Billy Sunday

That there is a strategic value in rallying all the churches about one man was demonstrated by the Methodists of Philadelphia on this occasion. Bishop Joseph F. Berry had heartily indorsed the project, and had urged all of the Methodist pastors who could possibly do so to accept the North American's invitation. The Methodist delegation was an enthusiastic unit. When they returned to Philadelphia a special issue of the local Methodist paper was issued, and in this thirty-two articles appeared, each written by an aroused pastor who had been a member of the delegation. Incidentally, all of the city papers, as well as the religious press of a very wide region, reported this extraordinary pilgrimage of more than two hundred pastors to a distant city to hear an evangelist preach the gospel. A reflex of this was the return visit, some months later, of a thousand "trail-hitters" to speak in Philadelphia pulpits.

Before leaving the subject of the criticism of Sunday, pro and con, it should be insisted that no public man or institution should be free from the corrective power of public opinion, openly expressed. This is one of the wholesome agencies of democracy. Mr. Sunday himself is not slow to express his candid opinion of the Church, the ministry, and of society at large. It would be a sad day for him should all critical judgment upon his work give way to unreasoning adulation.

The best rule to follow in observing the evangelist's ministry is, "Never judge unfinished work." Only a completed campaign should pass in review before the critics; only the whole substance of the man's message; only the entire effect of his work upon the public. Partial judgments are sure to be incorrect judgments.

Billy Sunday succeeds in making clear to all his hearers – indeed he impresses them so deeply that the whole city talks of little else for weeks – that God has dealings with every man; and that God cares enough about man to provide for him a way of escape from the terrible reality of sin, that way being Jesus Christ.

When a preacher succeeds in lodging that conviction in the minds of the multitudes, he is heaven's messenger. Whether he speak in Choctaw, Yiddish, Bostonese or in the slang of Chicago, is too trivial a matter to discuss. We do not inspect the wardrobe or the vocabulary of the hero who rides before the flood, urging the people to safety in the hills.

PLAIN SPEECH FROM SUNDAY HIMSELF

The hour is come; come for something else. It has come for plainness of speech on the part of the preacher. If you have anything to antagonize, out with it; specify sins and sinners. You can always count on a decent public to right a wrong, and any public that won't right a wrong is a good one to get out of.

Charles Finney went to Europe to preach, and in London a famous free-thinker's wife went to hear him. The free-thinker's wife noticed a great change in him; he was more kind, more affectionate, more affable, less abusive and she said, "I know what is the matter with you; you have been to hear that man from America preach." And he said, "Wife, that is an insult; that man Finney don't preach; he just makes plain what the other fellows preach." Now the foremost preacher of his day was Paul. What he preached of his day was not so much idealism as practicality; not so much theology, homiletics, exegesis or didactics, but a manner of life. I tell you there was no small fuss about his way of teaching. When Paul was on the job the devil was awake. There is a kind of preaching that will never arouse the devil.

"He that believeth not is condemned already." He that has not believed in Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God, is condemned where he sits.

Too much of the preaching of today is too nice; too pretty; too dainty; it does not kill. Too many sermons are just given for literary excellence of the production. They get a nice adjective or noun, or pronoun – you cannot be saved by grammar. A little bit of grammar is all right, but don't be a big fool and sit around and criticize because the preacher gets a word wrong – if you do that your head is filled with buck oysters and sawdust, if that is all that you can use it for.

They've been crying peace. There is no peace. Some people won't come to hear me because they are afraid to hear the truth. They want deodorized, disinfected sermons. They are afraid to be stuck over the edge of the pit and get a smell of the brimstone. You can't get rid of sin as long as you treat it as a cream puff instead of a rattlesnake. You can't brush sin away with a feather duster. Go ask the drunkard who has been made sober whether he likes "Bill." Go ask the girl who was dragged from the quagmire of shame and restored to her mother's arms whether she likes "Bill." Go ask the happy housewife who gets the pay envelope every Saturday night instead of its going to the filthy saloon-keeper whether she's for "Bill." Some people say, "Oh, he's sensational." Nothing would be more sensational than if some of you were suddenly to become decent. I would rather be a guide-post than a tombstone.

I repeat that everybody who is decent or wants to be decent, will admire you when you preach the truth, although you riddle them when you do it. The hour is come, my friend. The hour is come to believe in a revival. Some people do not believe in revivals; neither does the devil; so you are like your daddy.

I can see those disciples praying, and talking and having a big time. There are many fool short-sighted ministers who are satisfied if they can only draw a large crowd. Some are as crazy after sensations as the yellowest newspaper that ever came off the press. That's the reason we have these sermons on "The Hobble Skirt" and "The Merry Widow Hat" and other such nonsensical tommyrot. If there were not so many March-hare sort of fellows breaking into pulpits you would have to sweat more and work harder. There are some of you that have the devil in you. Maybe you don't treat your wife square. Maybe you cheat in your weights. Get rid of the devil. What does it matter if you pack a church to the roof if nothing happens to turn the devil pale? What is the use of putting chairs in the aisles and out the doors?

The object of the Church is to cast out devils.

The devil has more sense than lots of little preachers. I have been unfortunate enough to know D.D.'s and LL.D.'s sitting around whittling down the doctrine of the personality of the devil to as fine a point as they know how. You are a fool to listen to them. The devil is no fool, he is no four-flusher. He said to Christ: "If you are a God, act like it; if you are a man, and believe the Scriptures, act as one who believes."

John the Baptist wasn't that kind of a preacher. Jesus Christ wasn't that kind of a preacher. The apostles weren't that kind of preachers – except old Judas. John the Baptist opened the Bible right in the middle and preached the word of God just as he found it, and he didn't care whether the people liked it or not. That wasn't his business. I tell you, John the Baptist stirred up the devil. If any minister doesn't believe in a personal devil it's because he has never preached a sermon on repentance, or he'd have heard him roar. Yes, sir. If there's anything that will make the devil roar it is a sermon on repentance.

You can preach sociology, or psychology, or any other kind of ology, but if you leave Jesus Christ out of it you hit the toboggan slide to hell.

I'll preach against any minister who is preaching false doctrines. I don't give a rap who he is. I'll turn my guns loose against him, and don't you forget that. Any man who is preaching false doctrines to the people and vomiting out false doctrines to them will hear from me. I want to say that the responsibility for no revivals in our cities and towns has got to be laid at the doors of the ministry. Preachers sit fighting their sham battles of different denominations, through their cussedness, inquiring into fol-da-rol and tommyrot, and there sits in the pews of the church that miserable old scoundrel who rents his property out for a saloon and is going to hell; and that other old scoundrel who rents his houses for houses of ill fame and is living directly on the proceeds of prostitution, and he doesn't preach against it. He is afraid he will turn the men against him. He is afraid of his job. They are a lot of backsliders and the whole bunch will go to hell together. They are afraid to come out against it.

I'll tell you what's the matter. Listen to me. The Church of God has lost the spirit of concern today largely because of the ministry – that's what's the matter with them. I'll allow no man or woman to go beyond me in paying tribute to culture. I don't mean this miserable "dog" business, shaking hands with two fingers. The less brains some people have the harder they try to show you that they have some, or think they have. I allow no man to go beyond me in paying tribute to real, genuine culture, a tribute to intellectual greatness; but when a man stands in the pulpit to preach he has got to be a man of God. He has got to speak with the passion for souls. If you sleep in the time of a revival God Almighty will wake you up.

There are lots of preachers who don't know Jesus. They know about him, but they don't know him. Experience will do more than forty million theories. I can experiment with religion just the same as I can with water. No two knew Him exactly alike, but all loved Him. All would have something to say.

Now for you preachers. When a man prays "Thy Kingdom Come" he will read the Bible to find out the way to make it come. The preacher who prays "Thy Kingdom Come" will not get all his reading from the new books or from the magazines. He will not try to please the highbrows and in pleasing them miss the masses. He will not try to tickle the palates of the giraffes and then let the sheep starve. He will put his cookies on the lower shelf. He will preach in a language that the commonest laborer can understand.

One of the prolific sources of unbelief and backsliding today is a bottle-fed church, where the whole membership lets the preacher do the studying of the Bible for them. He will go to the pulpit with his mind full of his sermon and they will come to the church with their minds filled with society and last night's card-playing, beer-and-wine-drinking and novel-reading party and will sit there half asleep. Many a preacher reminds me of a great big nursing bottle, and there are two hundred or three hundred rubber tubes, with nipples on the end, running into the mouths of two hundred or three hundred or four hundred great big old babies with whiskers and breeches on, and hair pins stuck in their heads and rats in their hair, sitting there, and they suck and draw from the preacher. Some old sister gets the "Amusement" nipple in her mouth and it sours her stomach, and up go her heels and she yells. Then the preacher has to go around and sing psalms to that big two-hundred-and-fifty-pound baby and get her good-natured so that she will go back to church some day.

By and by some old whisky-voting church member gets the "Temperance" nipple in his mouth and it sours his stomach and up go his heels and he lets out a yell, throws his hands across his abdominal region, and the preacher says, "Whatever is the matter? If I hit you any place but the heart or the head I apologize." The preacher has to be wet nurse to about two hundred and fifty big babies that haven't grown an inch since they came into the church.

One reason why some preachers are not able to bring many sinners to repentance is because they preach of a God so impotent that he can only throw down card houses when all the signs are right! They decline to magnify his power for fear they will overdo it! And if they accidentally make a strong assertion as to his power, they immediately neutralize it by "as it were," or "in a measure, perhaps!"

You make a man feel as though God was stuck on him and you'll be a thirty-third degree sort of a preacher with that fellow.

If some preachers were as true to their trust as John the Baptist, they might be turned out to grass, but they'd lay up treasures for themselves in heaven.

Clergymen will find their authority for out-of-the-ordinary methods in the lowering of a paralytic through a roof, as told of in the Bible. If that isn't sensationalism, then trot some out.

If God could convert the preachers the world would be saved. Most of them are a lot of evolutionary hot-air merchants.

We've got churches, lots of them. We've got preachers, seminaries, and they are turning out preachers and putting them into little theological molds and keeping them there until they get cold enough to practice preaching.

The reason some ministers are not more interested in their work is because they fail to realize that theirs is a God-given mission.

We've got a bunch of preachers breaking their necks to please a lot of old society dames.

Some ministers say, "If you don't repent, you'll die and go to a place, the name of which I can't pronounce." I can. You'll go to hell.

There is not a preacher on earth that can preach a better gospel than "Bill." I'm willing to die for the Church. I'm giving my life for the Church.

Your preachers would fight for Christ if some of you fossilated, antiquated old hypocrites didn't snort and snarl and whine.

A godless cowboy once went to a brown-stone church – with a high-toned preacher – I am a half-way house between the brown-stone church and the Salvation Army. They are both needed and so is the half-way house. Well, this fellow went to one of these brown-stone churches and after the preacher had finished the cowboy thought he had to go up and compliment the preacher, as he saw others doing, and so he sauntered down the aisle with his sombrero under his arm, his breeches stuck in his boots, a bandana handkerchief around his neck, his gun and bowie knife in his belt, and he walked over and said: "Hanged if I didn't fight shy of you fellows – but I'll tell you I sat here and listened to you for an hour and you monkeyed less with religion than any fellow I ever heard in my life." They have taken away the Lord and don't know where to find him.

You must remember that Jesus tells us to shine for God. The trouble with some people and preachers is that they try to shine rather than letting their light shine. Some preachers put such a big capital "I" in front of the cross that the sinner can't see Jesus. They want the glory. They would rather be a comet than stars of Bethlehem.

CHAPTER XVII

A Clean Man on Social Sins

There are a good many things worse than living and dying an old maid, and one of them is marrying the wrong man. – Billy Sunday.

Sunday's trumpet gives no uncertain sound on plain, every-day righteousness. He is like an Old Testament prophet in his passion for clean conduct. No phase of his work is more notable than the zeal for right living which he leaves behind him. His converts become partisans of purity.

Sunday's own mind is clean. He does not, as is sometimes the case, make his pleas for purity a real ministry of evil. In the guise of promoting purity he does not pander to pruriency. As outspoken as the Bible upon social sin, he yet leaves an impression so chaste that no father would hesitate to take his boy to the big men's meeting which Sunday holds in every campaign; and every woman who has once heard him talk to women would be glad to have her daughter hear him also.

The verdict of all Christians who have studied conditions in a community after one of the Sunday campaigns is that Sunday has been like a thunder storm that has cleared the moral atmosphere. Life is sweeter and safer and more beautiful for boys and girls after this man has dealt plainly with social sins and temptations. Of course, it is more important to clean up a neighborhood's mind than its streets.

Even in cold print one may feel somewhat of the power of the man's message on "The Moral Leper."

A PLAIN TALK TO MEN

"Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment."

"Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap."

In other words, do just as you please; lie if you want to, steal if you want to. God won't stop you, but he will hold you responsible in the end. Do just as you please until the end comes and the undertaker comes along and pumps the embalming fluid into you and then you are all in.

No one is living in ignorance of what will become of him if he does not go right and trot square. He knows there is a heaven for the saved and a hell for the damned, and that's all there is to it.

Many men start out on a life of pleasure. Please remember two things. First, pleasure soon has an end, and, second, there is a day of judgment coming and you'll get what's coming to you. God gives every man a square deal.

If a man stood up and told me he was going to preach on the things I am this afternoon, I'd want him to answer me several questions, and if he could do that I'd tell him to go ahead.

First – Are you kindly disposed toward me?

Second – Are you doing this to help me?

Third – Do you know what you're talking about?

Fourth – Do you practice what you preach?

That's fair. Well, for the first. God knows I am kindly disposed toward you. Second, God knows I would do anything in my power to help you be a better man. I want to make it easier for you to be square, and harder for you to go to hell. Third, I know what I'm talking about, for I have the Bible to back me up in parts and the statements of eminent physicians in other parts. And fourth, "Do I practice what I preach?" I will defy and challenge any man or woman on earth, and I'll look any man in the eye and challenge him, in the twenty-seven years I have been a professing Christian, to show anything against me. If I don't live what I preach, gentlemen, I'll leave the pulpit and never walk back here again. I live as I preach and I defy the dirty dogs who have insulted me and my wife and spread black-hearted lies and vilifications.

I was born and bred on a farm and at the age of eleven I held my place with men in the harvest field. When I was only nine years old I milked ten cows every morning. I know what hard knocks are. I have seen the seamy side of life. I have crawled out of the sewers and squalor and want. I have struggled ever since I was six years old, an orphan son of a dead soldier, up to this pulpit this afternoon. I know what it is to go to bed with an honest dollar in my overalls pocket, when the Goddess of Liberty became a Jenny Lind and the eagle on the other side became a nightingale and they'd sing a poor, homeless orphan boy to sleep. I'm not here to explode hot air and theories to you.

Some men here in town, if their wives asked them if they were coming down here, would say: "Oh no, I don't want to go anywhere I can't take you, dear." The dirty old dogs, they've been many a place they wouldn't take their wife and they wouldn't even let her know they were there.

If sin weren't so deceitful it wouldn't be so attractive. The effects get stronger and stronger while you get weaker and weaker all the time, and there is less chance of breaking away.

Many think a Christian has to be a sort of dish-rag proposition, a wishy-washy, sissified sort of a galoot that lets everybody make a doormat out of him. Let me tell you the manliest man is the man who will acknowledge Jesus Christ.

Christian Character

Christianity is the capital on which you build your character. Don't you let the devil fool you. You never become a man until you become a Christian. Christianity is the capital on which you do business. It's your character that gets you anything. Your reputation is what people say about you, but your character is what God and your wife and the angels know about you. Many have reputations of being good, but their characters would make a black mark on a piece of coal or tarred paper.

I was over in Terre Haute, Indiana, not long ago, and I was in a bank there admiring the beauty of it when the vice-president, Mr. McCormick, a friend of mine, said: "Bill, you haven't seen the vault yet," and he opened up the vaults there, carefully contrived against burglars, and let me in. There were three, and I wandered from one to another. No one watched me. I could have filled my pockets with gold or silver, but no one watched me. Why did they trust me? Because they knew I was preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and living up to it. That's why they trusted me. There was a time in my life when a man wouldn't trust me with a yellow dog on a corner fifteen minutes.

Before I was converted I could go five rounds so fast you couldn't see me for the dust, and I'm still pretty handy with my dukes and I can still deliver the goods with all express charges prepaid. Before I was converted I could run one hundred yards in ten seconds and circle the bases in fourteen seconds, and I could run just as fast after I was converted. So you don't have to be a dish-rag proposition at all.

When a person's acts affect only himself they can be left to the conscience of the individual, but when they affect others the law steps in. When a child has diphtheria, you are not allowed personal liberty; you are quarantined, because your personal liberty could endanger others if exercised. So you haven't any right to live in sin. You say you'll do it anyhow. All right, you'll go to hell, too. Adam and Eve said they would eat the apple anyhow, and the world became a graveyard, and here's the result today.

I look out into the world and see a man living in sin. I argue with him, I plead with him. I cry out warning words. I brand that man with a black brand, whose iniquities are responsible for the fall of others.

No man lives to himself alone. I hurt or help others by my life. When you go to hell you're going to drag some one else down with you and if you go to heaven you're going to take some one else with you. You say you hate sin. Of course you do if you have self-respect. But you never saw anyone who hates sin worse than I do, or loves a sinner more than I. I'm fighting for the sinners. I'm fighting to save your soul, just as a doctor fights to save your life from a disease. I'm your friend, and you'll find that I'll not compromise one bit with sin. I'll do anything to help you. No man will argue that sin is a good thing. Not a one who does not believe that the community would be better off if there was no sin. I preach against vice to show you that it will make your girl an outcast and your boy a drunkard. I'm fighting everything that will lead to this and if I have to be your enemy to fight it, God pity you, for I'm going to fight. People do not fight sin until it becomes a vice.

You say you're not afraid of sin. You ought to be, for your children. It doesn't take boys long to get on the wrong track, and while you are scratching gravel to make one lap, your boy makes ten. We've got kids who have not yet sprouted long breeches who know more about sin and vice than Methuselah. There are little frizzled-top sissies not yet sprouting long dresses who know more about vice than did their great-grandmothers when they were seventy-five years old. The girl who drinks will abandon her virtue. What did Methuselah know about smoking cigarettes? I know there are some sissy fellows out there who object to my talking plain and know you shirk from talking plain.

If any one ever tells you that you can't be virtuous and enjoy good health, I brand him as a low, infamous, black-hearted liar.

Ask any afflicted man you see on the street. If you could only reveal the heart of every one of them! In most you would find despair and disease.

How little he thinks when he is nursing that lust that he is nursing a demon which, like a vampire, will suck his blood and wreck his life and blacken and blight his existence. And if any little children are born to him, they will be weak anemics without the proper blood in their veins to support them. Our young men ought to be taught that no sum they can leave to a charitable institution can blot out the deeds of an ignominious life. You don't have to look far for the reason why so many young men fail; why they go through life weak, ambitionless, useless.

Common Sense

Let's be common folks together today. Let's be men, and talk sense.

As a rule a man wants something better for his children than he has had for himself. My father died before I was born and I lived with my grandfather. He smoked, but he didn't want me to. He chewed, but he didn't want me to. He drank, but he didn't want me to. He cussed, but he didn't want me to. He made wine that would make a man fight his own mother after he had drunk it. I remember how I used to find the bottles and suck the wine through a straw or an onion top.