Spurgeon fills the Crystal Palace
23,654 people hear one sermon
Charles Haddon Spurgeon is twenty-three years old and the most famous preacher in England.
He came to London in 1854 as the pastor of New Park Street Chapel — a congregation that had declined to two hundred — and within a year the building was full, then overflowing, then requiring a move to Exeter Hall while a new building was constructed. The Metropolitan Tabernacle, built to seat five thousand, was packed from its opening.
The crowds that Spurgeon draws are not church crowds. They are London crowds — dockworkers and merchants, servants and aristocrats, skeptics who come to argue and stay to believe. He preaches without notes in a voice that carries, in an era before amplification, to the furthest corners of vast halls.
On October 7, 1857, a day of national prayer called by Queen Victoria during the Indian Rebellion, Spurgeon preaches at the Crystal Palace — the great glass building constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851. A crowd of 23,654 people is counted. It is the largest crowd to hear a sermon in the English language to that point in history.
Spurgeon preaches twice on Sundays and again on Thursday evenings. He publishes his sermons weekly — they are the bestselling publications in Victorian Britain. He founds a college for preachers, an orphanage, sixty-six other institutions.
He also suffers from severe depression — what he calls the slough of despond — and writes about it with honesty unusual for a public figure of his stature.
“It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.”
— Charles Spurgeon, c. 19th century
“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in him whom they have not heard? How will they hear without a preacher?”
Spurgeon drew crowds of twenty thousand in an era without amplification or social media, to a message that had not changed in nineteen centuries.
The draw was not technique. It was the quality of a man who had himself been undone by the gospel and could not speak of it without that undoing being visible.
And the same man who packed the Crystal Palace went home to depression so severe that he sometimes could not get out of bed.
Both things were true. The great preacher and the suffering man. He did not hide the second. He wrote about it publicly, because he knew that the people filling the Crystal Palace contained thousands who were also in the slough.
The authority to speak to suffering comes from having been there. Spurgeon had been there. They knew it.