The Book Readers Guild: Orthodox Convictions of Ethereal Thinkers

Classic Sermons Chapter Four   John Bunyan Biography: (1628-1688) PURITAN AUTHOR John Bunyan had very little schooling. He followed his father in the tinker's trade, and he served in the parliamentary army from1644 to 1647. Bunyan married in 1649 and lived in Elstow until 1655, when his wife died. He then moved to Bedford, and married again in 1659. John Bunyan was received into the Baptist church in Bedford by immersion in 1653. In 1655, Bunyan became a deacon and began preaching, with marked success from the start. In 1658 he was indicted for preaching without a license. The authorities were fairly tolerant of him for a while, and he did not suffer imprisonment until November of 1660, when he was taken to the county jail in Silver Street, Bedford, and there confined (with the exception of a few weeks in 1666) for 12 years until January 1672. Bunyan afterward became pastor of the Bedford church. In March of 1675 he was ag...

Classic Sermons Chapter Three Charles Haddon Spurgeon Biography: (1834–1892) BAPTIST PREACHER The descendant of several generations of Independent ministers, he was born at Kelvedon, Essex, and became a Baptist in 1850. In the same year he preached his first sermon, and in 1852 he was appointed paster of the Baptist congregation at Waterbeach. In 1854 he went to Southwark, where his sermons drew such crowds that a new church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Newington Causeway, had to be built for him. Apart from his preaching activites he founded a pastors’ college, an orphanage, and a colportage association for the propagation of uplifting literature. Spurgeon was a strong Calvinist. He had a controversy in 1864 with the Evangelical party of the Church of England for remaining in a Church that taught Baptismal Regeneration, and also estranged considerable sections of his own community by rigid opposition to the more liberal methods of Biblical exegesis. These diff...

Classic Sermons Chapter Two Charles G. Finney Biography: (1792-1875) AMERICAN REVIVALIST PREACHER AND EDUCATOR. Finney was born in Litchfield County, Conn., on Aug. 27, 1792. He studied law from 1818 to 1821, when he had a sudden conversion experience. After this he began to preach and was licensed to preach by the Presbyterian denomination in 1824. Wherever he traveled he started extensive religious revivals. Finney was criticized because he emphasized the will of man in the process of regeneration and employed revival techniques that became known as "New Measures", calculated to evoke a highly emotional response. Impatient with Presbyterianism, he became a Congregationalist, serving New York City's Broadway Tabernacle. Finney was appointed professor of theology at Oberlin College (1835), minister of the First Congregational Church at Oberlin (1837), and was named president of the college in 1852. His Lectu...