English Baptist preacher (1834-1892), known in his own time as "the Prince of Preachers." Converted at age 15 in a snowstorm at a small Primitive Methodist chapel when the scheduled preacher failed to arrive and a substitute preached on Isaiah 45:22 — "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." Called to New Park Street Chapel in London at age 19; within a few years was preaching to 10,000 each Sunday at the purpose-built Metropolitan Tabernacle. Over 38 years of ministry he preached an estimated 3,600 sermons — every one transcribed, published weekly in pamphlet form, and compiled into 63 volumes (the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit), the largest set of sermons by a single preacher in history.
Spurgeon is evangelicalism's great Victorian. He was Reformed in doctrine (he called himself "what is commonly known as a Calvinist"), Baptist in polity, warmly evangelistic in application, and unflinchingly polemical where the gospel was at stake — which eventually cost him. In the 1887 "Downgrade Controversy" he warned that liberal theology was gutting the Baptist Union; when the union refused to take doctrinal action he withdrew, at enormous personal cost. He founded the Pastors' College (training working-class men for ministry), the Stockwell Orphanage, colportage societies, and numerous charities. He suffered severe depression and chronic gout for decades, preaching through pain; his sermons on suffering remain the warmest, most pastoral work on that theme outside Scripture. His Morning and Evening daily readings, Treasury of David (six volumes on the Psalms), and Lectures to My Students are still in print and still teaching preachers. Nobody in modern Church history has put more Christ-exalting sentences into the world.