121 years ago today Spurgeon died. 100,000 people lined his funeral route to mourn the passing of one of the Victorian era’s most significant public figures. You could do a lot worse than signing up for a new email devotional that begins tomorrow which is a lightly edited version of one of his devotional books.
It seems highly unlikely that Spurgeon will ever be surpassed either in his influence as a preacher, or in his unrivalled status as the most prolific and most-read christian author of all time. To commemorate his death my new friend Stephen McCaskell has shared 32 facts you may not know about Spurgeon. Here are some of them:
- One woman was converted through reading a single page of one of Spurgeon’s sermons wrapped around some butter she had bought.
- Before he was 20, Spurgeon had preached over 600 times.
- Spurgeon typically read 6 books per week and could remember what he had read—and where—even years later.
- Spurgeon once addressed an audience of 23,654—without a microphone or any mechanical amplification.
- At least 3 of Spurgeon’s works (including the multi-volume Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit series) have sold more than 1,000,000 copies. One of these, All of Grace, was the first book ever published by Moody Press (formerly the Bible Institute Colportage Association) and is still its all-time bestseller.
- The theme for Spurgeon’s Sunday morning sermon was usually not chosen until Saturday night.
- For an average sermon, Spurgeon took no more than one page of notes into the pulpit, yet he spoke at a rate of 140 words per minute for 40 minutes.
- Spurgeon spoke out so strongly against slavery that American publishers of his sermons began deleting his remarks on the subject.
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