Being urged by his father and some others to take a college course, he agreed to meet Dr. Angus, the tutor of Stepney College, now Regents Park, at the house of Macmillan, the publisher, at Cambridge. Spurgeon went at the time appointed, and was shown into a room, where he waited for two hours for the tutor. Meantime, Dr. Angus had waited in another room, each not having been informed of the presence of the other by the servant; and, unable to wait longer, had taken the train for London. The result was that Spurgeon never went to College. At Cambridge, on the anniversary of the Sunday-school Union in 1853, Spurgeon, then nineteen, was asked to make an address. Mr. Gould, a Baptist deacon, liked the address so much, that he spoke of it to Mr. Thomas Olney, one of the deacons in New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, which had been one of the largest and richest of the Baptist churches in London. Mr. Gould thought the Waterbeach youth might put new life into the deteriorating church.
Spurgeon was invited to London to preach a sermon in December, 1853. Scarcely two hundred were in the chapel, which would seat twelve hundred. He preached earnestly from the words, "Every good gift, and every perfect gift, is from above." He was invited to come again for three Sundays in January, and soon asked to preach six months on probation.
He would not promise for more than three months. At the end of that time the church had filled so rapidly, that he was called to the pastorate; and before he was twenty, in 1854, was installed over the Baptist Church, with a salary of £150 a year. He came, as he says, to the great city of London, "a country lad," "wondering, praying, fearing, hoping, believing, ... all alone, and yet not alone; expectant of Divine help, and inwardly borne down by our sense of the need of it."
The church building soon became too small for the crowds which gathered to hear him. He was caricatured in the newspapers, standing beside a "polished" preacher, with his sermon on a velvet cushion. Spurgeon being called "Brimstone and Treacle." Again he was placarded as a man selling fly-paper, with judges, lords, and workingmen all sticking to his hat, or buzzing around him. This was called, "Catch-em-alive-O!" He was represented as "The Fast Train," his hair streaming in the wind, driving the engine. He was again pictured as a gorilla. But Mr. Spurgeon kept on preaching, and the interest deepened.
He has followed the dying words of the great Welsh Baptist minister, Christmas Evans, who used to drive from town to town in his evangelistic work, "Drive on! Drive on!"
"There is such a tendency," Spurgeon once said, "to pull up to refresh; such a tendency to get out of the gig and say, 'What a wonderful horse! Never saw a horse go over hill and down dale like this horse—the best horse that ever was; real sound Methodist or Baptist horse.' Now, brother, admire your horse as much as ever you like, but drive on!"
He worked day and night among his people when the cholera scourge came in the first year of his London pastorate. Neither praise nor blame deterred him in his work. His constant question of his deacons was, both there and at Waterbeach, "Have you heard of anybody finding the Lord?" One said, "I am sure there has been." "Oh," said Spurgeon, "I want to know it, I want to see it;" and he would at once seek out the inquirer.
"I have had nothing else to preach," said Mr. Spurgeon, "but Christ crucified. How many souls there are in heaven who have found their way there through that preaching, how many there are still on earth, serving the Master, it is not for me to tell; but whatever there has been of success has been through the preaching of Christ in the sinner's stead."
The church building soon became too cramped; and while it was being enlarged, from February to May, 1855, the congregation met in Exeter Hall. As the Strand became blocked with people, a Music Hall in Surrey Gardens was used, where ten thousand people gathered to hear him.