Introduction

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a biography of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He was the most famous preacher in an age of great preachers. Preacher, teacher, author, philanthropist, and political activist, he played a significant part in the history of Victorian England which has never been fully evaluated. Spurgeon's death in 1892 was followed by the publication of a number of memorial biographies as well as the first volume of the inevitable three-volumed Life and Works, written by Spurgeon's friend, G. Holden Pike. Spurgeon began life as an Independent, he ended it as an independent. Spurgeon's innovations were those of style rather than substance, and he held essentially the same theological views at the age of fifty that he had maintained at eighteen.