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Title: Burning truths from Billy's bat : A graphic description of the remarkable conversion of Rev. "Billy" Sunday (the world's famous evangelist)—embodying anecdotes, terse sayings, etc., compiled from various sources
Author: Sunday, William Ashley
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Burning truths from Billy's bat : A graphic description of the remarkable conversion of Rev. "Billy" Sunday (the world's famous evangelist)—embodying anecdotes, terse sayings, etc., compiled from various sources" ***
BAT ***
[Illustration:
REV. WM. A. SUNDAY MRS. SUNDAY
B. D. ACKLEY HOMER A. RODEHEAVER REV. L. K. PEACOCK
PIANIST AND PRIVATE SECRETARY CHOIR MASTER ASSISTANT
]
Burning Truths from
Billy’s Bat
A Graphic Description of the
Remarkable Conversion of
Rev. “Billy” Sunday
(The World’s Famous Evangelist)
Embodying Anecdotes, Terse
Sayings, etc., Compiled from
Various Sources
[Illustration]
1914
Diamond Publishing Co.,
Philadelphia, Pa.
Copyright, 1914,
By JOSEPH PALLEN
CONTENTS
PAGE
Mr. Sunday’s Early Life 9
Conversion of “Billy” Sunday 9
Beacon Lights on Billy’s Trail 16
Hard to Keep Good Man Down 17
Honor Your Wife 18
Two Pictures of American Homes 18
Kind Words to Children 19
Tribute to Wife 20
Scores Smart Set 20
Father Gives Up, but Mother Doesn’t 22
Bright Word Picture to Mothers 22
Bravest Battle Ever Fought 22
One Act, One Word Will Blight a Child 23
Touching Tribute to Mother’s Love 24
Every Child a Trust to Mother 25
Says Men Are What Mothers Make Them 26
Songs of Mothers Sweetest 26
Gathering Up the Sunbeams 28
Start Children Right 28
Dancing Worst of Amusements 29
Ballroom Permits Liberties 30
On Motherhood 31
Too Many Girls Are Not in Love 32
High Spots in Sermon to Women 32
Picking a Husband 33
Thy Kingdom Come 34
Hot Shots on Cards and Gambling 36
Taboo on Theatre 39
Taboo on Wedding Knots 40
Every Palace Not a Home 41
Drawing the Line on Christians 42
The Preachers and the Laymen 44
Belshazzar’s Feast 45
A Remarkable Prayer 47
Hitting the Sawdust Trail, Origin 49
Trying to Serve God and the Devil 50
Inconsistent Church Members 50
Christians Can’t Live Double Lives 51
A High Tribute to General Lee 52
Expose of Graft Stories 53
Women Have Same Right as Men 54
Backsliders Like Groundhogs 57
True to Lodge, False to Christ 57
Sunday to Society Women 58
Consolation for Old Maids 66
Girls Who Flirt 66
Drinking and Matrimony 67
Says Society’s to Blame 68
Some Extra Shots 68
Billy’s Sketch of Leper Bathing 69
Snapshots from Sermons 71
A Trip Through the Bible 72
Defends Divine Origin of the Bible 74
Spiritualism on the Grill 75
Straight Shots from the Shoulder 75
Others Suffer from Your Sins 79
Lessons from Story of Pilate 80
Moral Truths 80
These Three Will Ruin City 81
Billy’s Key to Success 82
A Few Bunts to Live Students 84
Tribute to the Holidays 85
Living Up to One’s Profession 89
Stray Shots from the Gallery 89
Some Hot Ones, Fired at Random 90
A Characteristic Prayer 90
Sunday’s Bombshells 92
Sundayisms 96
Sunday’s Prayer for Strength 98
Faith of Great Men 99
Bible Above All 99
Some Home Runs 100
Up to Mothers 100
Electric Flashes 101
Sunday on Evolution 103
Rev. William A. Sunday
(The World’s Famous Evangelist)
His Early Life, a Dramatic Portrayal of His Conversion, and the
Disintegration of the Old White Stocking Baseball Team, of Which He was a
Member
Rev. “Billy” Sunday (as he is familiarly known) was born in a log cabin in
the backwoods of Story County, Iowa, November 19, 1862. Not long after his
birth his father went to the Civil War and never returned. Billy remained
home until he was about fourteen years of age, and as a hired hand later
lived with Colonel John Scott, former Lieutenant Governor of Iowa, and
was enabled to acquire a high-school education. He tried various lines
of work, from a hired hand at sixteen years old to a furniture polisher,
driver of a hearse, member of a volunteer hose company, railroad fireman,
ball player, student and now evangelist.
MR. SUNDAY’S REMARKABLE CONVERSION.
“Twenty-seven years ago I walked down a street in Chicago in company with
some ball players who were famous in this world—some of them are dead
now—and we went into a saloon. It was Sunday afternoon and we got tanked
up and then went and sat down on a corner. I never go by that street
without thanking God for saving me. It was a vacant lot at that time. We
sat down on a curbing. Across the street a company of men and women were
playing on instruments—horns, flutes and slide trombones—and the others
were singing the gospel hymns that I used to hear my mother sing back in
the log cabin in Iowa and back in the old church where I used to go to
Sunday school.
“And God painted on the canvas of my recollection and memory a vivid
picture of the scenes of other days and other faces.”
“WON’T YOU COME?”
“Many have long since turned to dust. I sobbed and sobbed and a young man
stepped out and said: ‘We are going down to the Pacific Garden mission.
Won’t you come down to the mission? I am sure you will enjoy it. You can
hear drunkards tell how they have been saved and girls tell how they have
been saved from the red light district. I arose and said to the boys: “I’m
through. We’ve come to the parting of the ways,” and I turned my back on
them. Some of them laughed and some of them mocked me; one of them gave me
encouragement; others never said a word. Twenty-seven years ago I turned
and left that little group on the corner of State and Madison streets,
walked to the little mission, fell on my knees and staggered out of sin
and into the arms of the Saviour.
I went over to the west side of Chicago where I was keeping company
with a girl now my wife, Nell. I married Nell. She was a Presbyterian,
so I am a Presbyterian. Had she been a Catholic, I would have been a
Catholic—because I was hot on the trail of Nell.
The next day I had to go out to the ball park and practice. Every morning
at 10 o’clock we had to be out there and practice. I never slept that
night. I was afraid of the horse-laugh that the gang would give me because
I had taken my stand for Jesus Christ.
I walked down to the old ball grounds. I will never forget it. I slipped
my key into the wicket gate and the first man to meet me after I got
inside was Mike Kelley.
Up came Mike Kelley. He said: “Bill I’m proud of you—religion is not my
long suit, but I’ll help you all I can.” Up came Anson, Pfeffer, Clarkson,
Flint, McCormick, Burns, Williamson and Dalrymple. There wasn’t a fellow
in that gang who knocked, every fellow had a word of encouragement for me.
That afternoon we played the old Detroit club. We were neck and neck for
the championship. That club had Thompson, Richardson, Rowe, Dunlap, Hanlon
and Bennett, and they could play ball. I was playing right field and John
G. Clarkson was pitching. He was as fine pitcher as ever crawled into a
uniform. There are some pitchers today, O’Toole, Bender, Wood, Mathewson,
Johnson, Marquard, but I do not believe any one of them stood in the class
with Clarkson.
We had two men out and they had a man on second and one on third, and
Bennett, their old catcher was at the bat. Charley had three balls and two
strikes on him. Charley couldn’t hit a high ball. I don’t mean a Scotch
high-ball, but he could kill them when they went about his knee.
I hollered to Clarkson and said: “One more and we got ’em.”
You know every pitcher digs a hole in the ground where he puts his foot
when he is pitching. John stuck his foot in the hole and he went clear to
the ground. Oh, he could make them dance. He could throw over-handed, and
the ball would go down and up like that. He is the only man on earth I
have seen do that. The ball would go by so fast that a thermometer would
drop two degrees. John went clear down, and as he went to throw the ball
his right foot slipped, and the ball went low instead of high.
I saw Charley swing hard and heard the bat hit the ball with a terrific
blow. Bennett had smashed the ball on the nose. I saw the ball rise in the
air and knew it was going clear over my head.
I could judge within ten feet of where the ball would light. I turned my
back to the ball and ran.
The field was crowded with people and I yelled: ‘Stand back!’ and the
crowd opened like the Red Sea opened for the rod of Moses. I ran on, and
as I ran I made a prayer; it wasn’t theological, either, I tell you. I
said: “God, if you ever helped mortal man, help me to get that ball, and
you haven’t got much time to make up your mind, either.”
I ran and jumped over the bench and stopped. I thought I was close enough
to catch it. I looked back and saw it going over my head, and I jumped and
shoved my left hand out and the ball hit it and stuck. At the rate I was
going, the momentum carried me on and I fell under the feet of a team of
horses. I jumped up with the ball in my hand. Up came Tom Johnson. He was
afterwards Mayor of Cleveland. “Here is $10.00 Bill; buy yourself the best
hat in Chicago. That catch won me $1,500. Tomorrow go and buy yourself the
best suit of clothes you can find in Chicago.”
An old Methodist minister said to me a few years ago: “Why, William, you
didn’t take the $10.00 did you.” I said: “You bet I did.”
Listen! Mike Kelley was sold to Boston for $10,000. Mike got half of the
purchase price. He came up to me and showed me a check for $5,000. John L.
Sullivan the champion fighter, went around with a subscription paper and
the boys raised over $12,000 to buy Mike a house.
They gave Mike a deed to the house and they had $1,500 left and gave him
a certificate of deposit for that. His salary for playing with Boston
was $4,700 a year. At the end of that season Mike had spent the $5,000
purchase price and the $5,000 he received as salary and the $1,500 they
gave him and had a mortgage on the house. And when he died in Pennsylvania
they went around with a subscription to get money enough to put him in
the ground. Mike sat there on the corner with me twenty-seven years ago,
when I said: “Goodbye, boys, I’m through.”
A. G. Spalding signed up a team to go around the world. I was the first
man he asked to sign a contract and Captain Anson was the second.
I was sliding to second base one day. I always slid head first, and I hit
a stone and cut a ligament loose in my knee.
I got a doctor and had my leg fixed up and he said to me: “William, if you
don’t go on that trip I will give you a good leg.” I obeyed and I have as
good a leg today as I ever had. They offered to wait for me at Honolulu
and Australia.
Spalding said: “Meet us in England, and play with us through England,
Scotland and Wales.” I didn’t go.
Ed Williamson, our old short-stop, was a fellow weighing 225 pounds, and a
more active man you never saw. He went with them, and while they were on
the ship crossing the English channel a storm arose. The captain thought
the ship would go down. Then he dropped on his knees and promised God
to be true, and God spoke and the waves were still. They came back to
the United States and Ed. came back to Chicago and started a saloon on
Dearborn Street.
I would go there and give tickets for the Y. M. C. A. meetings and would
talk with him, and would cry like a baby, I would get down and pray for
him. When he died they put him on the table and cut him open and took out
his liver. It was so big it would not go in a candy bucket.
Ed Williamson sat there on the street corner with me twenty-seven years
ago when I said, “Goodbye, boys, I’m through.”
Frank Flint, our old catcher, who caught for nineteen years, drew $3,200 a
year on an average. He caught before they had chest protectors and masks
and gloves. He caught bare-handed. Every bone in the ball of his hand was
broken. You never saw a hand like Frank had. Every bone in his face was
broken and his nose and cheekbones, and the shoulder and ribs had all been
broken.
I’ve seen old Frank Flint sleeping on a table in a stale beer joint and
I’ve turned my pockets inside out and said: “You’re welcome to it, old
pal.”
He drank on and on, and one day in winter he staggered out of a stale beer
joint and stood on a corner and was seized with a fit of coughing.
The blood streamed out of his nose, his mouth and his eyes. Down the
street came a woman. She took one look and said: “My God, is it you,
Frank?” And the old love came back.
The wife called two policemen and a cab and started with him to her
boarding house. They broke all speed regulations. She called five of the
best physicians, and they listened to the beating of his heart—eight,
nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen—and the doctor said: “He
will be dead in about four hours.” She said: “Frank the end is near,” and
he said: “Send for Bill.”
They telephoned me and I came. When I reached his bedside he said to me:
“There’s nothing in the life of years ago I care for now. I can hear the
grandstand hiss when I strike out. I can hear the bleachers cheer when I
make a hit that wins the game, but there is nothing that can help me now,
and if the umpire calls me out now, won’t you say a few words over me,
Bill?”
He struggled as he had years ago on the diamond when he tried to reach
home—but the great Umpire of the universe yelled: “You’re out.” And the
great gladiator of the diamond was no more.
Frank Flint sat on the street corner drunk with me twenty-seven years ago
in Chicago when I said: “I’ll bid you goodbye, boys, I’m going to Jesus.”
Say men, did I win the game of life, or did they?
BEACON LIGHTS ON BILLY’S TRAIL.
I owe God everything. I owe the devil nothing except the best fight I can
put up against him.
The church needs more of God and less dress and strife over money.
Judas bought a ticket to hell for thirty pieces of silver, and it wasn’t a
round-trip ticket, either.
Every saloon gives the devil a better chance to land your boy in hell.
You breed more infidels with your “divine philosophy” than all the
Ingersols in the world.
The church doesn’t need new members as much as she needs to have the old
bunch made over.
A lot of people, from the way they live, make you think they’ve got a
ticket to heaven on a Pullman parlor car, and have ordered the porter to
wake ’em when they get there. But they’ll get side-tracked almost before
they’re started.
HARD TO KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN.
“Somebody says: ‘But you don’t know my circumstances, Mr. Sunday. I’m
handicapped by my parents. I’m handicapped by poverty.’ Listen! Go down
tonight and get down your books and read of the men of history who have
crept and crawled from the sewers of poverty and the quagmires of squalor.
Obscurity never kept Benjamin Franklin walking the streets of Philadelphia
gnawing at his loaf. Obscurity didn’t keep Edison working as a telegraph
operator at $60.00 a month. Obscurity didn’t keep David herding sheep. If
gold and diamonds weren’t so hard to get they wouldn’t be worth so much.
Obscurity didn’t keep Grant in a tannery. Obscurity didn’t keep Garfield
on the towpath of a canal. If you’ve got it in you, squalor and want can’t
keep you down.”
“If you are going to win out you must have grit. That means you must be
able to say “no” when asked to do wrong, so loud it will stagger hell.
Or “yes” so loud it will gladden the angels of God. Put up your dukes and
fight the devil.”
HONOR YOUR WIFE BEFORE SHE DIES.
“Don’t wait until your wife dies before you brag on her. Tell her
that coffee was fine. Tell her how you like those biscuits—not those
big four-story ones, but the little flat fellows with crust on both
sides—that’s the kind I like. Think of the days you bought her gumdrops
and candy hearts with reading on them. I wish I had all the money I’ve
spent on candy hearts with reading on them. You’ve bought ’em, too, you
fellows, haven’t you? Ha, ha! Thought so! (Here Mr. Sunday recited the
poem, “Kiss Her.”) Some fellows pet dogs more than they pet their wives.
“Play with the children. You say, ‘Bill, I haven’t any.’ I say, ‘Then get
some.’”
TWO PICTURES OF AMERICAN HOMES.
I think one of the prettiest pictures ever looked upon is to see a father
with the religion of Jesus Christ in his heart, and a mother with the
religion of Jesus Christ in her heart, and to see them throw their arms
about their eldest child, and the oldest child throw his arms about their
next oldest child, and that child take the next oldest child by the hand,
and on until the youngest and all with happiness in their hearts and songs
on their lips, start for heaven.
And I think the blackest, darkest picture ever looked upon is to see
a father without the religion of Jesus Christ in his heart, and a
be-frizzled society woman without the religion of Jesus Christ in her
heart, and the next oldest child, and on down until the baby in the
cradle, and to see that father and mother lock arms and all start to hell,
like many of them are doing today.
KIND WORDS TO HELP CHILDREN.
There are fewer things more important in the home than conversation.
Think of the good you can do in your home with your voice. You use it to
give pain, but the conversation in your home ought to be loving. In many
homes they have no conversation. There is no affectionate greeting in
the morning when the children start for school, no little kiss to linger
on their lips, and when they come home at noon, hungry, there is no kind
greeting. The old man never says a word unless he growls for you to pass
something, and so far as anyone would know, you would be in a deaf and
dumb asylum. No fireside chats with the children.
You are down at some fool club, some lodge; you are off to some literary
social, beer and wine-drinking hell, and you let your children go to the
devil. You turn them over to some nurse, whose only interest in the child
is so many dollars per week.
EVANGELIST PAYS TRIBUTE TO WIFE.
Sunday humorously complimented his wife at the tabernacle meeting Thursday
night. He quoted “Battling” Nelson’s statement that Mrs. Sunday was worth
$10,000,000.00, but said Bat had the estimate too low.
Sunday began by speaking of the traits of various nations. “Scotch blood”
he said, “stands for persistency, stick-to-it-iveness, faithfulness and
bulldog tenacity. I guess I ought to know, for Ma’s full-blooded Scotch,
and I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
SEVERELY SCORES “SMART SET” BUNCH.
And of the women in our “smart set” nowadays. Too much can not be said
in condemnation of them. Too much time is spent by them outside of their
homes. They have thrown to the wind all womanly modesty and prudence.
They are flattered and cajoled, and they look upon themselves as sort
of an especial form upon which to hang the latest creation of a Worth
or a Redfern. They have digestive apparatus with which to digest highly
seasoned foods which some rich husband can buy and cram into their
gullets. And they lend their presence to vaudeville, and have vaudeville
performances in their homes, and their children are allowed to witness
performances which border on the obscene. And they indulge in gambling to
such an extent, poker, roulette wheels, champagne, and all the whole long
list, my friends, and they are more familiar with poker chips and gambling
devices and frivolity than they are with their Bible, the English language
or classic literature.
“No man lives to himself alone. When you go to hell you’re going to drag
someone else down with you, and if you go to heaven you’re going to take
someone else with you. You say you hate sin. Of course you do if you have
respect. You never saw anyone in this town who hates sin worse than I, 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.”
“If there is a father that hits the booze, he doesn’t want his son to. If
he is keeping someone on the side, he doesn’t want his son to. In other
words, you would not want your son to live like you if you are not living
right.”
“Look on the bright side. Every time you smile you put a crimp in the
undertaker’s business, keep the hearse standing in the shed, keep the
embalming fluid out of your veins, and keep the quartet from singing
‘Lead, Kindly Light.’”
SUNDAY’S BRIGHT WORD PICTURES IN HIS SERMON TO MOTHERS.
_Father Gives up but Mother Doesn’t._
“Fathers often give up. The old man often goes to boozing, becomes
dissipated, takes a dose of poison and commits suicide, but the mother
will stand by the home and keep the little band together if she has to
manicure her fingernails over a washboard to do it. If men had half as
much grit as the women, there would be different stories written about
a good many homes. Look at her work! It is the greatest in the world;
in its far-reaching importance it is transcendently above everything in
the universe—her task in molding hearts and lives and shaping character.
If you want to find greatness, don’t go toward the throne; go to the
cradle, and the nearer you get to the cradle, the nearer to greatness.
The launching of a boy or girl to live for Christ is greater work than to
launch a battleship.”
BRAVEST BATTLE FOUGHT IN WORLD.
“The bravest battle that ever was fought,
Shall I tell you where and when?
On the maps of the world you’ll find it not—
’Twas fought by the mothers of men.
“Nay, not with cannon or battle shot.
With sword or nobler pen.
Nay, not with eloquent word or thought,
From mouths of wonderful men.
“But deep in a walled up woman’s heart—
Of woman that would not yield,
But bravely, silently bore her part—
Lo, there is the battlefield.
“No marshaling troops, no bivouac song,
No banner to gleam and wave;
But oh! these battles, they last so long—
From babyhood to the grave.”
“There is a mighty power in a mother’s kiss—inspiration, courage, hope,
ambition. One kiss made Benjamin West a painter, and the memory of it
clung to him through life. One kiss will drive away the fear in the dark
and make the little one brave. It will give strength where there is
weakness.”
ONE ACT, ONE WORD WILL BLIGHT CHILD.
“There is power enough in a word or act to blight a boy, and through him,
curse a community. There is power enough in a word or act to tincture
the life of that child so it will become a power to lift the world to
Jesus Christ. The mothers will put in motion influences that will either
touch heaven or hell. Talk about greatness! Oh, you wait until you reach
the mountains of eternity, then read the mothers’ names in God’s hall of
fame, and see who they have been in this world. I want to tell you women,
fooling away your time hugging and kissing a poodle dog, caressing a
Spitz, drinking a society bran mash and a cocktail, and playing cards, is
mighty small business to moulding the life of a child.”
“When God gave the office of mother to women it was just like giving you
his own right hand. Think of what importance is attached to it! Think
of the mother’s power! There is more power in a mother’s hand than in a
king’s scepter.”
TOUCHING TRIBUTE TO MOTHER’S LOVE.
“I once read the story of an angel who stole out of heaven and came to
this world one bright sunshiny day; roamed through the field, forest, city
and hamlet, and as the sun went down, plumed his wings for the return
flight. The angel said: ‘Now that my visit is over, before I return
I must gather some mementoes of my trip.’ He looked at the beautiful
flowers in the garden and said, ‘How lovely and fragrant,’ and plucked
the rarest roses, made a bouquet, and said, ‘I see nothing more beautiful
and fragrant than these flowers.’ The angel looked further and saw a
bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked child, and said, ‘That baby is prettier than
the flowers; I will take that, too;’ and, looking beyond to the cradle,
he saw a mother’s love pouring out over her babe like a gushing spring,
and the angel said, ‘The mother’s love is the prettiest thing I have
seen; I will take that too.’ And with these three treasures the heavenly
messenger winged his flight to the pearly gates, saying: ‘Before I go in
I must examine the mementoes of my trip to the earth.’ He looked at the
flowers; they had withered. He looked at the baby’s smile; it had faded.
He looked at the mother’s love; it shone in all its pristine beauty. Then
he threw away the withered flowers, cast aside the faded smile, and with
the mother’s love pressed to his breast, swept through the gates into the
city, shouting that the only thing he had found that would retain its
fragrance from earth to heaven is a mother’s love.”
EVERY CHILD IS A TRUST TO MOTHER.
“Every child is put in a mother’s arms as a trust from God, and she has to
answer to God for the way she deals with that child. No mother on God’s
earth has any right to raise her children for pleasure. She has no right
to send them to dancing school and haunts of sin. You have no right to do
those things that will curse your children. That babe is put in your arms
to train for the Lord. No mother has any more right to raise her children
for pleasure than I have to pick your pockets or throw red pepper in your
eyes. She has no more right to do that than a bank cashier has to rifle
the vaults and take the savings of the people. One of the worst sins you
can commit is to be unfaithful to your trust.”
“The biggest place in the world is that which is being filled by the
people who are in close touch with youth. Being a king, an emperor or a
president is mighty small business compared to being a mother, or the
teacher of children, whether in a public school or in a Sunday school,
and they fill places so great that there isn’t an angel in heaven that
wouldn’t be glad to give a bushel of diamonds to boot to come down here
and take their place. Commanding an army is little more than sweeping a
street or pounding an anvil compared with the training of a boy or girl.”
SAYS MEN ARE WHAT MOTHERS MAKE THEM.
“Emerson said: ‘Men are what their mothers make them.’ They are what their
mothers make them, and if the mothers of today were true to their trust,
then they could send their boys to college and need not be afraid of them
coming back infidels, like many of them do. There is no power on earth
that can lift to heaven or shove to hell like the touch of a mother’s
hand. Everywhere men have been brought back from the valley of the shadow
of death simply by the touch of mother’s hand.”
SONGS OF MOTHER SWEETEST TO HEAR.
“There is power in a mother’s song, too. It’s the best music the world
ever heard. There is no brass band or pipe organ that can hold a candle to
mother’s song, the kind she sings gets tangled up in your heart strings.
There would be a disappointment in the music of heaven to me if there were
no mothers there to sing. The song of an angel or a seraph would not have
much charm for me. What would you care for an angel’s song if there is
no mother’s song? The song of a mother is sweeter than that ever sung by
minstrel or written by poet. Talk about sonnets! You ought to hear the
mother sing when her babe is on her breast, when her heart is filled with
emotion. Her voice may not please an artist, but it will please any one
who has a heart in him. The songs that have moved the world are not the
songs written by the great masters. I think when we reach heaven it will
be found that some of the best songs we will sing there will be those we
learned at mother’s knee.”
“There is power in a mother’s love. A mother’s love must be like God’s
love. How God could ever tell the world that He loved it without a
mother’s help has often puzzled me. If the devils in hell ever turned
pale, it was the day when mother’s love flamed up for the first time in a
woman’s heart. If the devil ever got ‘cold feet,’ it was that day, in my
judgment.”
“To teach a child to love the truth and hate a lie, to love purity and
hate vice, is greater than inventing a flying machine that will take
you to the moon, or to the North pole. Unconsciously, you set in motion
influences that will damn or bless the old universe and bring new worlds
out of chaos and transform them for God.”
GATHERING UP THE SUNBEAMS.
“If we knew the baby fingers pressed against the window pane,
Would be cold and still tomorrow, never trouble us again,
Would the bright eyes of our darling catch the frown upon our brow?
Would the prints of little fingers vex us then as they do now?
Let us gather up the sunbeams lying all around our path,
Let us keep the wheat and roses, casting out the thorns and chaff!
We shall find our sweetest comforts in the blessings of today, and
With patient hand removing all the briers from our way.”
START CHILDREN RIGHT, ONLY SOLUTION.
“When God wants to throw a world out into space he is much concerned about
it. The first mile that world takes settles its course for eternity. When
God throws a child out into the world he is mighty anxious that it gets a
right start. The Catholics are right when they say: ‘Give us the children
until they are ten years old, and we don’t care who has them after that.’
The Catholics are not losing any sleep about losing men and women from
their church membership. It is the only church that has ever shown us
the only sensible way to reach the masses—that is, by getting hold of
the children. That’s the only way on God’s earth you will ever solve the
problem of reaching the masses. You get the boys and girls started right
and the devil will hang crepe on his door, bank his fires, and hell will
be “for rent.”
“There is power in a mother’s smile. See the boy, how he will outdo
himself if he knows his mother is watching him, and it makes the hard
places easy and the dark places light. A long face and a gloomy look are
about the last things you ought to give to your children if you want to
inspire and cheer them.”
DANCING WORST OF AMUSEMENTS.
The dance is the hotbed of iniquity, and I denounce it as the rottenest,
most hellish, vice-producing institution that ever wriggled from the
depths of perdition.
The dance is simply a hugging match set to music.
Dancing is not an innocent amusement. It has caused the downfall of more
girls than anything else.
Three-fourths of the fallen women in big cities, fell because of the dance.
You’d just as soon husk corn by moonlight as to dance with your own wife.
It’s the other fellow’s wife, some other fellow’s sister that you want to
dance with.
A man will wallow and get so low he’ll have to climb a hill to get into
hell, then make a bluff at reforming and society takes him in. Then at the
dance he’ll breathe promises into the ears of some innocent young girl,
gain her confidence and then ruin her.
You say you need exercise and that’s why you dance. All right, then, let
women dance with women, and men with men.
The dance brings vice and virtue into such close contact that virtue loses.
Any church that encourages dancing is too low down to deserve the name of
church.
If there are variations of hell, the dancer will crack brimstone in the
hottest spot.
If there was nothing but card players and dancers in the church, how it
would stink and rot!
DECLARES BALLROOM PERMITS LIBERTIES.
You grant men liberties on the ball room floor that if any man attempted
in your home and your husband found you at it, he would have no trouble
in securing a divorce, and if he shot the man, no jury in the world would
convict him for it.
If I found any man hugging Mrs. Sunday as a man does in a dance, I’d clear
for action like a battleship, and give him HIS.
Where do you find your most accomplished dancers? In the brothels.
When a girl gets so low that she’ll smoke and drink, she is on the
toboggan slide and going to hell fast.
And you fellows like to “sit out” a dance. I always did think it was a
foolish proposition to gallop a mile to get a hug.
The round and square dances look alike to me. It doesn’t take very long to
cut the corners off.
There was a time in America when the stately cotillion seemed to satisfy,
but it is too slow now for the hot blood of the Twentieth Century. The
young people must have something that will chase hurdles through their
veins.
WHAT BILLY SAID ON MOTHERHOOD.
“I don’t believe there is an angel in heaven that would not come to earth
and be honored with motherhood if God would grant them that privilege.
Like produces like in animals and in human beings. Blood will tell in
horses, sheep, quadruped and in human beings. A consumptive mother will
produce a consumptive child, and the same is true of its paternity. It
is time to lay aside mock modesty. You can’t trifle with God’s rules.
Society has just about put maternity out of fashion. When you stop to
consider the average society woman I do not think maternity has lost
anything. The child of affluence is turned over to nurses at birth and is
fed on prepared foods and knows nothing of its mother. The children of
humbler homes are raised by their mothers, instead of being turned over to
governesses. These mothers spend their time in bridge parties, gadding,
and fondling pet dogs; no wonder men go to the clubs. No man wants to
play second fiddle to a bow-legged bulldog. I am sure I would not!”
TOO MANY GIRLS ARE NOT IN LOVE.
“There are too many girls marry for other causes than love. I think
ambition, indolence, avarice, laziness and indifference lead more girls to
the altar than love. Girls not actuated by the noblest of human feeling,
but simply willing to pay the price for a good time. They are not moved
by the nobler desires of manhood and womanhood. Maternity is the highest
possible gift of God to woman. The up-to-date women pride themselves on
their criminal knowledge. Some girls marry for society, some marry for
home, some marry for ease, some marry to reform man; he wouldn’t marry you
to reform you—you little fool. It is no easier to make a kingly husband
out of a beer-soaked, cigaret-smoking specimen of a man than a prostitute
can make a queenly wife.”
HIGH SPOTS IN BILLY’S SERMON TO WOMEN.
_Up to Women to Save World._
“Woman lives on a higher plane morally than man. No woman was ever ruined
that some brute of a man did not take the initiative. Women have kept
themselves purer than men. I believe a good woman is the best thing this
side of heaven, and a bad woman the worst thing this side of hell. I think
they rise higher and sink lower than men. I think she is the purest on
earth or the most degraded on earth. Our homes are on the level with
women. Towns are on the level with homes. Nations are on the level with
towns. What our women are, the towns will be. What the town is the men
will be. The devil and women can damn this world, and Jesus and women can
save this world. The womanhood of the world has to settle the destiny of
the world. I believe there is something unfinished in the makeup of a girl
with the absence of religion. The average girl of today no longer looks
forward to motherhood as the crowning glory of womanhood.”
GIVES ADVICE ON PICKING A HUSBAND.
“Say, girls, don’t simper and look silly when you speak about love. There
is nothing silly about it although some folks are silly because they are
in love; love is the noblest and purest gift to man and womanhood. Don’t
let your actions advertise “Man Wanted Quick.” That is the surest way
not to get a real one. You might get something with pantaloons on, but
that is not a man. Some men should be arrested for going around and being
disguised as men. Don’t get excited and try to hurry things along. If the
man wants you he’ll come around in his good time; and don’t try to do half
the courting. Don’t bestow the love that God gave you to bestow upon a
baby on a poodle dog. Dogs are all right in their places, but their place
is out in the kennel.”
DON’T LET GIRLS MARRY INFIDELS.
“Don’t teach your girls,—mothers,—that the only thing in the world is
to marry. A girl is a big fool to marry an infidel. God says be ye not
unequally yoked with unbelievers. If she does she will have a hard life as
sure as she lives. The offsprings of such marriages either follow in the
footsteps of their father, and go to hell, or cling to their mother and
are sneered at all their life by their father.”
“THY KINGDOM COME.”
If you really pray “Thy Kingdom Come” you will pray with your hands, feet
and money as well as with your voice, every day.
Your religion should mean that you’re going to bring about the conversion
of the world before you sit down to breakfast.
The minister who prays with a true appreciation of “Thy Kingdom Come”
don’t cater to the small highbrow bunch of his church. He puts the cookies
on the bottom shelf.
The man who truly prays “Thy Kingdom Come” won’t slip coppers in the
collection plate and then go home with his head up singing “Jesus Paid It
All.”
When we really mean what we are praying, the old devil won’t own an inch
of this world. We won’t need any penitentiary then, or jails or have any
murders, or young girls robbed of their womanhood.
God never meant anybody to offer up a prayer that was measured in square
miles.
Some people here are so busy singing about the streets of glory that they
forget to sweep the snow off their own streets.
Talk about non-church goers—it makes me sick. Why don’t you talk about the
non-going church?
The proof of the pudding is not found in smelling the bag or chewing the
strings. There are lots of church members who only smell the bag and chew
the rag.
Christianity must be a good thing or why would they try to counterfeit it.
You never heard of a counterfeit infidel.
The man who refuses to be a Christian because there are hypocrites in the
church is a fool.
You can find about everything in the ordinary church from a humming bird
to a turkey buzzard.
I could no more shock some of you fellows than I could pour something on a
skunk and make him smell good.
The inconsistency you talk about is in your life, not in the Bible.
Talk to people on business and they’ll talk sense; talk to them on
religion and they’ll talk nonsense.
Christianity is the one thing that allows the angel to take hold of you
and strangle the animal in you.
HOT SHOTS ON CARDS AND GAMBLING.
If you have a deck of cards and a Bible in your home, throw the deck in
the alley. Either throw the cards out and keep the Bible, or throw out the
Bible and keep the cards.
What’s the difference between a game of cards and a game of checkers? Just
as much difference as between heaven and hell.
It is said nine-tenths of the gamblers are taught in their homes by their
mothers, and 80 per cent by Christian people.
I believe that cards and dancing are doing more to damn the spiritual life
of the church than the grog-shops, though you can’t accuse me of being a
friend of that stinking, dirty, rotten, hell-soaked business.
I believe more people backslide on account of the social side than on
account of the saloon.
Lots of church members have cards on their tables as often as food.
A billiard table is the first cousin to a saloon.
The saloonkeepers and gamblers laugh every time they read the announcement
of a euchre or card party in the newspapers, for they know it will only be
a question of time until they get the players.
You have no right to find fault with the city officials because they don’t
suppress gambling when it is carried on right in your home.
[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE OPENING OF THE TABERNACLE.]
EVANGELIST PUTS TABOO ON THEATER.
The theater, as conducted today, is one of the rottenest institutions
outside of hell.
It is upon the charred souls of women that most of the men who are a power
in the theatrical world have climbed to their height.
The theater is corrupting, educationally, commercially and morally.
It is almost impossible to find in the theater decency and purity.
The church and the theater have nothing in common.
The only way to reform the theater is to turn it into something else.
The rogue and scoundrelism and man’s infidelity form the groundwork of
most plays.
The day is long past when any number of serious-minded citizens look to
the theater for inspiration or instruction.
If it were not for the leg shows the theater would go bankrupt.
Booth and Garrick would not allow their own children to go to the theater.
Smiling religion—that’s what we want.
The devil can’t laugh—poor devil.
God enjoys a little fun. He made the parrot, donkey, monkey and some of
you folks.
The Lord wants the best; why can’t he have it?
Some men are so rotten and vile they ought to be disinfected and take a
bath in carbolic acid and formaldehyde every five minutes.
To see some people you would think that the essentials of Christianity is
to have a face so long you could eat oatmeal out of a gas pipe. Religion
is not cramp colic.
I want to lift the burden tonight from the heads of unoffending womanhood
and hurl it at the heads of offending manhood.
Some people have just enough religion to give them goosepimples. Get in
the game. Some of you have just enough religion to get to the edge of life
but not faith enough to plunge in.
Don’t find fault with your physician until after you have tried his
remedy; don’t find fault with God until you have tried him.
I know some fellows here who are afraid to come to the Tabernacle and do
one thing decent before going to Hell. I despise a religious coward.
Society takes no notice of sin at first; it waits for the mute evidences
of that sin.
BILLY PUTS TABOO ON WEDDING KNOTS.
Although an ordained minister, in all of his twenty-seven years’
experience as an evangelist, Mr. Sunday has united but one couple in
marriage. And that, he declares, he did very reluctantly.
In nearly every city where Billy has a campaign, he is besieged by young
men and young women who want him to marry them. But Billy states that
there is absolutely nothing doing in that line. He has performed his first
and last marriage ceremony, and says he will stick to plain evangelism,
and leave the marrying part to other ministers.
EVERY PALACE IS NOT A HOME.
“I have walked and ridden and driven over the hills and through the
valleys and looked at your beautiful homes and your spacious lawns and
your happy children; you can build your palaces and amass your fortunes;
your sideboards can groan beneath the weight of gold and silver, cut
glass and hand-painted china; and you can let your little ones play over
your Brussels carpet or your Persian or Axminster rugs; and you can have
a retinue of servants to wait upon you and do your bidding and satisfy
your slightest desire; and you can loll upon your oriental divans and
breathe the perfumed air and watch the sparkling water as it spurts from
fountains; and you can look at your rare paintings and ransack Europe in
order to find the masterpieces; and you can lie there with some one to
fan you, and take your afternoon siesta; and you can sit and gormandize
upon all the viands that the earth can produce; and your chef may be a
Frenchman whose ability would command a princely fortune even in the homes
of the crowned heads of Europe.
“But, after all, if you sit behind the tapestry and look out through
the plate-glass and wait for the staggering reeking, vomiting, spewing,
drink-soaked, drunken sot of a son, or you wait for the coming of the
steps of a girl who has lost her virtue, I tell you, all that wealth can
bring you will fly and you will think you are sitting in a sepulchre and
the rich furniture will simply become the bones of other days and other
faces, for nothing can make happy the father or the mother who has a
drunken sot of a boy, as many of them have today, and nothing can make
happy the father or the mother of a girl who has sold her womanhood for
gain. And I tell you, not only should our homes be the center of all that
is pure, but all that is cheerful and bright.”
DRAWING THE LINE ON CHRISTIANS.
Too many of you kneel at the communion table and then beat down the wages
of your employes so their children go to bed hungry at night.
What God wants is workers and boosters; not knockers and iconoclasts.
Every time a lazy man looks towards heaven, the angels close the door.
It would be a Godsend if the church could smell a little gunpowder. A
little persecution would be a good thing to get rid of the parasites and
driftwood in the churches.
Enthusiasm for Jesus Christ is like the measles and diphtheria—it’s
catching.
You sing “Calvary in Heaven,” and yet you put the wrong figures on the
ledger book; you profess brotherly love, and yet slander your neighbor.
There is no use trying to build a revival on a bottle of booze and on
skullduggery and intrigue. I’m just trying to clear away the debris now.
A lot of people will wear out ten pair of holdbacks and only one pair of
tugs working for God.
Too many churches are frauds, four-flushers, excess baggage and false
alarms.
The dude who splutters and splurges and spends his daddy’s dough, is the
missing link between man and the monkey.
You say religion causes insanity; I say you’re a liar!
You tell the doctor, who says you need beer for your health that he’s a
liar.
Knowledge is of no benefit unless you use it.
The world is being born into sin 20 to 1 faster than into the spirit of
God.
Religion doesn’t make anybody mad; it’s hell that makes men mad.
Any fool can criticise; it needs neither brains nor heart to find fault.
Churches in New York City have 50,000 less members today than a year ago.
All denominations are failing to reach the multitude.
You’re either a patriot or a traitor to God’s cause in this revival.
The man with real red blood in his veins scorns the path of roses our
modern churches have made to accept Christ.
Criticism is the scales on which you weigh yourself.
THE PREACHERS AND THE LAYMEN.
Lots of churches will sidestep the man with two dollars, but who ever
heard of a man with five hundred thousands being turned out of church.
Lots of sermons today are nothing but a book review with a little religion
tacked on the end.
A poor sinner couldn’t find Jesus Christ in some of the churches with a
searchlight.
We’ve got too many preachers breaking their necks, trying to please the
worldly gang that is going to increase their salaries.
Nobody nowadays is afraid of God; the picture of Jesus Christ is fading
from the world; the word of God has been discarded as being too crude for
this enlightened age.
Many churches are nothing but social clearance houses.
There are lots of people in this city who would rather have their friends
go to hell than be saved by my preaching.
The best Christian will be the best citizen everywhere.
An employer is a thief if he takes advantage of his employe by not paying
him for the honest work he does; the employe is a thief who does not give
honest toil for honest wages.
Public opinion is not always competent to judge whether or not a man is
worthy.
BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST.
_What the Bible says._
“Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords and
drank wine before the thousands.
“Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and
silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple
which was in Jerusalem; that the king and his princes, his wives and his
concubines might drink therein.
“They drank wine and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of
iron, of wood and of stone.
“In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand and wrote over
against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace;
and the king saw part of the hand that wrote.
“Then the king’s countenance was changed and his thoughts troubled him so
that the joints of his loins were loosed and his knees smote one against
another.
“The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans and the
soothsayers.
“Then came the king’s wise men; but they could not read the writing nor
make known to the king the interpretation thereof.
“Then was Daniel brought before the king, and the king said: “If thou
canst read the writing thou shalt be clothed with scarlet and have a chain
of gold about thy neck and shalt be third ruler of the kingdom.”
“Then Daniel answered and said before the king, “Let thy gifts be to
thyself and give thy rewards to another; yet I will read the writing and
make known unto the king the interpretation.”
“And this is the writing that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.”
BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST.
_“Billy” Sunday’s Version._
Belshazzar’s feast was no common beer, pretzel and dill pickle blow-out,
but the real goods. Nude and lewd women wormed and wriggled their way
through the banquet hall. The bunch began to get soused and the revelry
increased.
Then came the obscene song, the drunken hiccough, the slavering lip, and
the guffaw of idiotic laugh bursting from the lips of princes, flushed,
reeling and bloodshot, while mingled with it all were the hurrahs for
great Belshazzar.
Then from the atmosphere flashed an armless hand which wrote upon the
frieze in words that blazed like fire and glistened like gold. Terror
froze Belshazzar to the very soul. His countenance changed, his thoughts
troubled him so that the joints of his loins were loose and his knees
smote together. I tell you old “Bel” was about all in.
In a few moments he hoarsely cried: “Bring in the astrologers, the
Chaldeans and the soothsayers (we’d call ’em mediums today). And in came
the Magi and when they couldn’t decipher the heiroglyphics, Belshazzar
cried, “Give ’em the hook.”
Then he sent for Daniel on his mother’s advice.
I can see him say: “Put her there Dan,” as he slapped his hand in
Daniel’s, and say, “My maw’s be tellin’ me about you. This bunch has got
on my nerves. The four-flushers have been feedin’ and fattenin’ around
here and can’t read that writing. If you’ll do it I’ll give you a chain
and a ring of gold.”
But Daniel said: “Nothin’ doing on the chain and ring proposition, Bel.”
Then Daniel read the writing. “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.”
A REMARKABLE PRAYER.
_Sunday says Devil Growls when 10,000 Confess their Wrongs._
“Oh, Jesus, isn’t this a great spectacle? This must make you smile, Jesus.
I know it does me. And devil, this sight must make you growl. I can hear
you saying, ‘What’s Bill Sunday doing up there? Look at that crowd of
10,000 people standing because they’re sorry they broke any of God’s
commandments. We’ve got to get busy or we’ll lose thousands. Come on all
you devils, get out of hell. Get out I say.’
“And Jesus, I’ll bet all those devils are trembling when they look up
here, and I’ll bet all the angels in heaven are rejoicing and shouting
with joy. I can see mothers and fathers up there saying, ‘Get back, Moses,
get back Solomon, get back David, you haven’t got any children down there.
Let me look and see if my boy or girl is in that audience. Yes, there she
is down in section 27; yes, there is my boy over by post 14; thank God for
that.’
“And, oh, Jesus, if any preacher here tonight has got cold feet, help him
to stiffen up; give him backbone so he can fight for you. And, Jesus,
bless these preachers, thank them for deepening the spirit here tonight.
Bless all newspaper boys who are giving us such wonderful reports.
Bless all in their offices that we met the other day—all of the clerks,
stenographers, printers, pressmen and from the men that own the papers
down to the boys that sell the papers on the street.
“And, Jesus, bless this choir, bless the ushers, bless the Chief, the
Mayor, the Governor, help the state officials, Jesus. And bless this old
state and this city and may we have a rousing time here. Guide us and keep
us for your sake, Jesus, amen, amen, amen and amen. Good night.”
“HITTING THE SAWDUST TRAIL.”
The meaning “to hit the sawdust trail,” has a beautiful and appropriate
meaning. It was first used when Sunday and his party were in the midst
of a campaign among the lumbermen on Puget Sound. At the tabernacle at
Bellingham, Washington. The floor of the tabernacle was covered with the
sawdust from the lumber camp and the lumbermen, when any of their men went
down front to speak to Rev. Sunday, called it “Hitting the Trail.”
In the lumber camps in the mountains there is a trail that leads through
the fastness of the wooded mountain side covered by wood chips, so as to
make it conspicuous by night as well as by day. The woodsmen some time
wander far away from camp and are lost in the primeval forest. In their
wanderings, if they can “hit the trail,” they are saved, as it leads to
the safety and shelter of the camp. So on the pathway of life if you can,
“hit the trail,” of God’s mercy through the Lord Jesus Christ you are led
to safety. So these rude lumbermen called the giving up of self to God and
going down the sawdust isle of the tabernacle—“Hitting the Trail.”
The phrase stuck to the Sunday party ever since and it has a thrilling
touch of the wildwood and a meaning that is very appropriate and beautiful
when taken in the language of the backwoods.
TRYING TO SERVE GOD AND THE DEVIL.
It would almost be a blessing if a wave of scarlet fever or small-pox
could visit some city just after a revival and sweep into heaven thousands
who had been converted before they were given a chance to backslide.
Lots of people never get any place to backslide from.
The man who keeps his store open on Sunday is an anarchist. I don’t
mean the hotel man or the restaurant proprietor, for some things are an
absolute necessity.
You never saw a dancing, card-playing and theatre-gadding church member
that amounted to the snap of your finger.
Belonging to a church won’t save you. A thief can be a church member.
There’s too much playing tag with God, and hide-and-seek with the devil
nowadays.
There’s too much joining the church today and too little joining Jesus.
Even preachers, elders, deacons and stewards may not be members of the
body of Christ, but merely church members.
INCONSISTENT CHURCH MEMBERS.
Don’t start a Christian life and compromise on a pack of cards.
Religion is not for time, money, applause or politics, but for God first,
last and all the time.
There never was an honest draft from an honest heart that was refused at
the bank window of heaven.
If you worked for God as hard as you do for the devil, you wouldn’t be up
against it.
If you’re a backslider, you’re a liar, a perjurer and you’ve broken your
marriage vows with God.
Many men may be true to their business, to their lodge and to their wives,
but dirty liars to God.
You can graduate from the best university on God’s dirt and make a cold
storage plant out of your brain, but without Jesus you aren’t worth a cent.
There is as much connection between some church members and Jesus as there
is between a wooden leg and the man that wears it.
Life is just chuck full of half-done things.
CHRISTIANS CAN’T LIVE DOUBLE LIVES.
It don’t make any difference with God whether the one who sins wears a
coat or petticoat; plug hat or a hairpin.
This double-standard business is the curse of humanity today. God demands
the same standard of purity in man as he does in woman.
There are a lot of lobsters here tonight who, if their wives lived the
lives they did, would be down at the court house whining for divorces
tomorrow morning.
You can’t cut the week up into seven parts, call six secular and one
Sunday when you go to church and listen to a little sermonette, and expect
to be saved.
You are a blackguard liar when you say every man and woman have a price.
Most men are honest; most women are virtuous. It’s the dishonest man and
the woman with no virtue that are in the minority.
Lots of people start on a royal race in life, but compromise at the finish
in a mouse hole.
A HIGH TRIBUTE TO THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER OF GEN. LEE.
Billy Sunday paid the following tribute to the Christian character of
General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces in the Civil
War:
“There is no man I so delight to honor as the man who is true. There is
no woman I so delight to honor as the woman who is true. There is no one
I so abhor as a man or woman whose words are untruth and whose promises
are as vapor. I may differ from a man in politics or religion, and if he
is living up to his highest ideals, even if I think those ideals wrong, I
respect him and I will do my best to clear up his errors and lead him to
the sunlit hills of God’s pardon.
“At the beginning of the Civil War General Robert E. Lee said to General
Scott that he was a Union man at heart, but that his native state of
Virginia had seceded and that as a loyal son he felt he must cast his
fortunes with the Confederacy. As the war proceeded, Lee saw the bright
hopes of the Confederacy fade, saw its government overturned and broken at
his feet. When the end came he was a prematurely old man, his health fled,
his fortune gone, his property at Arlington confiscated. At that time of
despair there came to him the officers of the Louisiana Lottery company,
offering to make him its president.
“‘But, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anything about the lottery
business.’
“‘That makes no difference,’ they said, ‘we do. We want the use of your
name, and we will give you $10,000 a year.’
“General Lee buttoned his coat over his sunken breast, brushed back his
gray hair from his forehead, and said: ‘Gentlemen, my good name and my
self respect are all that is saved from the wreck, and they are not for
sale. You cannot buy Robert E. Lee.’
“My father was a Union soldier. I am a loyal American, but I say that
Robert E. Lee was one of the noblest Christian characters this country has
ever produced, and that Stonewall Jackson was another.”
EXPOSES FALSEHOOD OF “GRAFT” STORIES.
Billy Sunday takes frequent raps at those who knock him and accuse him
of grafting. Wednesday night he became reminiscent for a few minutes and
referred to his turning down big offers from baseball teams, to become a
Y. M. C. A. secretary.
“When I turned down offers of $500.00 and even $1,000 a month from ball
teams, to make $83.00 as a Y. M. C. A. secretary, they never called me a
grafter, and in those days we were up against hard times,” he said. “For
six months I got no salary; I went hungry at noon and walked to and from
work to save car fare.
“Then there’s another lie they tell about me and it is that I own a saloon
in Chicago. I don’t know what all they tell about me, but I do not and
never did own a single piece of property in Chicago.”
WOMEN HAVE THE SAME RIGHTS AS MEN.
“God has marked out the same path for men and for women to follow. Away
with the hellish doctrine of a double standard of living in this twentieth
century. It makes no difference whether the one who sins wears a plug hat
or a petticoat. Young fellow, your sister has as good a right to live as
you do, as you have. She has as good a right to walk up street smoking a
cigaret as you have. Your wife has as good a right to line up before a
bar and put 10 beers under her belt as you have. She has as good a right
to go to the corner grocery in the evening and sit around and put her
feet up on the stove and settle the questions of the day, as you have.
She has as good a right as you have to walk down street with a half a
plug of Lorillard’s sticking out of her mouth and spit enough to drown a
jackrabbit as you have. I wouldn’t clean out your old spittoon for you.
I’d throw it at your old head. Yes, sir. Mop up your own slop, you old
hog.”
[Illustration: WHEN THE TABERNACLE SERVICES ARE OVER.]
SAYS BACKSLIDERS LIKE GROUNDHOGS.
“The invitation is never given at a revival but there are those who will
respond to it and for a time will live as Christians should. Then, when
the revival is over and the routine of everyday life begins, they slip
gradually back into their former ways. They are like the groundhog. When
spring comes the groundhog awakes from his winter’s sleep and emerges into
the sunlight and lives an active life until the storms of winter come
again. Then he crawls into his hole of hibernation and falls into a sleep
of months. Oh, it is easy to think of things divine when the revival is on
and there is inspiration on every side and the bands are playing and the
crowds are marching. These groundhog people have family prayer then, and
they attend to their religious duties faithfully, but when the revival is
over they begin to relapse into their old ways.”
TRUE TO LODGE; FALSE TO CHRIST.
“They tell me a lodge man will share his last dollar with a needy person,
die for the widow or the orphan, put his head on the track ahead of the
Twentieth Century Limited or allow himself to be shot to pieces before he
would be false to the vows he took amid the scent of the orange blossoms.
That sounds like a good man; but there are lots of men who will be true in
all these things, and false to Jesus Christ. They will go to church and
partake of the communion, then will go out and line up in front of some
bar or tell smutty stories. True in business, true in society, true in the
home, but a perjurer in the sight of God. If you are such a man you are a
backslider—a backslider, sir, and a liar.”
“Girls, you are a fool if you will walk along the street with a fellow who
smokes a cigaret as he walks with you. He wouldn’t walk with you if you
smoked one.”
SUNDAY ADVISES SOCIETY WOMEN TO SAVE SOULS.
“No doubt you women have a retinue of servants and haven’t dirtied your
hands in dishwater for so long that you have forgotten how it feels. But
you have souls to save, and don’t wait until just before the undertaker
backs up to your door.”
Mr. Sunday took Van Dyke’s sketch, “The Lost Word,” as a theme for his
talk. He related how Hermas, the pagan, after accepting Christianity for
several years, grew tired of it and sold the Word of Jesus for gold,
pleasure and worldly success. He demonstrated to the club women that, if
they had ever known Jesus, they could read their heart’s biography.
“Without that word you are nonentities!” said Sunday, “Without that word
you are lost. And you can’t find it in society. Do as society wants you to
do, and you will not be doing as Jesus wants you to do. If ease, comfort,
luxury and the chasing of the phantoms of pleasure have led you away from
the old landmarks and moorings, get back, my friends, get back.”
The man that bucks the jackpot until 3 o’clock in the morning is just as
good as the church member that plays for a prize.
There’s nothing too hard for God.
If your heart is full of sin you’ll never be satisfied until you get
others to sin likewise.
Bad as is physical leprosy, moral leprosy is ten thousand times worse.
Suppose every young man in the city who is a moral leper were compelled
and impelled by some uncontrollable impulse to make public the sins you’ve
committed.
There’s a day of judgment coming when God will peel off the bark and find
many full of wormholes.
Suppose all had glass doors in our hearts. I think we would want stained
glass windows, heavy tapestry and thick curtains.
God never made Hell for man. God made Hell for the devil. If you follow
the devil you must go to the abode of the devil.
You may live in the most beautiful house and the world passes by your door
not knowing of the sadness and sorrow within. But it will out. If the
world never finds it out, it’ll meet you at the throne of God.
It’s the men of means, wealth and leisure that support dens of vice.
The devil will let you have an easy time until God asks you to do personal
work.
Some people think it is beneath their dignity to do personal work for God.
If it is beneath your dignity to do personal work, then you are above
Christ.
If you haven’t got religion enough to smile, there’s a leak in your
fountain.
I pity that boy or that girl who has no incentive from a father or mother
to be a Christian.
Sissy, that fellow wouldn’t go with you to reform you.
Those most likely to be affected by your sins are those nearest and
dearest to you.
Society needs a new division of anathemas. Stop hurling your anathemas at
that girl and hurl them at that fellow.
If we only knew the secrets in the hearts and lives of a great many we
envy, we would be filled with sadness and sorrow.
I wish to God the church were as afraid of imperfection as it is of
perfection.
If the saloon is no place for a boy it’s no place for a man either. You’ll
get what’s coming to you, too, before I’m through if you stand with that
damnable bunch.
I had to say no to fifteen or twenty cities to come here.
The curse of the church is not so much sins of commission as sins of
omission.
Two things I try to do—strengthen the faith and clarify the vision of
those that believe; help bring the unsaved to Christ.
Nobody begins to live until they become a Christian. You’re not ready to
die unless you’re ready to live.
You can learn something from some politicians—energy and organization.
It won’t be long until the entire State of Iowa is cleared of the liquor
traffic. Only twenty counties remain wet and these are going dry with a
rapidity almost dazzling.
It’s hard for you to teach the baby how to walk; it’s harder for the baby
to learn how to walk.
I never saw a revival movement yet until God’s people fell on their knees
and renewed their vows of Christianity.
Personal work is a difficult form of work; more difficult than preachings,
singing, attending conventions.
Some things must be faultless to be valuable.
Love is the greatest thing in the world; character the grandest.
You can bury a man, but his character will beat the hearse back from the
graveyard.
Don’t your hearts say, you must forsake sin before you can expect pardon?
I will preach with all the power I have against sin, but I will never
“bawl” a man out.
God is doing His best to keep men out of hell; men are doing their best to
get into hell.
God cannot and will not put the good and bad in the same place.
What did Jesus ever do that was not for the good of humanity?
Jesus Christ never preached a funeral sermon; that was out of his line.
If you are in favor of something Jesus is against, then he does not want
you.
Jesus Christ is against all wrong. Are you?
Jesus stands for a square deal all around.
Are you against the saloon? Jesus Christ is.
Jesus Christ was the bravest man who ever lived. I am tired of hearing him
referred to as a dough-faced person.
Something is expected of a Godless person that is not of a sinner.
I do not care a rap for your claps or applause unless your acts take the
form of living your Christianity.
Without faith there would not be a factory or a bank here.
Nothing was ever accomplished without men first believing something.
The man who is a Christian has life more abundantly than an infidel.
Christ turned houses of mourning into houses of joy.
You act as though you had reached the apex and written “finis” after
everything you do. We haven’t learned the a b c’s of what is yet to come
in this old world.
There’s a law of gravitation in character as well as in matter.
A saloonkeeper does not enjoy a prayer meeting.
With everything wicked men can do today they try to check religion. Yet
religion never will be stopped. You might as well try to dam Niagara Falls
with toothpicks.
For twenty-seven and a half years I have been a Christian. I defy the
devil or anyone else on earth or in hell to prove that I don’t live what I
preach.
A motorman might as well try to run his car up yonder hill by blowing his
breath against the front vestibule as to expect salvation without Jesus
Christ.
You can’t stop religion by making fun of it.
If it’s wrong for me to hit the booze, it’s wrong for you.
God says, if you give me a chance, old man, I can make you sober and keep
you sober.
Take out of this town what Christianity has done for it and its real
estate would not be worth ten cents by Christmas.
Do not be deluded to believing that all you need is sincerity of thought.
A man may believe he can handle nitro-glycerine with impunity, but if he
does he will be slivered into atoms.
I know Jesus made good with me. Has he with you?
Wherever Jesus’ teachings have gone joy has followed.
Jesus Christ has crowned womanhood and placed garlands on her head.
Some men bequeath disease and cravings for drink to their children.
If Paul and Silas had looked as gloomy as some of you coming to the
Tabernacle that man in jail would not be liberated yet.
Jesus bled and died to save you. Whosoever will.
I am traveling to heaven according to a time-card, the gospel schedule.
[Illustration: BILLY SUNDAY AT THE AGES OF 14 AND 18 YEARS.]
CONSOLATION FOR THE OLD MAIDS.
“Take this from Uncle Fuller: ‘Don’t worry if you don’t marry, there are
worse things in the world than being an old maid, and one of them is
marrying the wrong man. Love is the divinest gift of God to man and woman.
Some of the noblest women in the world have been old maids; they are not
old maids, simply ladies-in-waiting, but I tell you girls I would rather
be an old maid, with dogs, cats, furniture and bric-a-brac than to be
yoked to a profane, cigaret smoking, cursing, whisky-soaked, jug-handle
for a husband.’”
TAKES RAP AT GIRLS WHO FLIRT.
“I wish I could make a girl that flirts see herself as others see her.
If you make eyes at a man on the street he will pay you back. It means
that if you don’t care any more than that for yourself why should he? It
takes a whole lot of nerve for a fellow to look a girl in the face and
say: ‘Will you be my wife and partner and help me fight the battle during
life?’ But I think it means a whole lot more to the girl who has to answer
and fight that question; but the fool girl loafs around, waits to be
chosen and takes the first chance she gets and seems to think that if they
get made one the laws of man can make them two again. The divorce laws are
damnable and pernicious.”
DRINKING AND MATRIMONY.
No man ever intended being a drunkard. He started out a moderate drinker.
If any young buck would come and ask to take my daughter out on a midnight
joy ride, so help me God, I certainly would land on him.
If these automobiles and carriages could talk, there’d be something doing.
The reason we’ve got so many little whip-poor-will widows nowadays is that
they married men to reform them.
Girls, you sell yourselves too cheap. You’ll keep company with some
miserable young buck who’ll dodge into a doorway so as not to be
embarrassed by the look of recognition from some fallen woman on the
street, just to have “steady” company.
SAYS SOCIETY TO BLAME FOR SINNERS.
I say, you card playing women for little prizes such as a dinky cream
pitcher or pair of silk hose (maybe you’ve got ’em on now) are responsible
for many of the gamblers, because you started ’em.
The purer life for men and women will never come till the girls raise the
standard of their company. Then we’ll clean up some of these young bucks
around town.
I believe the man who will seduce an innocent young girl and sell her into
a life of shame, ought to be shot on the spot.
Society takes no notice of an innocent flirtation. It waits till the mute
evidence of a girl’s downfall cannot be concealed, then gasps in horror
and turns her out.
Society is responsible for the sins of those you saw starting toward hell
and didn’t warn ’em.
Society’s to blame for many a blithering drunkard, for starting him
drinking at a fashionable party.
SOME EXTRA SHOTS TO THE OUTFIELD.
If I can send one girl from the red light back to home, mother and God,
then I’ll be repaid for having stood all your bitter raillery and your
mockery. Mock you old devil, mock.
Gehazi was the first grafter mentioned in the Bible.
If by some power I could yank a string and pull from you all the clothes
you are wearing that are not paid for, some of you would have left only a
celluloid collar and pair of socks.
Many a fool today, when told what to do to keep out of hell, gets mad at
God.
Some fellows are so rotten that they ought to be disinfected for two years
and then given a bath in carbolic acid and formaldehyde before they should
be allowed to speak to a decent woman.
Christian Scientists, I notice, always answer the call for dinner just as
quick as I do.
Don’t condemn your doctor until you try his remedies.
The devil’s no fool. If you get to playing tag with him he’ll touch you on
the shoulder, say “tag, you’re it,” and get your goat. He’s never idle. He
never gets the rheumatiz, peritonitis, gout or appendicitis.
BILLY’S SKETCH OF LEPER BATHING IN JORDAN.
Billy Sunday’s impersonation of the leper Naaman, entering the waters of
the Jordan river to dip seven times, given Thursday night in his sermon on
“The Moral Leper,” in the language of the vaudeville press agent, was a
“bell-ringer.”
Billy, in the role of Naaman, made things so realistic that his vast
audience could almost expand their imagination enough to see the muddy
waters of the river, the slippery bank and the frightened and shivering
Naaman, endeavoring to bolster up enough courage to plunge in and take
his seven dips to be cured of leprosy.
Billy cautiously approached the water’s edge, stuck one toe in to
ascertain the temperature of the water, drew it back with a shiver and an
“U-u-gh, but that’s cold!” Then he stopped to explain that Naaman was not
accustomed to such surroundings, but was used to a porcelain bath tub at
home and to a “crooked-handle dingaramus” to rub his back with. With this
Billy went through the contortions of a man trying to reach the hollow of
his back with a brush or sponge.
SAYS WATER MADE NAAMAN SHIVER.
He told of a big “snake doctor” stinging Naaman on the shoulder, emitting
an unearthly screech and slapping one hand to the offended spot. Then he
tried the water again. He got part way in, slipped, stubbed his toe and
went hobbling about on his left foot, holding the other in both hands
as his facial contortions told of Naaman’s pain after getting hurt. He
shivered again, let his teeth chatter with a loud “b-r-r-r,” as he again
went into the water, pinched his nose shut after taking a long breath,
squinted his eyes and “ducked” under the surface, coming up spluttering,
spitting and choking.
Then Billy told of the spots of leprosy on Naaman beginning to itch. He
nearly had every one in the tabernacle scratching arms and legs as he
vigorously rubbed various spots on his body, and scratched ’em. Then he
resumed his ducking stunt. After the seventh dip, he told of Naaman’s
flesh being covered with the delicate skin of a babe and of him emerging
from the river no longer a leper. Here Sunday ended his monologue with the
exclamation, “Gee, wonder what Mrs. Naaman and the kids will say when I
come home and they see me cured.”
SNAPSHOTS FROM SUNDAY’S SERMONS.
God never owned a slave. All the service you render for God is or should
be prompted by gratitude.
It’s hell and damnation that put men and women in the asylums and jails.
If my vehemence and exertions amaze you, your apathy and laziness stagger
me.
If God could get possession of all the flesh and blood that belongs to
Him, He could create a commotion in this city in 48 hours.
Some people work only with their mouths. But God wants that part of you
that’s on the ground as well as in the air.
Christianity and red whiskey don’t stay in the same hide together.
Bill Shakespeare was onto his job when he said “What fools these mortals
be.”
The Lord’s having just as bad a time today with the folks here as with the
old Jews out there in the wilderness.
It gives me prostration to see how some people do things in this world.
It’s no wonder the devil’s got a mortgage on the world and is about ready
to foreclose it.
Some churches have 500 in the congregation and about 25 turn out at prayer
meeting. Where are the other 475? They have just as much right to be there
as the 25.
Faith is like a headlight on a train.
I don’t believe one-half the people in the churches were ever converted or
had an experience.
I believe in experimental religion.
Faith is above all other graces; it honors God and brings blessings to the
individual.
The average preacher don’t pray much more than five minutes each day; the
average churchgoer not more than three minutes.
If we got what was coming to us—it’d be Hell for all of us.
A TRIP THROUGH THE BIBLE WITH BILLY SUNDAY.
_An Example of the Evangelist’s Power in Painting Word Pictures._
Twenty-seven years ago with the Holy Spirit as my guide, I entered at the
portico of Geneses and went into the art gallery of the Old Testament,
where, on the wall, hung pictures of Enoch, Noah, Jacob, Abraham, Elijah,
David, Daniel and other famous prophets of old. Then I passed into the
music room of the Psalms, where the spirit swept the keyboard of my
nature and brought forth the dirge—like a wail of the weeping prophet,
Jeremiah, to the grand exultant strain of the 24th Psalm and where every
reed and pipe in God’s great organ of nature seemed to respond to the
tuneful harp of David, as he played for King Saul in his melancholy moods.
Next I passed into the business office of Proverbs, then into the chapel
of Ecclesiastes, where the voice of the preacher was heard; then over
into the conservatory of the songs of Solomon, where the Lily of the
Valley and the Rose of Sharon and sweet-scented spices perfumed my life.
Then I stepped into the prophetic room and saw through telescopes various
stars, some pointing to far-off stars and others to nearby stars, but all
concentrated upon the bright and Morning Star which was to rise above the
moon-lit hills of Judea, while shepherds guarded their flock by night.
From there I passed into the audience room and caught a vision of the King
from the standpoint of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I then went into the
Acts of the Apostles, where the Holy Spirit was doing office work in the
formation of the Infant Church. From here I went to the correspondence
room where Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James and Judah sat at
their desks, penning their epistles to the church. Then I passed last of
all into the throne room of Revelations and the king sitting high upon his
throne.
DEFENDS DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE.
If the Bible were the dreams of men, it would have gone down long ago.
But it still stands like a light-house, shining out into the darkness,
surrounded by thousands of dead birds, which have battered their brains
out, knocking it.
The biggest fool today is the man who sneers at the word of God.
God’s word can’t be overthrown. It is too hard for the tooth of time and
will last forever.
God’s plan in the beginning was that man should never die and that no
man should ever work. Now, because of sin, white or black, Christian or
skeptic, civilized or savage, it’s work for you or over the hills to the
poor house.
You can say, if you want to, that your great-great-great-great-grandfather
was a monkey with a prehensile tail, playing in the back alley, all right,
but you can’t connect me with your monkey ancestors.
Why is it that corn that is fed to chickens makes feathers; that fed to
sheep makes wool; that fed to the cow makes milk, and that which you eat
goes into brain?
The men who undertake to overthrow the Bible will find the biggest job
they ever had on their hands, and a lot of these lobsters have already
gone to the mat for the count.
Don’t you feel like brutes; don’t you feel lower than snakes when you
raise you voice against the Bible and this campaign, which is working for
the influence of Christianity?
You can take all the books of all ages and nations, and take out all that
is good and noble in them, and you can’t produce a book which will touch
the hem of the Bible, which, is the word of God.
SPIRITUALISM ON THE GRILL.
Spiritualism is of the devil, pure and simple. I have no quarrel with you
if you’re a spiritualist, but I have with that damnable doctrine.
Spiritualism is as old as the Egyptian mummies or the sphinx. It had long,
gray hair and walked on crutches of decrepitude before Athens or Rome had
a single mud hut or Romulus and Remus had been nourished by the wolf. It
cannot work in the light, but needs darkness, because its deeds are evil.
I never knew a confirmed spiritualist who had a normal physical body.
Their religion is unclean. Christian science is the worst tommyrot since
the Third Century.
STRAIGHT SHOTS FROM THE SHOULDER.
Bryan, clean as a hound’s tooth—he’s a friend of mine, too—isn’t afraid to
put a Bible under his arm and preach the word of God.
The churches used to be daffy over high-critic preachers. Nowadays your
high-critic preachers are wearing out shoe leather and going blind
reading the want columns, trying to find jobs.
Down in Georgia they were having a dress ball. Huh! Better call it an
undress ball.
Religion will do more for the world than it is now, as soon as God gets
more than dimes and nickles to work with.
Some ministers are as crazy after sensation as the “yellowest” newspaper
that ever came off the press.
Some of you society women are so stuck-up with pride that you can’t lie
straight in bed at night.
These long-winded prayers will never get anything for Christ.
In nearly every church there is a little bunch that prays and all the rest
are going to the devil.
What Shakespeare says is “literatwah,” but what Bill Sunday says is
“vulgwah.”
The worst thing that ever wriggled out of hell is a church scrap.
I believe that some time in the life of every man and woman there will
come a time when they will pray.
“I’d like to see the day,” said Sunday, “when there wouldn’t be a store
open on Saturday night. I can’t see to save my gizzard why it’s necessary.
People can do their shopping early. If they’d close the stores Saturday
evening the same as on other days, the church attendances would be
doubled. But of course, when you do anything to help humanity, some
yellow dog has got to block it. And you employers and proprietors sit
around in the churches and wonder why the attendance is so small, when
you’re to blame yourself by making your employes work themselves to death
so that they are too tired to go to church.”
[Illustration: BILLY SUNDAY AT THE AGES OF 20 AND 22 YEARS.]
OTHERS SUFFER FROM YOUR SINS.
“When you come staggering home, cussing right and left and spewing and
spitting, your wife suffers, your children suffer, you infernal old
devil. Don’t think that you are the only one that suffers. You’re placing
a stain on your wife and your children. If you’re a dirty, low-down,
filthy, drunken, whisky-soaked bum you’ll affect all with whom you come in
contact. If you’re a God-fearing man you will influence all with whom you
come in contact. You can’t live by yourself.
“Personal liberty is not personal license. Our forefathers did not fight
and die for personal license, but for personal liberty bounded by laws.
Personal license is the liberty of a red-handed anarchist. Personal
license is the liberty of a burglar, of a seducer, of a raper, of a wolf
that wants to remain in a sheep fold, or the fox in a henroost.”
LESSONS FROM STORY OF PILATE.
Pilate was a pliable, plastic, rathole, stand pat, peanut, lunch counter
politician of his day.
Pilate sent Jesus to an innocent death to please the machine politicians.
Away with your hell-born, stinking lie of Unitarianism that Jesus was
not a good man. He was either the Son of God or a fraud and liar, and I
believe Him to be the Son of God.
God keeps no half-way house. It’s either heaven or hell for everyone.
A millionaire will go to hell just as fast as a hobo counting the ties on
a railroad, if he doesn’t live true to God.
I challenge all the infidels on the earth to find one flaw in the
character of Jesus Christ.
Even if Jesus wasn’t the Son of God I would worship Him anyway, for he is
my ideal. I can’t conceive a grander character.
MORAL TRUTHS BILLY GAVE TO MEN.
Lyman Beecher was the father of more brain than any other man.
It’s everybody’s business how you live.
Law stands between you and personal liberty.
I brand that man with a black brand whose iniquities are responsible for
the fall of others.
No man lives to himself alone.
No man will argue that sin is a good thing.
It doesn’t take boys long to get on the wrong track.
There are little frizzled top sissies who know more about vice than their
gray-haired grandmothers.
As a rule a man wants something better for his children than he had
himself.
You would not want your son to live like you, if you are not living right.
A young buck that cusses will crush your daughter’s honor like he would an
eggshell.
If you never become religious, men, for God’s sake stop your cussing.
Like produces like in everything.... Blood will tell.
SAYS THESE THREE WILL RUIN CITY.
“No man can be a good husband, no man can be a good father, no man can be
a respectable citizen, no man can be a gentleman, and cuss. You can hang
out a sign of gentleman, but when you cuss you might as well take it in.
“There are three things which will ruin any town, open license saloons,
open stores on the Sabbath day and a dirty, cussing, swearing gang of
blacklegs on the streets. Let a town be known for these three things, and
these alone, and you could never start a boom half big enough to get one
man there.”
“You can’t go anywhere any more, in a car, a depot, a restaurant, but
what you find some fiend with his foul-mouthed oaths ready to spew them
out. What an awful place hell will be when it gets all of that bunch down
there.”
“Say, boys, if I was on a jury and you could prove to me that a father
had stolen a loaf of bread to keep his wife from starving, you could keep
me in the room until the ants took me out through the keyhole before I’d
stick him. That may not be law, I don’t know, but you’ll find there is a
big streak of humanity in Bill.”
DO GOD’S WILL.
He told the women that it was not sufficient to be familiar with all the
poets and the books of etiquette to get into heaven. The one essential
thing is the doing of the will of God, he said.
Mr. Sunday showed through the story of Lady Anne Erskine of Rome, how the
devil and Christ are bidding for their souls—the devil offering beauty,
pleasure, adulation and ease; Jesus promising peace, joy and eternal
happiness—and it was left to them to choose.
BILLY’S KEYS TO SUCCESS.
“Dig the foundation deep, young man;
Plant firm the outer wall.
Build it well what ere you do;
Build it straight and strong and true;
Build it clean and high and broad,
Build it for the eye of God.”
Have some definite aim in life. Don’t drift ’round and ’round like a log
in a whirlpool.
Do the best you can and you will win; God could not ask more than that.
Not only aim high, but muster up enough power to pierce the opposition and
to ring the bell.
Don’t try to build character with a whisky bottle, a pack of cards, a
libertine life and cigarets. Put the Bible and Jesus Christ in your life
instead.
Be careful what you read. Don’t read bad, worthless books.
Don’t assassinate every noble desire that comes to you.
Get a good introduction of yourself to yourself and find out how little
you really know.
Cut out the cigarets, boys, or they’ll cut you out. Just take that from
your Uncle Fuller.
Have the grit of Sampson in your system so that you won’t tremble when the
lions roar.
Don’t have your veins filled with ice water. Get some pepper, ginger and
tabasco sauce into them.
Be a live wire. Be like the man with the itch; make everybody scratch when
they come near you.
Remember, you’re not measured by your size, but by what you are.
If your pockets are empty, fill your heart with resolutions and get into
the game. Don’t sit on the bleachers and growl.
You can’t determine success by the rattle of the cash register.
The limbs of the tree of knowledge hang so low that anybody with ambition
can reach up and pluck the fruit.
Cities are whirlpools that whirl you into the jaws of hell.
A FEW BUNTS TO LIVE STUDENTS.
It’s a sad day for the young man when President Taft’s overcoat won’t make
him a vest, he’s so chesty.
Education is knowing what you want, knowing how to get it, and knowing
what to do with it after you get it.
If you find a fellow on the top of the hill, he never “lit” there; he
climbed.
You can’t measure manhood by a tape line around the waist.
Parents, don’t try to make your boy another “you.” If God had wanted
another “you,” he would have made you twins.
You can’t always tell the size of a man by the fuss he makes. A frog makes
more noise than a whale.
We can build universities, tax the people to support them and furnish
the best curriculum on God’s dirt, but we can’t make something out of a
nonentity.
When a girl is seventeen and is introduced to a young man, she asks, “Who
is he?” At twenty-two she asks, “What is he?” and at thirty-five she
cries, “For God’s sake, where is he?”
If I had lived in Napoleon’s day I would have followed his star for he
could hit the ball.
You can hear more curbstone, barbershop and livery stable theology in this
city today than ever before.
All some men are fit for is to make one more when the census count is
taken.
The man who has nothing but money is the poorest man on earth.
It’s the false ideal that strews this world with wrecks.
SUNDAY’S TRIBUTE TO THE HOLIDAYS.
“I’m glad we celebrate the Fourth of July, when we can uncork our
enthusiasm and shoot firecrackers and eat peanuts and drink red lemonade,
for it makes us realize that we are living in the greatest nation that
man’s eye ever saw or God’s hand ever made. I’m glad we have Labor
day, when the man who toils can have a holiday of his own. I’m glad we
celebrate Easter to commemorate the time when the Son of Man arose in
conquering majesty. I’m glad we celebrate Thanksgiving, when we sit at our
sumptuously laden tables and recall that as a nation we have never gone
to bed hungry and that our granaries have never been empty, and reflect
that we have one state that can raise corn enough to feed us all. America
can feed the world. I pay tribute to the man with the dinner bucket,
with bundles of muscle that knot like steel. All these days are days of
precious memories, days that make the nation strong and great, days that
make us better men and women.”
“If you are well prepared for life you’ll never wear out shoe leather
hunting for a job, and you’ll never become blind reading the ‘Help wanted’
ads.”
“What songs do the people go daffy over today? Listen and I’ll tell you.”
“Love your neighbor as yourself,
But let his wife alone;
For if you don’t he’ll soon get wise,
And then you’ll lose your own.”
And here Sunday named some of the popular songs he said were causing
divorces. Among them were: “My Wife’s Gone to the Country,” “I Love My
Wife, But Oh You Kid,” and “I’ll Trust My Wife With Fifty Men, But With
One?—Not On Your Life.”
Sunday pointed out five things which he stated he considered necessary
qualifications to win in life: Blood, environment, grit, education and
religion. He then added that the first four without the fifth meant
nothing at all, and pleaded with his youthful audience to trust in God.
“It takes more than a mortarboard cap, pipe, peg-top trousers, a cane and
your ‘rah, rah, rah,’ to make a man out of you. It takes character and
determination. It pays to feed the Bible to the children,” Sunday said.
[Illustration: BILLY SUNDAY AT THE AGES OF 24 AND 50 YEARS.]
LIVING UP TO ONE’S PROFESSION.
You can summon all your card-playing, theatre-going church members and
they can’t drive the devil out of a boy as big as a peanut.
If you want the world to be better after awhile, then keep the devil out
of your boys and girls now.
I am an “amen” Christian, but I don’t shout it any louder than I live it.
You’re killing religion with your dignity today.
Lots of people would go to hell sure if they died out of Lent season.
One-half the professing Christians amount to little or nothing as a
spiritual force.
SOME STRAY SHOTS FOR THE GALLERY.
I’m a graduate of the university of poverty and have taken several
post-graduate courses there, too.
Some of you sing, “I’m standing on the solid rock,” through a set of false
teeth that you haven’t paid for yet.
Nine-tenths of the church members are bench warmers.
“Not my will but”—it costs some of you too much to complete the other
three words—“Thine be done.” That’s why your spiritual batting average is
only fifteen when it ought to be nine hundred.
I’d rather see a child in the mouth of a crocodile than to see it dragged
down by some immoral influence.
Go into the church and you’ll find most of the bunch nearer the theatre
and card party than to Jesus.
The nearer to Jesus the more elbow room there is; the farther away you
find the biggest crowd.
SOME HOT ONES SHOT AT RANDOM.
You don’t see the “S. R. O.” (standing room only) signs in the churches;
you have to go to the theatre to see them.
Show me a church where the minister hasn’t any concern in a spiritual
revival, and I will show you a rich, fashionable, third-rate amusement
bureau with religion left out.
You’ll spend more time and money getting a steer ready for a business
deal, than you will to start your boys on a safe trip to heaven.
If you’re afraid to take your stand for fear of being ridiculed by the
miserable bunch that won’t trot square, you ought to be ashamed to call
yourself a man.
If you are in a business that religion hurts, you are a moral pauper and
in a mighty dirty, rotten, stinking business.
The trouble with a great many men is they have got all their property and
religion in their wives’ name.
ONE OF “BILLY” SUNDAY’S CHARACTERISTIC PRAYERS.
“Well, Lord, we pray Thou will help us. I’m glad, Jesus, that I can stand
here today and say that after all these years of trusting in Thee, Thou
hast helped me. Help them, God. We beseech Thee to help us here today.
Help us as we go along from day to day. There’ll be troubles, the way will
be dark and dreary sometimes. The sun will not always shine, there’ll
be rain and dark clouds, but they’ll soon clear away. It is the work of
the devil to make it hard for us. It is the devil’s work to make us weak
physically, so that it will be hard to bear the strain of God’s work. Oh,
devil, why do you strike us when we’re down? Why do you prey upon our
weaknesses? Why do you do it? You know, devil, you and I are enemies. We
always have been.
“There’s no compromise between us. You know, devil, I’ve never uttered a
word, preached a sermon or written a line that I didn’t believe was right
and that I’ll not stand upon. I wouldn’t take back a single thing I ever
said. And say, devil, if there’s anything in my sermons that doesn’t hurt
you, tell me, and I’ll take it out, and Lord, if there’s anything in my
sermons that doesn’t help your work, tell me, and I’ll take it out. I’ve
learned to love these people Lord. Oh, their friendship and generosity
have been wonderful. I never saw such love and kindness, Jesus. I’ve been
overwhelmed by it. And now, today, there may still be some who have not
yet taken their stand, and who’ll be the first to come down and take me by
the hand.”
SOME OF SUNDAY’S BOMBSHELLS.
If I ever accepted the pastorate of a church I’d buy a round trip ticket.
But believe me, I’d skin the bunch while I was on the job.
Too many people desert the prayer meeting for a card party or a Dutch
lunch.
Paul was an evangelist. Wherever he preached they had to call out the cops
to protect him. He always had a riot or a revival.
We need a revival because the churches are critical, cold, blown in the
bottle, stamped on the cork—petrified. You can’t scald a hog in ice-water.
The world would sink into hell before the Fourth of July if it had to
depend on “ethical” revivals.
If you want to see this city as God wants it to be you’ll help. If you
want it to be as hell and the devil wants it, then knock.
There are two gangs in every church—the rubs and the anti-rubs.
Some people have sat in their pews so long that they are mildewed.
There are multitudes in heaven that have crept and crawled out of the
quagmire of filth and the cesspools of iniquity and drunkenness.
It takes the combined efforts of the Trinity to keep you out of hell.
I’ll do anything on earth to help a sinner. I’ll do anything in the world
to put the devil and all his cohorts in hell.
Conversion must be effected by the influence of the truth on the mind.
Truth resisted, loses its power on the mind that resists and each
resistance weakens the truth.
When God begins to show His power, then the devil and all of the demons
get busy.
Religion makes its appeal to your sensibility, not your intellect.
The way into the kingdom is heart first, not head first.
God is not an explanation; God is a revelation.
Most people are converted at revival services.
If you are thirty and have not been converted, the chances are that if you
are not converted now, you will never be converted.
If it weren’t for revivals, just think what hell would be like.
If you spurn Jesus Christ you are doing the same thing which the Pharisees
did.
Some say a revival is only temporary; so is a bath, but it does you good.
Trouble with some fellows is that they have their religion and property in
their wives’ names. You’ve got to be something more than a brother-in-law
to God.
If God had his way there’d be no saloons.
The history of the church is a history of revivals; when any preacher
talks against revivals, he’s a damn scoundrel.
What the Church of God needs today is a baptism of horse sense.
Some people never read the Bible from week-end to week-end. No wonder they
are dried up like an Egyptian mummy.
Religion doesn’t affect some poor old sinners any more than shooting peas
at the Rock of Gibraltar with a pop gun.
If I can win a man over to Christianity—to keep a drunkard sober, even
just for a year, it’s worth every dollar.
Some of the worst knockers I have in this county are the preachers—sour
grapes; that’s the only way I can see it.
You’ve been so dignified, stiff and worldly until you’ve grieved the
Spirit of God.
Give the Lord a main line and see what he’ll do these days.
Never saw God bless a stingy gang yet.
I feel like a shouting Methodist. When you get a Presbyterian shouting
there’s something doing.
I am pleading for the old-fashioned Pentacostal revival. My evangelism is
2,000 years old; as old as the nails in the cross.
If a city sags morally, the reason is not with God, but with her
citizenship. They’d rather have a dirty, rotten town.
The biggest coward in America today, the biggest coward we have in the
profession of Christian religion, who is afraid to come out and declare
himself in a campaign like this is the business man. He is afraid of some
saloon keeper, some brewer, some gambler and others of that kind—they’re
afraid they will lose their trade by it, and by the eternal God they ought
to be punished before the moon changes.
I believe you are getting ready to place this town on the map as a place
where the name of God and decency are revered.
Over your head, the devil and the angels of God are locked in a struggle
for your soul.
When you work for Jesus you must expect to be abused.
Heaven wants to save you, earth to cheat you and hell to damn you.
You are just as good as you want to be and not a whit better.
You haven’t got money enough in your bank vault to hire me to come here if
I didn’t care for the welfare of your souls.
If man wrote the Bible we’d never been told that Noah got drunk. Man would
have left such things out, but God didn’t. He put everything in whether
pleasant or unpleasant.
When you swell up like a poisoned pup and think you are complimenting God
by being present here tonight, then God’s got nothing for you.
Some of the biggest heathens this side of hell are right here tonight.
“No trade” is the passport by which 90 per cent of the men are entering
the prisons and penitentiaries.
You may be lower down in the sight of God than the one whom you condemn.
The devil believes in God and in hell. He’s more orthodox than some
preachers I know who preach that there is no hell.
How can you pray when you look at the throne of God through the bottom of
a beer glass.
Some people pray as though they never expected anything and they’re not
disappointed.
How can you pray and say “Thy will be done,” when you have the booze wagon
drive up to your back gate twice every week.
SUNDAYISMS.
I wish to God we all could see what a common sense proposition religion
really is.
Graft has a stranglehold on religion today.
A preacher told me that in a certain town an undertaker came to him and
offered a rake-off if he’d throw the funerals his way.
The church member that rents his property for a saloon is as bad as the
saloon keeper himself.
Something has to be done to save this nation.
We are trying to apologize for man’s condition today on an economic basis.
A free nation cannot endure if it is dominated by grafters, special
interests, thieves and crooks.
The constitution was cradled in prayer.
You spend a whole lot of money for flowers at the funeral of your wife
that you might have spent for a hired girl.
It’s a good thing for you I’m not God for about fifteen minutes. I’d keep
the undertaker busy unless you squared up.
I could no more shock some of you folks than I could pour something on a
skunk to make it smell sweet.
It makes no difference whether you kneel before God as a millionaire or a
hobo—it’s a case of sin and salvation.
I don’t care whether you hot-footed it to the Tabernacle tonight or rode
in an auto.
God puts no premium on laziness. You can bank on that—Jesus Christ is the
center, circumference and nucleus of the Old and New Testament.
I believe that no man disbelieves in hell unless he finds himself on the
straight road to hell.
I wonder God is doing as well as He is with the bunch He has to work with.
The new idea in religion says the world is getting better and better.
That’s not true. The world is getting worse and worse.
Don’t storm and fuss at God about the plans of redemption when you don’t
know beans about a housefly.
The greatest scientists, the greatest painters, the greatest inventors,
the greatest astronomers, have all been Christians.
If you are a member of a Masonic lodge, give me your hand or take off that
badge. Especially do I challenge you if you are a Knight Templar, with
your sword drawn in defense of the gospel I am preaching.
AT A PRAYER MEETING, MR. SUNDAY OFFERED THE FOLLOWING PRAYER, PLEADING TO
GOD TO GIVE HIM STRENGTH TO CARRY ON HIS WORK.
“Oh Jesus, we’re not making an excuse. We’re not trying to offer an excuse
for not doing things as perhaps we might have done. But our voice is
hoarse, we feel the strain of his campaign, our health is not the best,
and we pray to Thee for more strength with which to battle down the forces
of sin and hell. But Jesus, we’re willing to fight for you, no matter how
bad we feel. We’ll stick to it, Jesus as long as you will let us. But,
Jesus, don’t you think for a minute we’re trying to give some excuse.
We’re tired, but on the job, and we want to stick to it, so help us all
and give us strength for Your sake. Amen.”
FAITH OF GREAT MEN.
Washington, in the snow at Valley Forge, knelt down and prayed for
victory; Abraham Lincoln got down on his knees at the White House and
prayed to God; Burke, Bismarck, Gladstone, Garfield, the immortal and
martyred McKinley, Hays and Roosevelt all had faith in God and have prayed
to him in times of war or trouble. Cleveland, Harrison and Woodrow Wilson
believe in the Bible. Milton, Longfellow, Shakespeare and all other famous
poets drew their inspirations from the Bible; famous artists dipped their
brushes into the light of heaven and why can’t we all have that same faith?
BIBLE ABOVE ALL.
Man has assailed the Bible for ages. All who have undertaken the job have
found it the biggest one they ever tackled and have been compelled to go
to the mat and take the count. But the Bible has withstood the ravages of
time, and today it stands buttressed about with the demolished theories
of speculators like the lonely light-house on the distant island, the
sands about her covered with the bodies of seabirds that have battered
their lives out against her light windows. The conflicts of the ages have
swayed around this old book and the shores of time have been strewn with
broken and demolished theories while the old ship Zion speeds on her way
as strong as ever with the banner floating from her mast.
SUNDAY KNOCKS OUT SOME “HOME” RUNS.
_On Training Children at Home._
Blood tells: the time to start training the boy right is seventy-five
years before he is born.
The reason there are so many nickel theatres and hell-holes in the wall is
because the home is not made attractive enough to retain the boy and girl.
Of all the devil-inspired sentences this is the limit: “Children should be
seen and not heard.”
The biggest mistake we ever made was to take from the teachers the right
to lick the kids.
I believe the downfall of most men and women can be traced to some defect
in the home.
A home must be something more than four walls and a roof.
The biggest monstrosity God ever looked at is the mother with her children
playing about her feet and they not getting an inspiration of Jesus.
We’re neglecting the home for the club, the lodge, the card party, the
literary society and the social function.
If a firm advertised for a bookkeeper it would expect something else than
just a man on legs; something else than just a slot machine to shove its
salary into every Saturday night.
UP TO MOTHERS.
God pity us. If mothers had failed as fathers have, God would have dumped
you into hell long ago.
God bless the women. I believe in women’s rights.
If some of you women had to get to heaven on the testimony of your
washerwomen, would you make it?
If you see a kid with its stockings hanging down like the skin on a
rhinoceros, and a dirty nose, it don’t take a prophet to say, “Ma’s gone
to the club.”
Outlawism is not settled by the street mob—it is settled in the home.
I haven’t much faith in the woman who talks heaven and makes her home a
hell.
Don’t tell the children what you don’t mean.
Don’t talk about your neighbors or anybody else.
Don’t hurt your children’s self-respect by punishing them in the presence
of company. Wait until the company is gone, then dust both hemispheres.
Don’t lie to your children, and then wonder where they learned to lie.
Don’t be a fool, and if you’ve got plenty of income, overdress your
children and send them to school to make the children of some poor,
conscientious man dissatisfied because their dad can’t give them as nice
clothes.
ELECTRIC FLASHES.
The young man or woman who is ashamed of his or her father or mother, is a
fool and too low down for me to spit on.
To hear boys cuss you’d think cussing was a part of the school curriculum.
The woman who tries to rid herself of the responsibilities of maternity,
is as red-handed and black-hearted a murderess as she who chokes to death
her 12-months old babe.
Of all the contemptable, triple-extract of hell, God-forsaken, hell-born,
infamous, vile, stinking and damnable people, the murderer who disguises
under the title of doctor is the worst.
A gambler, if he wins, is a thief, and if he loses, he’s a fool. So he’s
both a thief and a fool, no matter how you look at it.
If a church runs a lottery, then it’s a thief.
There are three ways of spreading news, telephone, telegraph and
tell-a-woman. But that’s really an insult, for some of these old
he-gossipers have got the women backed off the boards.
I pity the woman who’ll slap Jesus in the face to please some miserable
society gang.
The dance hall has proved to be the biggest graveyard this side of hell
for young girls.
The fellow who lives purely for the gratification of his lust, is so low
down he’d have to take an airship to reach hell.
The most useless woman on God’s dirt is the society woman.
It’s a good thing to have money and all it will buy, but it’s a better
thing to sit down and think whether you’ve got what money can’t buy.
We’re making money by the bucketfuls in this country, and we’re going to
hell in carload lots and on excursion rates, too.
Citizens who will not live on a level with the Ten Commandments ought to
be in the penitentiary. Public opinion does not always judge correctly.
SUNDAY ON EVOLUTION.
“The Bible says: ‘In the beginning G-O-D, God!’ I don’t know when that
beginning was, but in the beginning God! whether it was 6,000 years ago
or a hundred of millions of years ago, as some cranks now claim, created
the heaven and the earth. I don’t believe the doctrine of evolution. Did
this tabernacle evolute? No: common sense will tell you that. Did flowers
evolute? If things have evoluted, why haven’t they been improved upon
during all these years? Flowers found today along the Nile grew there
in exactly the same form centuries ago. Have they evoluted? You can put
a gold belt around a hog, tie his sides up with ribbons and he’ll still
squeal for slop. He’s the same old hog. Has he evoluted? If you believe
human beings evoluted from the ape, all right. If you believe that your
great-great-great-great-grandfather was a monkey with a prehensile tail
around the limb of a cocoanut tree, all right; but don’t connect your
monkey ancestors with me. Listen here, I’m going to stick by that book—the
Bible if I die the very next instant.”
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Burning truths from Billy's bat : A graphic description of the remarkable conversion of Rev. "Billy" Sunday (the world's famous evangelist)—embodying anecdotes, terse sayings, etc., compiled from various sources" ***
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