Derek Thomas

And Bunyan is telling you about this in his autobiography.

He tells of his own story.

When there was a fire in the church, in Spurgeon's church, somebody in the balcony cries out, fire.

It's a hoax.

But there's a stampede to get out to the building.

This is before all the sort of civil codes that we now have for fire escapes and so on.

Several people are killed.

I think up to about a dozen people are killed in the stampede to get out to the building.

Spurgeon is absolutely and totally shaken by it.

He's out of commission.

He doesn't preach for months afterwards.

He is urged to go to the south of France to this house that somebody loans him to recuperate.

He is in the depths of depression because of this incident that he experiences.

Well, on the Saturday night, about midnight, Christian and hopeful begin to pray.

And I thought I would read part of the story to you of the way in which this tale is now told, as Bunyan himself tells it in Pilgrim's Progress.

Towards evening,

The giant goes down into the dungeon again to see if the prisoners had taken his counsel to end their lives.

But when he came there, he found them alive and truly alive was all.

For now, what for want of bread and water and by reason of the wounds they received when he beat them, they could do little but breathe.

But I say he found them alive, at which he fell into a grievous rage and told them that seeing they hadn't obeyed his counsel, it should be worse with them than if they had never been born.