Charles Spurgeon

Who Was Charles Spurgeon?

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was the most celebrated preacher in the English-speaking world of the nineteenth century — a Baptist minister whose sermons drew crowds of ten thousand to the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London and whose published works constitute the largest body of writing by any individual Christian in history. Born in Kelvedon, Essex, converted at fifteen in a small Primitive Methodist chapel during a snowstorm, he began preaching at sixteen and was called to the New Park Street Chapel in London at nineteen. He never attended a university or a seminary.

His preaching was characterized by clarity, warmth, wit, and an extraordinary capacity to make the great doctrines of Reformed theology accessible and compelling to ordinary people. He preached an estimated 3,600 sermons, which were published weekly and distributed around the world; by the time of his death in 1892, over 100 million copies of his sermons had been sold. His devotional writings — particularly Morning and Evening (1865) — remain in print and in daily use around the world more than a century after his death.

Spurgeon engaged in the Down Grade Controversy in the late 1880s — withdrawing from the Baptist Union over what he perceived as the denomination’s accommodation to theological liberalism — a controversy that cost him relationships and health but that he regarded as a matter of faithfulness to the gospel. He is significant for TLA as the supreme instance of the preacher-writer: the man whose literary gift was entirely in the service of proclamation, and whose proclamation was entirely in the service of the gospel.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Morning and Evening — 1865 — daily devotional
• The Treasury of David — 1869–1885 — commentary on Psalms
• Lectures to My Students — 1875–1894
• All of Grace — 1886
• Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit — 63 volumes of sermons