Charles Spurgeon
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) was a Baptist preacher in Victorian London, often called the “Prince of Preachers.” He was born on 19 June 1834 at Kelvedon, Essex, into a family of Independent ministers, and was converted in January 1850 when a snowstorm drove him into a small Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. He was baptised that May, began preaching in the villages around Cambridge, and at seventeen became pastor of the Baptist chapel at Waterbeach.
In 1854, aged nineteen, he was called to New Park Street Chapel in Southwark. The congregation outgrew the building within months, met for a time in Exeter Hall and the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, and in 1861 opened the Metropolitan Tabernacle, seating about five and a half thousand. Spurgeon preached there for the rest of his life. A sermon was printed every week from 1855 onward and the collected series ran to sixty-three volumes. Alongside the pulpit he founded the Pastors’ College (1856) to train ministers, the Stockwell Orphanage (1867), and a colportage association, and he wrote steadily: The Treasury of David on the Psalms, Morning and Evening, Lectures to My Students, and John Ploughman’s Talk among many others.
Spurgeon was a convinced Calvinist and a warm evangelist, and saw no tension between the two. In 1887 he protested what he called the “Down-Grade” of doctrine within the Baptist Union and withdrew from it, a controversy that cost him friends and health. Suffering from gout and kidney disease, he died at Menton on the French Riviera on 31 January 1892 and was buried at West Norwood Cemetery, London. His wife Susannah edited his autobiography; their son Thomas succeeded him at the Tabernacle.
Books
5 book(s).
- A Defense of Calvinism — C. H. Spurgeon
- Complete in Christ — C. H. Spurgeon · 1892
- Life Story of C. H. Spurgeon — James T. Allen
- Teaching Children — C. H. Spurgeon
- Till He Come — C. H. Spurgeon · 1894