Church Fads - A Dose of Spurgeon

The following excerpt comes from "A Sermon to the Lord's Little Children," a sermon preached Sunday Morning, 18 March 1883, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London.
Till we are rooted and grounded in the truth, new things have great charms for us, especially if they have about them a great show of holiness and zeal for God.Listen, then, dear children but newly born into the Savior's family: "Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning."Alas, even those who are older in grace than you are have shown a sad readiness to be duped by plausible persons who have invented fresh notions and methods. I have lived long enough to have seen a considerable variety of follies and manias in the religious world. They have sprung up, grown great, declined, and vanished. One day it has been one thing, another another.I have lived to see those things justly ridiculed which a few years before were cried up as the wonders of the age. I thank God I have not been moved by any of these periodical fits of frenzy, but have been content to keep to the one old truth which I have gathered from the Scriptures and made my own by experience, and by the teaching of the Holy Spirit.I have not had to tack about, for I have been enabled to steam ahead; and I hope I shall do so to the end. I have no respect for these upstart inventions; but I regard them as so many phases of human delusion. One never knows what will come next; but of this we are pretty sure, that every now and then a new doctrine is brought forth which turns out to be an old heresy with a fresh coat of varnish on it; or else some new method of saving souls is found out, and the work blazes away like a house on fire till it dies out in smoke.Let us not be carried off our feet by every wind of doctrine. We may live to see the present craze ended and another or two after it; only be it ours to be steadfast, immovable. "Little children, let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning:" leave to others the soon-exhausted novelties and do you keep to the eternal unchangeable truth which is taught you in God's word and in your own soul's experience.