"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message: With his own words which have won thousands for ChristEllis, William T. (William Thomas)
Religion
"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message: With his own words which have won thousands for Christ
Ellis, William T. (William Thomas)
Baseball players -- United States -- Biography; Evangelists -- United States -- Biography; Sunday, Billy, 1862-1935
One cannot cease to exult at the fashion in which the evangelist makes
the Gospel synonymous with clean living. All the considerations that
weigh to lead persons to go forward to grasp the evangelist's hand,
also operate to make them partisans of purity and probity.
Put into three terse phrases, Sunday's whole message is: "Quit your
meanness. Confess Christ. Get busy for him among men." There are no
finely spun spiritual sophistries in Sunday's preaching. He sometimes
speaks quite rudely of that conception of a "higher spiritual life"
which draws Christians apart from the world in a self-complacent
consciousness of superiority.
His is not a mystical, meditative faith. It is dynamic, practical,
immediate. According to his ever-recurring reasoning, if one is not
passing on the fruits of religion to somebody else--if one is not
hitting hard blows at the devil or really doing definite tasks for God
and the other man--then one has not the real brand of Christianity.
Sunday's preaching has hands, with "punch" to them, as well as lift;
and feet, with "kick" in them, as well as ministry.
Like a colliery mined on many levels, Sunday's preaching reaches
all classes. Everybody can appreciate the social service value of
converting a gutter bum and making him a self-supporting workman. Is
it any less social service to convert a man--I cite an actual instance
from Pittsburgh--who had lately lost a twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year
position through dissipation, and so thoroughly to help him find
himself that before the meetings were over he was back in his old
office, once more drawing one thousand dollars a month?
To a student of these campaigns, it seems as if business has sensed,
better than the preachers, the economic waste of sin.
A careful and discriminating thinker, the Rev. Joseph H. Odell, D.D.,
formerly pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of Scranton, wrote an
estimate of Billy Sunday and his work for _The Outlook_, in which he
explains why his church, which had been opposed to the coming of the
evangelist, reversed its vote:
Testimony, direct and cumulative, reached the ears of the same refined
and reverent men and women. The young business men, even those from
the great universities, paused to consider. The testimony that
changed the attitudes of the Church came from judges, lawyers, heads
of corporations and well-known society leaders in their respective
communities. The testimony was phenomenally concurrent in this: that,
while it did not endorse the revivalist's methods, or accept his
theological system, or condone his roughness and rudeness, it proved
that the preaching produced results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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