Billy Sunday

The fact is, Sunday is a born actor. He knows how to portray truth by a vocal personality. When he describes the traveler playing with a pearl at sea, he tosses an imaginary gem into the air so that the spectators hold their breath lest the ship should lurch and the jewel be lost. Words without gesture could never attain this triumph of oratory.

A hint of Sunday's state of mind which drives him to such earnestness and intensity in labor is found in quotations like the following:

"You will agree with me, in closing, that I'm not a crank; at least I try not to be. I have not preached about my first, second, third or hundredth blessing. I have not talked about baptism or immersion. I told you that while I was here my creed would be: 'With Christ you are saved; without him you are lost.' Are you saved? Are you lost? Going to heaven? Going to hell? I have tried to build every sermon right around those questions; and also to steer clear of anything else, but I want to say to you in closing, that it is the inspiration of my life, the secret of my earnestness. I never preach a sermon but that I think it may be the last one some fellow will hear or the last I shall ever be privileged to preach. It is an inspiration to me that some day He will come.

"'It may be at morn, when the day is awaking,When darkness through sunlight and shadow is breaking,That Jesus will come, in the fullness of glory,To receive from the world his own."'Oh joy, Oh delight, to go without dying,No sickness, no sadness, no sorrow, no crying!Caught up with the Lord in the clouds of gloryWhen he comes to receive from the world his own.'"

"Go straight on and break the lion's neck and turn it into a beehive, out of which you will some day take the best and sweetest honey ever tasted, for the flavor of a dead lion in the honey beats that of clover and buckwheat all to pieces. Be a man, therefore, by going straight on to breathe the air that has in it the smoke of battle.

"Don't spend much time in looking for an easy chair, with a soft cushion on it, if you would write your name high in the hall of fame where the names of real men are found. The man who is willing to be carried over all rough places might as well have wooden legs. 'He is not worthy of the honeycomb who shuns the hive because the bees have stings.' The true value of life lies in the preciousness of striving. No tears are ever shed for the chick that dies in its shell.

"'Did you tackle the trouble that came your wayWith a resolute heart and cheerful?Or hide your face from the light of dayWith a craven soul and fearful?Oh, a trouble is a ton, or a trouble is an ounce,Or a trouble is what you make it,And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts —But only – How did you take it?'"

"This poem is by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the negro poet:

"'The Lord had a job for me, but I had so much to do,I said: "You get somebody else – or, wait till I get through.I don't know how the Lord came out, but he seemed to get along —But I felt kinda sneakin' like, 'cause I know'd I done him wrong —One day I needed the Lord, needed him myself – needed him right away —And he never answered me at all, but I could hear him say —Down in my accusin' heart – "Nigger, I'se got too much to do,You get somebody else, or wait till I get through."Now when the Lord he have a job for me, I never tries to shirk;I drops what I have on hand and does the good Lord's work;And my affairs can run along, or wait till I get through,Nobody else can do the job that God's marked out for you.'"

"I will tell you many young people are good in the beginning, but they are like the fellow that was killed by falling off a skyscraper – they stop too quick. They go one day like a six-cylinder automobile with her carbureters working; the next day they stroll along like a fellow walking through a graveyard reading the epitaphs on the tombstones. It is the false ideals that strew the shores with wrecks, eagerness to achieve success in realms we can not reach that breeds half the ills that curse today. One hundred years from tonight what difference will it make whether you are rich or poor; whether learned or illiterate.

"'It matters little where I was born,Whether my parents were rich or poor;Whether they shrunk from the cold world's scorn,Or lived in pride of wealth secure.But whether I live an honest man,And hold my integrity firm in my clutch;I tell you – my neighbor – as plain as I can,That matters much.'

"The engineer is bigger than the locomotive, because he runs it.

"Do your best and you will never wear out shoe leather looking for a job. Do your best, and you will never become blind reading 'Help Wanted' ads in a newspaper. Be like the fellow that went to college and tacked the letter V up over his door in his room. He was asked what that stood for, and he said valedictorian, and he went out carrying the valedictory with him.

"'If I were a cobbler, best of all cobblers I would be.If I were a tinker, no tinker beside should mend an old tea kettle for me.'"

In dealing with the unreality of many preachers, Sunday pictures a minister as going to the store to buy groceries for his wife, but using his pulpit manner, his pulpit tone of voice and his pulpit phraseology. This is so true to life that it convulses every congregation that hears it. In these few minutes of mimicry the evangelist does more to argue for reality and genuineness and unprofessionalism on the part of the clergy than could be accomplished by an hour's lecture.

Another of his famous passages is his portrayal of the society woman nursing a pug dog. You see the woman and you see the dog, and you love neither one. Likewise, Sunday mimics the skin-flint hypocrite in a way to make the man represented loathe himself.

This suggests a second fact about Sunday's preaching. He often makes people laugh, but rarely makes them cry. His sense of humor is stronger than his sense of pathos. Now tears and hysterics are supposed to be part of the stock in trade of the professional evangelist. Not so with Sunday. He makes sin absurd and foolish as well as wicked; and he makes the sinner ashamed of himself. He has recovered for the Church the use of that powerful weapon, the barb of ridicule. There are more instruments of warfare in the gospel armory than the average preacher commonly uses. Sunday endeavors to employ them all, and his favorites seem to be humor, satire and scorn.

As a physical performance the preaching to crowds of from ten to twenty-five thousand persons every day is phenomenal. Sunday has not a beautiful voice like many great orators. It is husky and seems strained and yet it is able to penetrate every corner of his great tabernacles. Nor is he possessed of the oratorical manner, "the grand air" of the rhetorician. Mostly he is direct, informal and colloquial in his utterances. But he is so dead in earnest that after every address he must make an entire change of raiment – and, like most baseball players, and members of the sporting fraternities, he is fond of good clothes, even to the point of foppishness. He carries about a dozen different suits with him and I question whether there is a single Prince Albert or "preacher's coat" in the whole outfit.

A very human figure is Billy Sunday on the platform. During the preliminaries he enjoys the music, the responses of the delegations, and any of the informalities that are common accessories of his meetings. When he begins to speak he is an autocrat and will brook no disturbance. He is less concerned about hurting the feelings of some fidgety, restless usher or auditor than he is about the comfort of the great congregation and its opportunity to hear his message.

Any notion that Sunday loves the limelight is wide of the mark. The fact is, he shuns the public gaze. It really makes him nervous to be pointed out and stared at. That is one reason why he does not go to a hotel, but hires a furnished house for himself and his associates. Here they "camp out" for the period of the campaign, and enjoy something like the family life of every-day American folk. Their hospitable table puts on no more frills than that of the ordinary home. The same cook has accompanied the party for months; and when a family's religion so commends itself to the cook, it is likely to grade "A No. 1 Hard," like Minnesota wheat.

"Ma," as the whole party call Mrs. Sunday, is responsible for the home, as well as for many meetings. Primarily, though, she looks after "Daddy." Sunday is the type of man who is quite helpless with respect to a dozen matters which a watchful wife attends to. He needs considerable looking after, and all his friends, from the newspaper men to the policeman on duty at the house, conspire to take care of him.

The Pittsburgh authorities assigned a couple of plain clothes men to safeguard Sunday; of course he "got them" early, as he gets most everybody he comes into touch with. So these men took care of Sunday as if he were the famous "millionaire baby" of Washington and Newport. Not a sense of official duty, but affectionate personal solicitude animated those two men who rode in the automobile with us from the house to the Tabernacle.

This sort of thing is one of the most illuminating phases of the Sunday campaign. Those who come closest to the man believe most in his religion. As one of the newspaper men covering the meetings said to me, "The newspaper boys have all 'hit the trail.'" Then he proved his religion by offering to do the most fraternal services for me. From Mrs. Sunday, though, I learned that there was one bright reporter who had worked on aspects of the revival who had not gone forward. He avoided the meetings, and evaded the personal interviews of the Sunday party. The evangelist's wife was as solicitous over that one young man's spiritual welfare as if he had been one of her own four children.

Ten of the policemen stationed at the Tabernacle went forward the night before I arrived in Pittsburgh. I was told that twenty others were waiting to "hit the trail" in a group, taking their families with them.

The personal side of Sunday is wholesome and satisfactory. He is a simple, modest chap, marked by the ways of the Middle West. Between meetings he goes to bed, and there friends sometimes visit him. Met thus intimately, behind the scenes, one would expect from him an unrestrained display of personality, even a measure of egotism. Surely, it is sometimes to be permitted a man to recount his achievements. Never a boast did I hear from Sunday. Instead, he seemed absurdly self-distrustful. These are his times for gathering, and he wanted me to tell him about Bible lands!

CHAPTER XII

"The Old-Time Religion"

I am an old-fashioned preacher of the old-time religion, that has warmed this cold world's heart for two thousand years. – Billy Sunday.

Modern to the last minute Sunday's methods may be, but his message is unmistakably the "old-time religion." He believes his beliefs without a question. There is no twilight zone in his intellectual processes; no mental reservation in his preaching. He is sure that man is lost without Christ, and that only by the acceptance of the Saviour can fallen humanity find salvation. He is as sure of hell as of heaven, and for all modernized varieties of religion he has only vials of scorn.

In no single particular is Sunday's work more valuable than in its revelation of the power of positive conviction to attract and convert multitudes. The world wants faith. "Intolerant," cry the scholars of Sunday; but the hungry myriads accept him as their spiritual guide to peace, and joy, and righteousness. The world wants a religion with salvation in it; speculation does not interest the average man who seeks deliverance from sin in himself and in the world. He does not hope to be evoluted into holiness; he wants to be redeemed.

"Modernists" sputter and fume and rail at Sunday and his work: but they cannot deny that he leads men and women into new lives of holiness, happiness and helpfulness. Churches are enlarged and righteousness is promoted, all by the old, blood-stained way of the Cross. The revivals which have followed the preaching of Evangelist Sunday are supplemental to the Book of the Acts. His theology is summed up in the words Peter used in referring to Jesus: "There is none other Name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved."

One of Sunday's favorite sayings is: "I don't know any more about theology than a jack-rabbit does about ping-pong, but I'm on the way to glory." That really does not fully express the evangelist's point. He was arguing that "theology bears the same relation to Christianity that botany does to flowers, or astronomy to the stars. Botany is rewritten, but the flowers remain the same. Theology changes (I have no objection to your new theology when it tries to make the truths of Christianity clearer), but Christianity abides. Nobody is kept out of heaven because he does not understand theology. It isn't theology that saves, but Christ; it is not the sawdust trail that saves, but Christ in the motive that makes you hit the trail.

"I believe the Bible is the word of God from cover to cover. I believe that the man who magnifies the word of God in his preaching is the man whom God will honor. Why do such names stand out on the pages of history as Wesley, Whitefield, Finney and Martin Luther? Because of their fearless denunciation of all sin, and because they preach Jesus Christ without fear or favor.

"But somebody says a revival is abnormal. You lie! Do you mean to tell me that the godless, card-playing conditions of the Church are normal? I say they are not, but it is the abnormal state. It is the sin-eaten, apathetic condition of the Church that is abnormal. It is the 'Dutch lunch' and beer party, card parties and the like, that are abnormal. I say that they lie when they say that a revival is an abnormal condition in the Church.

"What we need is the good old-time kind of revival that will cause you to love your neighbors, and quit talking about them. A revival that will make you pay your debts, and have family prayers. Get that kind and then you will see that a revival means a very different condition from what people believe it does.

"Christianity means a lot more than church membership. Many an old skin-flint is not fit for the balm of Gilead until you give him a fly blister and get after him with a currycomb. There are too many Sunday-school teachers who are godless card-players, beer, wine and champagne drinkers. No wonder the kids are going to the devil. No wonder your children grow up like cattle when you have no form of prayer in the home."

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SUNDAY

What does converted mean? It means completely changed. Converted is not synonymous with reformed. Reforms are from without – conversion from within. Conversion is a complete surrender to Jesus. It's a willingness to do what he wants you to do. Unless you have made a complete surrender and are doing his will it will avail you nothing if you've reformed a thousand times and have your name on fifty church records.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, in your heart and confess him with your mouth and you will be saved. God is good. The plan of salvation is presented to you in two parts. Believe in your heart and confess with your mouth. Many of you here probably do believe. Why don't you confess? Now own up. The truth is that you have a yellow streak. Own up, business men, and business women, and all of you others. Isn't it so? Haven't you got a little saffron? Brave old Elijah ran like a scared deer when he heard old Jezebel had said she would have his head, and he beat it. And he ran to Beersheba and lay down under a juniper tree and cried to the Lord to let him die. The Lord answered his prayer, but not in the way he expected. If he had let him die he would have died with nothing but the wind moaning through the trees as his funeral dirge. But the Lord had something better for Elijah. He had a chariot of fire and it swooped down and carried him into glory without his ever seeing death.

So he says he has something better for you – salvation if he can get you to see it. You've kept your church membership locked up. You've smiled at a smutty story. When God and the Church were scoffed at you never peeped, and when asked to stand up here you've sneaked out the back way and beat it. You're afraid and God despises a coward – a mutt. You cannot be converted by thinking so and sitting still.

Maybe you're a drunkard, an adulterer, a prostitute, a liar; won't admit you are lost; are proud. Maybe you're even proud you're not proud, and Jesus has a time of it.

Jesus said: "Come to me," not to the Church; to me, not to a creed; to me, not to a preacher; to me, not to an evangelist; to me, not to a priest; to me, not to a pope; "Come to me and I will give you rest." Faith in Jesus Christ saves you, not faith in the Church.

You can join church, pay your share of the preacher's salary, attend the services, teach Sunday school, return thanks and do everything that would apparently stamp you as a Christian – even pray – but you won't ever be a Christian until you do what God tells you to do.

That's the road, and that's the only one mapped out for you and for me. God treats all alike. He doesn't furnish one plan for the banker and another for the janitor who sweeps out the bank. He has the same plan for one that he has for another. It's the law – you may not approve of it, but that doesn't make any difference.

Salvation a Personal Matter

The first thing to remember about being saved is that salvation is a personal matter. "Seek ye the Lord" – that means every one must seek for himself. It won't do for the parent to seek for the children; it won't do for the children to seek for the parent. If you were sick all the medicine I might take wouldn't do you any good. Salvation is a personal matter that no one else can do for you; you must attend to it yourself.

Some persons have lived manly or womanly lives, and they lack but one thing – open confession of the Lord Jesus Christ. Some men think that they must come to him in a certain way – that they must be stirred by emotion or something like that.

Some people have a deeper conviction of sin before they are converted than after they are converted. With some it is the other way. Some know when they are converted and others don't.

Some people are emotional. Some are demonstrative. Some will cry easily. Some are cold and can't be moved to emotion. A man jumped up in a meeting and asked whether he could be saved when he hadn't shed a tear in forty years. Even as he spoke he began to shed tears. It's all a matter of how you're constituted. I am vehement, and I serve God with the same vehemence that I served the devil when I went down the line.

Some of you say that in order to accept Jesus you must have different surroundings. You think you could do it better in some other place. You can be saved where you are as well as any place on earth. I say, "My watch doesn't run. It needs new surroundings. I'll put it in this other pocket, or I'll put it here, or here on these flowers." It doesn't need new surroundings. It needs a new mainspring; and that's what the sinner needs. You need a new heart, not a new suit.

What can I do to keep out of hell? "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved."

The Philippian jailer was converted. He had put the disciples into the stocks when they came to the prison, but after his conversion he stooped down and washed the blood from their stripes.

Now, leave God out of the proposition for a minute. Never mind about the new birth – that's his business. Jesus Christ became a man, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. He died on the cross for us, so that we might escape the penalty pronounced on us. Now, never mind about anything but our part in salvation. Here it is: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

You say, "Mr. Sunday, the Church is full of hypocrites." So's hell. I say to you if you don't want to go to hell and live with that whole bunch forever, come into the Church, where you won't have to associate with them very long. There are no hypocrites in heaven.

You say, "Mr. Sunday, I can be a Christian and go to heaven without joining a church." Yes, and you can go to Europe without getting on board a steamer. The swimming's good – but the sharks are laying for fellows who take that route. I don't believe you. If a man is truly saved he will hunt for a church right away.

You say, "It's so mysterious. I don't understand." You'll be surprised to find out how little you know. You plant a seed in the ground – that's your part. You don't understand how it grows. How God makes that seed grow is mysterious to you.

Some people think that they can't be converted unless they go down on their knees in the straw at a camp-meeting, unless they pray all hours of the night, and all nights of the week, while some old brother storms heaven in prayer. Some think a man must lose sleep, must come down the aisle with a haggard look, and he must froth at the mouth and dance and shout. Some get it that way, and they don't think that the work I do is genuine unless conversions are made in the same way that they have got religion.

I want you to see what God put in black and white; that there can be a sound, thorough conversion in an instant; that man can be converted as quietly as the coming of day and never backslide. I do not find fault with the way other people get religion. What I want and preach is the fact that a man can be converted without any fuss.

If a man wants to shout and clap his hands in joy over his wife's conversion, or if a wife wants to cry when her husband is converted, I am not going to turn the hose on them, or put them in a strait-jacket. When a man turns to God truly in conversion, I don't care what form his conversion takes. I wasn't converted that way, but I do not rush around and say, with gall and bitterness, that you are not saved because you did not get religion the way I did. If we all got religion in the same way, the devil might go to sleep with a regular Rip Van Winkle snooze and still be on the job.

Look at Nicodemus. You could never get a man with the temperament of Nicodemus near a camp meeting, to kneel down in the straw, or to shout and sing. He was a quiet, thoughtful, honest, sincere and cautious man. He wanted to know the truth and he was willing to walk in the light when he found it.

Look at the man at the pool of Bethesda. He was a big sinner and was in a lot of trouble which his sins had made for him. He had been in that condition for a long time. It didn't take him three minutes to say "Yes," when the Lord spoke to him. See how quietly he was converted.

"And He Arose and Followed Him"

Matthew stood in the presence of Christ and he realized what it would be to be without Christ, to be without hope, and it brought him to a quick decision. "And he arose and followed him."

How long did that conversion take? How long did it take him to accept Christ after he had made up his mind? And you tell me you can't make an instant decision to please God? The decision of Matthew proves that you can. While he was sitting at his desk he was not a disciple. The instant he arose he was. That move changed his attitude toward God. Then he ceased to do evil and commenced to do good. You can be converted just as quickly as Matthew was.

God says: "Let the wicked man forsake his way." The instant that is done, no matter if the man has been a life-long sinner, he is safe. There is no need of struggling for hours – or for days – do it now. Who are you struggling with? Not God. God's mind was made up long before the foundations of the earth were laid. The plan of salvation was made long before there was any sin in the world. Electricity existed long before there was any car wheel for it to drive. "Let the wicked man forsake his way." When? Within a month, within a week, within a day, within an hour? No! Now! The instant you yield, God's plan of salvation is thrown into gear. You will be saved before you know it, like a child being born.

Rising and following Christ switched Matthew from the broad to the narrow way. He must have counted the cost as he would have balanced his cash book. He put one side against the other. The life he was living led to all chance of gain. On the other side there was Jesus, and Jesus outweighs all else. He saw the balance turn as the tide of a battle turns and then it ended with his decision. The sinner died and the disciple was born.

I believe that the reason the story of Matthew was written was to show how a man could be converted quickly and quietly. It didn't take him five or ten years to begin to do something – he got busy right away.