"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
When a person's acts affect only himself they can be left to the
conscience of the individual, but when they affect others the law steps
in. When a child has diphtheria, you are not allowed personal liberty;
you are quarantined, because your personal liberty could endanger
others if exercised. So you haven't any right to live in sin. You say
you'll do it anyhow. All right, you'll go to hell, too. Adam and Eve
said they would eat the apple anyhow, and the world became a graveyard,
and here's the result today.
I look out into the world and see a man living in sin. I argue with
him, I plead with him. I cry out warning words. I brand that man with a
black brand, whose iniquities are responsible for the fall of others.
No man lives to himself alone. I hurt or help others by my life. When
you go to hell you're going to drag some one else down with you and if
you go to heaven you're going to take some one else with you. You say
you hate sin. Of course you do if you have self-respect. But you never
saw anyone who hates sin worse than I do, or loves a sinner more than
I. I'm fighting for the sinners. I'm fighting to save your soul, just
as a doctor fights to save your life from a disease. I'm your friend,
and you'll find that I'll not compromise one bit with sin. I'll do
anything to help you. No man will argue that sin is a good thing. Not
a one who does not believe that the community would be better off if
there was no sin. I preach against vice to show you that it will make
your girl an outcast and your boy a drunkard. I'm fighting everything
that will lead to this and if I have to be your enemy to fight it, God
pity you, for I'm going to fight. People do not fight sin until it
becomes a vice.
You say you're not afraid of sin. You ought to be, for your children.
It doesn't take boys long to get on the wrong track, and while you
are scratching gravel to make one lap, your boy makes ten. We've got
kids who have not yet sprouted long breeches who know more about sin
and vice than Methuselah. There are little frizzled-top sissies not
yet sprouting long dresses who know more about vice than did their
great-grandmothers when they were seventy-five years old. The girl who
drinks will abandon her virtue. What did Methuselah know about smoking
cigarettes? I know there are some sissy fellows out there who object to
my talking plain and know you shirk from talking plain.
If any one ever tells you that you can't be virtuous and enjoy good
health, I brand him as a low, infamous, black-hearted liar.
Ask any afflicted man you see on the street. If you could only reveal
the heart of every one of them! In most you would find despair and
disease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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