English Nonconformist CHARLES
HADDON SPURGEON, was born at Kelvedon,
Essex, on the i9th of June 1834. He was the
grandson of an Essex pastor, and son of John
Spurgeon, Independent minister at Upper Street,
Islington. He went to school at Colchester
and Maidstone, and in 1849 he became usher
at a school in Newmarket. He joined the Baptist
communion in 1851, and his work at once attested
his conversion. He began distributing tracts
and visiting the poor, joined the lay preachers
association, and gave his first sermon at
Teversham, near Cambridge. In 1852 he became
pastor of \Vaterbeach. He was strongly urged
to enter Stepney (now Regents Park) College
to prepare more fully for the ministry, but
an appointment with Dr Joseph Angus, the tutor,
having accidently fallen through, Spurgeon
interpreted the contretemps as a divine warning
against a college career. The lack of early
systematic theological training certainly
had a momentous effect upon his development.
Broad in every other respect, he retained
to the last the narrow Calvinism of the early
Igth century. His powers as a boy preacher
became widely known, and at the close of 1853
he was called to New Park Street Chapel, Southwark.
In a very few months time the chapel was full
to overflowing. Exeter Hall was used while
a new chapel was being erected, but Exeter
Hall could not contain Spurgeons hearers.
The enlarged chapel at once proved too small
for the crowds, and a huge tabernacle was
projected in Newington Causeway. The preacher
had recourse to the Surrey Gardens music hall,
where his congregation numbered from seven
to ten thousand. At twenty-two he was the
most popular preacher of his day. In 1857,
on the day of national humiliation for the
Indiafi Mutiny, he preached at the Crystal
Palace to 24,000 people. The Metropolitan
Tabernacle, with a platform for the preacher
and accommodation for 6000 persons, was opened
for service on the 25th of March 186I. The
cost was over ~3o,ooo, and the debt was entirely
paid off at the close of the opening services,
which lasted over a Inonth. Spurgeon preached
habitually at the Tabernacle on Sundays and
Thursdays. He frequently spoke for nearly
an, hour, and invariably from heads and subheads
jotted down upon half a sheet of letter paper.
His Sunday sermons were taken down in shorthand,
corrected by him on Monday, and sold by his
publishers, Messrs Passmore & Alabaster,
literally by tons. They have been extensively
translated. Clear and forcible in style and
arrangement, they are models of Puritan exposition
and of appeal through the emotions to the
individual conscience, illuminated by frequent
flashes of spontaneous and often highly unconventional
humour. In his method of employing illustration
he is suggestive of Thomas Adams, Thomas Fuller,
Richard Baxter, Thomas Manton. and John Bunyan.
Like them, too, he excelled in his vigorous
command of the vernacular. Among more recent
preachers he had most affinity with George
Whitefield, Richard Cecil and Joseph Irons.
Collected as TI-fe Tabernacle Pulpit, the
sermons form some fifty volumes. Spurgeons
lectures, aphorisms, talks, and Saplings for
Sermons were similarly stenographed, corrected
and circulated. He also edited a monthly magazine,
The Sword and Trowel; an elaborate exposition
of the Psalms, in seven volumes, called The
Treasury of David (1870-1885); and a book
of sayings called John Ploughmans Talks; or~
Plain Advice for Plain People (1869), a kind
of religious Poor Richard. In the summer of
1864 a sermon which he preached and printed
on Baptismal Regeneration (a doctrine which
he strenuously repudiated, maintaining that
immersion was only an outward and visible
sign of the inward conversion) led to a difference
with the bulk of the Evangelical party, both
Nonconformist and Anglican. Spurgeon maintained
his ground, but in 1865 he withdrew from the
Evangelical Alliance. Subsequently in 1887
his distrust of modern biblical criticism
led to his withdrawing from the Baptist Union.
His powers of organization were strongly exhibited
in the Pastors College, the Orphanage (at
Stockweil), the Tabernacle Almshouses, the
Colportage Association for selling religious
books, and the gratuitous book fund which
grew up under his care. He received large
money testimonials
