wrote it without irony. He wrote it knowing that the same heart, in another week, would be cast down again. Both things were true in him at once. The fainting fits and the delightful sense of perfect peace lived in the same chest, in the same year, sometimes in the same week.
That is the part the loud piety cannot hold. It wants the believer to be either in joy or out of grace, and Spurgeon was neither. He was a man who lived in both rooms — the dark one and the bright one — and he refused to be embarrassed by either. The depression was real. The peace, when it came, was real. The peace did not falsify the depression. The depression did not falsify the peace.
You can hold that, slowly, as a way of reading your own week. The Sunday morning you wept in the pew was not a lie because the Wednesday afternoon you laughed at the kitchen table was a truth. Both happened to the same woman. Both belonged in the same year. Spurgeon would not have asked you to choose which one was the real you. He would have said both are. The dust is real. The peace is real. The God who meets the dust is the God who gives the peace.
The contemplative companion to this whole posture — sitting with the day as it actually is, holding the bright part next to the dark part without insisting the dark part leave — is the slow work of prayer for anxiety and overthinking. The 140-day form, the Devotionals on Anxiety, holds that practice for the woman who needs the page already to have a shape on the night the depression returns. The page does not lift the depression. The page is the chair you sit in while it is in the room with you.
What Spurgeon actually did inside the fainting fits
Read this carefully. It is one of his evening passages, written, almost certainly, during the same decade as the Fainting Fits lecture:
“Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love. Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever.” — Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Notice what he is doing. He is not asking for the depression to lift. He is not begging the dark to go. He is sitting in the cool twilight — which is to say, in an ordinary evening, with the day finished, with the body tired — and he is receiving the company of God in the dark.
Sweet is the cool twilight. That is the line worth keeping near the page. The twilight is the dim hour, the half-light, the time when the day is no longer day and the night is not yet night. It is the hour the depressed Christian knows well — the hour when the mind dims, the energy dims, the desire to do anything dims. Spurgeon writes that hour as sweet. Not because the dimness is bright. Because, in the dimness, every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.
The practice he models is small. He stops trying to chase the day’s brightness back. He sits down in the twilight. He calls it sweet, not because he is performing sweetness, but because he has discovered, over decades of fainting fits, that the cool twilight is one of the places God most reliably keeps fellowship with the soul. The dust, finally still, finds the eye of heaven in the star.
You can do this. Not as a technique. As a posture. When the evening of your depressed week arrives and the light dims and the body slows — instead of fighting back to the brightness, sit down. Sweet is the cool twilight. Let the cool wind be the breath of celestial love. Let the star be the eye of heaven. The depression has not been argued away. It is still in the room. So is He.
A second pause. The jaw. The chest. The places the depression sits in your body when the day winds down. Let them be there. Notice them without trying to dispel them. The notice is itself a small piece of the company Spurgeon describes. You are not asked to feel the cool wind. You are asked to be in the twilight, in the chair, with God in the room. The feeling, if it comes, will come at its own pace.
What “yes, a Christian can be depressed” actually means
It means the question itself was framed badly. Can a Christian be depressed is the question of a piety that wants depression and discipleship to be mutually exclusive. They are not. They never were. The Psalms know that. The prophets know that. Jesus in the garden knows that. Spurgeon knew that, and said so, in a lecture hall, to a roomful of young ministers who would otherwise have spent their early years pretending they were fine.
The better question is the one Spurgeon’s chapter actually answers — what does the Christian do while she is depressed? And his answer is small and steady and almost embarrassingly ordinary. She stays. She stays in the room with God. She does not pretend the fainting is not happening. She does not pretend the faith has solved it. She lets the dust be dust. She sits in the cool twilight, sometimes for years, and she discovers, slowly, that the cool wind has been the breath of celestial love the whole time.
If the depression has been heavy for you for long enough that the heaviness itself has begun to feel like a verdict on your faith, hear this carefully. It is not. Spurgeon, preaching to thousands, weeping on Mondays, wrote some of the most consoling devotional pages in the English language out of the fainting fits, not in spite of them. The depression did not unmake him as a believer. The fainting fits, in some long quiet way, were part of how he learned the cool twilight.
The companion that holds this practice in slow daily form is the Devotionals on Anxiety — the 140-day book, the page-a-day shape, the small structure that meets you on the evening you cannot generate a structure for yourself. It is not a cure. It is a chair. (The wider healing-journey books for women shelf — slowly built, not a binge list — is the longer reading companion if you are putting together the year’s reading on this. And self-care ideas for Christian women in hard seasons is the letter to the depleted, written for exactly this season.)
For the wider sibling reading on the same question from a different father — Augustine, who asked the why of the suffering and the silence — see why does God allow suffering — Augustine’s answer in City of God and why does God feel so distant — the restless heart of Augustine. They are slow reads, both. They sit beside Spurgeon at the same long evening.
If the broader self-care frame underneath all of this has been the part keeping you stuck — the sense that resting is a failure of vocation — Christian self-care: 20 ideas that aren’t bubble baths is the gentle untangling of that.
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Closing
Can a Christian be depressed. Yes. Spurgeon, who preached to thousands and wept in the dark, answered that question two centuries ago and gave the rest of us the chapter we keep forgetting to read. The fainting fits are not the end of the faith. They are part of the long shape of it.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety. Not a cure for the dark months. A chair to sit in with God while they pass. Spurgeon would, I think, have liked the format.
