Charles Spurgeon

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born in 1834 in Kelvedon, Essex, and spent much of his childhood with his grandfather, a Congregational minister. He was converted at the age of fifteen in a Primitive Methodist chapel during a snowstorm, when a lay preacher urged the congregation to 'look unto me, and be ye saved'. He became a Baptist and began preaching as a teenager. In 1854, at nineteen, he became pastor of New Park Street Chapel in London, and his preaching drew such crowds that the congregation built the Metropolitan Tabernacle, which opened in 1861 and seated about five thousand people. His sermons were printed every week and sold widely around the world. In 1856 a false fire alarm during a service in a crowded music hall caused a stampede in which several people died, an event that troubled him for years. He founded a college for training pastors and an orphanage. In later years he suffered from gout and often spent winters in Menton, France, where he died in 1892.

Charles Spurgeon is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: English Baptist preacher and pastor. Source: Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) (via Wikisource)