Spurgeon and Gandhi

I was talking to someone the other day about Spurgeon and he mentioned that Gandhi had heard him. That didn't seem right but I checked and it is true. Gandhi was in London 1888-1891 studying for the bar. Spurgeon did not die until 1892 and preached his last sermon in the Tabernacle the year before in June.

The book Gandhi and his ashrams by Mark Thomson (1993) says (inaccurately to some extent at the end considering that Spurgeon once said that "the religion of the Hindoos is neither more nor less than a mass of the rankest filth that ever imagination could have conceived").

"During this period Gandhi began to learn more of other religions. He had developed a distaste for Christianity during his childhood. In Kathiawar conversion to Christianity was associated with eating beef and drinking alcohol, and he was repelled by the proselytising efforts of missionaries bent on damning all other faiths as "heathen". A Christian friend in London convinced him that meat-eating and drink were not enjoined by the Scriptures, and suggested he read the Bible. Gandhi found he could only read the Old Testament "with much difficulty and without the least interest or understanding", but the New Testament inspired him. He thought the Sermon on the Mount comparable to the Gita. He began to attend church services, and from Nonconformists such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon and Dr Joseph Parker he learnt of a radical interpretation of Christianity that was neither dogmatic nor intolerant of other faiths, and imbued with the spirit of humanism. "

The fact of Gandhi hearing Spurgeon is confirmed in Rajmohan Gandhi's biography (2006) here. He also mentions him hearing the Anglican F W Farrar.