A great tabernacle was once built for a great preacher.

Such were Charles Haddon Spurgeon's preaching gifts that London's Metropolitan Tabernacle–a structure accommodating 6,000 people–was built in 1861 just for him. The great orator and preacher continued filling the pews until death thirty years later, while also founding there a pastor's college and an orphanage, both of which still exist.

Rejecting the Congregationalist theology of his father, Spurgeon was baptized as an adult and soon after discovered his God-given gifts in a Baptist pastorate near Cambridge, England. A powerful evangelist with a natural and appealing sense of humor, Spurgeon delivered sermons that are eminently readable today and still, remarkably, in print over a century later.