He preached to 10 million people before radio existed

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born in Essex in 1834 and converted at 15 when, caught in a snowstorm, he ducked into a small Methodist chapel and heard a lay preacher deliver a short message on Isaiah 45:22: "Look unto me and be saved." He looked. He was 15.

He preached his first sermon at 16, filling in for someone who had not shown up. He was invited back. Within a year he had a regular congregation. By 19 he had been called to New Park Street Chapel in London, one of the most prominent Baptist churches in the city. The congregation outgrew the building within months.

He eventually moved to the Metropolitan Tabernacle, built to hold 5,500. It was routinely full. In an era before amplification, Spurgeon had a voice and a presence that contemporaries struggled to describe without resorting to superlatives. Weekly attendance across his ministry, calculated over his lifetime, is estimated at 10 million people.

His sermons were transcribed weekly and distributed as pamphlets. They were translated into dozens of languages. He founded a pastor's college, an orphanage, and wrote prolifically. He also suffered attacks of severe depression throughout his adult life. He did not hide this. He preached about it from the pulpit, wrote about it in letters and sermons, and treated it as a real and serious part of his experience rather than a failure of faith.

He died in 1892, worn out at 57. The depression, the physical ailments that accumulated through his fifties, the theological controversies he had navigated. He died in Mentone, France, where he had retreated for his health. His wife Susannah, who had been largely housebound for years with her own illness, lived another ten years. She had spent much of their marriage reading his sermons aloud rather than hearing them in person. He had found a way to make sure she never missed them.