In these venues Spurgeon frequently preached to audiences numbering more than 10,000—all in the days before electronic amplification. The congregation quickly outgrew their building, moved to Exeter Hall, then to Surrey Music Hall. In 1854, just four years after his conversion, Spurgeon, then only 20, became pastor of London's famed New Park Street Church (formerly pastored by the famous Baptist theologian John Gill). Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) was England's best-known preacher for most of the second half of the nineteenth century.
The congregation quickly outgrew their building. He died at Menton three months later.Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) was England's best-known preacher for most of the second half of the nineteenth century.
When he left Herne Hill station, London, on 26 October 1891, for the south of France, he said to the friends who came to say good-bye, ‘The fight is killing me’. In this last decade he was faced with increasing controversy and a title for his last years could well be his own words, ‘In Opposition to So Many’.īy the time Spurgeon was fifty-seven in 1891 his health was utterly broken. Then came the 1880s and by far the most difficult period in Spurgeon’s life. On every front the work was being blessed. Spurgeon, revised and updated by Alistair Begg. Onlookers often supposed that so many enterprises could never be maintained at the high level of usefulness with which they began, but they were, and the 1870s might well be described in terms of ‘Holding the Ground’. Devotional material is taken from Morning and Evening, written by C. The congregation which he pastored grew from 314 in 1854 to 5,311 in 1892. Spurgeon was Pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle (located near the Elephant & Castle in London) where he garnered a reputation as an inspired and eloquent preacher. Produced by the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, it provides great insight into the meaning of Scripture. The institutions which he founded, and for which he remained responsible, included a College to train pastors a publications enterprise (with a weekly published sermon and a monthly magazine The Sword and the Trowel) an Orphanage a Colportage Association to spread Christian literature and above all the Metropolitan Tabernacle itself, opened for the church he served in 1861 and capable of holding about 6,000. Spurgeon’s Bible Commentary is one such volume. In the next decade, the 1860s, his work might best be described in terms of ‘The Advancement of Gospel Agencies’. At the age of twenty the largest halls in London were filled to hear him at twenty-one the newspapers spoke of him as ‘incomparably the most popular preacher of the day’ when he was twenty-three, 23,654 people heard him at a service in the Crystal Palace. Through the 1850s he was ‘The Youthful Prodigy’ who seemed to have stepped full-grown into the pulpit. Roughly speaking, Spurgeon’s public work can be divided up into four decades.
From there he moved to New Park Street, London in 1854 at the age of nineteen. He was then assisting at a school in Cambridge and it was in these Cambridge years that he came to Baptist principles and was called to the Baptist pastorate in the near-by village of Waterbeach. After a childhood in Essex, when he owed much to Christian parents and grandparents, he was converted in 1850 at the age of fifteen. Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) was England’s best-known preacher for most of the second half of the nineteenth century.