photo #8701550

October 19, 1856: A Sunday evening service led by Charles Haddon Spurgeon turns tragic when someone shouts “Fire!” in London’s enormous Surrey Gardens Music Hall. The crowd is estimated at 14,000 in a hall designed for 10,000, with thousands more outside. There was no fire, but the stampede left seven people dead and twenty-eight more hospitalized. The episode plunged Spurgeon into weeks of depression. As he wrote: “I refused to be comforted; tears were my meat by day, and dreams my terror by night. I felt as I had never felt before. My thoughts were all a case of knives, cutting my heart in pieces, until a kind of stupor of grief ministered a mournful medicine to me. Broke in pieces all asunder, my thoughts, which had been to me a cup of delights, were like pieces of broken glass, the piercing and cutting miseries of my pilgrimage.” In 1861, Spurgeon opened the Metropolitan Tabernacle south of the Thames, which held 6,000. He often referred to the Surrey Gardens disaster, saying he had been hardened in “a burning furnace.”