Charles Simeon was born in 1759, the youngest son of a Reading lawyer. After spending twelve years at Eton, he went on to King's College, Cambridge, in January 1779.

After only three days in residence he received the provost's usual summons to attend Holy Communion, a duty he could not avoid but which he felt unready to face. He tried desperately to prepare himself for it. He found Bishop Wilson's Book on the Lord's Supper, which gave him a true understanding of the Sacrament and led to his conversion on Easter Day. Of that day he wrote, "Peace flowed in rich abundance into my soul."

After this traumatic experience Simeon continued his studies for three years before becoming a Fellow, a position which he continued to hold until his death because he was unmarried. In 1782, at the age of twenty-two, he was appointed vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge. He continued to serve for the next fifty-four years, in spite of prolonged opposition from town and gown, because of the appeal of his preaching. To quote his epitaph: "whether as the ground of his own hopes or as the subject of his ministrations he determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified."

He was a striking example of Philips Brooks' definition of preaching as "truth through personality." Dr. Coggan reminds us that "the sermon, as distinct from the lecture or essay, consists as much in what the preacher is as in what he says. That is why preaching is so searching and humbling and sometimes terrifying a task." "He made his name as a preacher of extraordinary power, but the discerning could see that it was what he was in his dedicated self that made his ministry so remarkable. He was a man of boundless energy: rising early to say his prayers, riding daily over the fens for exercise, visiting the sick and the poor in their homes and the prisoners in jail.

Simeon once related the substance of a conversation he had with John Wesley; from his own account and a reference to the same meeting in Wesley's Journal, it is evident that they saw eye to eye on many things. Here is Wesley's account: "I went to Hinksworth where I had the satisfaction of meeting Mr. Simeon. He had spent some time with Mr. Fletcher at Madeley, two kindred souls much resembling each other in both fervor of spirit and in the earnestness of their address. He gave me the pleasing information that there are three parish churches in Cambridge where true scriptural religion is preached and several young gentlemen who are happy partakers of it" (Wesley's Journal, Dec. 20, 1784).

Few men have held a more reverent attitude towards the Bible than Simeon. He was a constant student of Scripture and an eager seeker after its meaning. He believed that the truths of revelation stand out clear and unmistakable in the Bible and that the Bible was the sufficient treasure house of the Christian faith and the ultimate criterion in matters of doctrine.

Simeon refused to treat the Bible as a storehouse of prooftexts. He said, "My endeavor is to bring out of the Scriptures what is true and not to trust in what I think might be there. I have a great jealousy on this head, never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage which I am expounding." In another place he writes, "I love the simplicity of the Scriptures and I seek to receive and inculcate every truth precisely in the way it is set forth in the sacred volume. Were this the habit of all divines, there would soon be an end of most of the controversies that have agitated and divided the Church of Christ."