"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
I have sometimes tried to imagine myself in Damascus on review day, and
have seen a man riding on a horse richly caparisoned with trappings
of gold and silver, and he himself clothed in garments of the finest
fabrics, and the most costly, though with a face so sad and melancholy
that it would cause the beholder to turn and look a second and third
time. But he was a leper. And a man unaccustomed to such scenes might
be heard to make a remark like this: "How unequally God seems to divide
his favors! There is a man who rides and others walk; he is clothed in
costly garments; they are almost naked while he is well fed," and they
contrast the difference between the man on the horse and the others. If
we only knew the breaking hearts of the people we envy we would pity
them from the bottom of our souls.
I was being driven through a suburb of Chicago by a real estate man who
wanted to sell me a lot. He was telling me who lived here and who lived
there, and what an honor it would be for me and my children to possess
a home there. We were driving past a house that must have cost $100,000
and he said: "That house is owned by Mr. So-and-So. He is one of our
multi-millionaires, and he and his wife have been known to live in that
house for months and never speak to each other. They each have separate
apartments, each has a separate retinue of servants, each a dining-room
and sleeping apartments, and months come and go by and they never speak
to each other." My thoughts hurried back to the little flat we called
our home, where we had lived for seventeen years. I have paid rent
enough to pay for it. There wasn't much in it; I could load it in two
furniture vans, maybe three, counting the piano, but I would not trade
the happiness and the joy and the love of that little flat if I had to
take that palatial home and the sorrow and the things that went with
it.
Family Skeletons
Suppose you were driving along the street and a man who was intimately
acquainted with the skeletons that are in every family, should tell you
the secrets of them all, of that boy who has broken his father's heart
by being a drunkard, a blackleg gambler, and that girl who has gone
astray, and that wife who is a common drunkard, made so by society, and
the father himself who is also a sinner.
Leprosy is exceedingly loathsome, and as I study its pathology I am
not surprised that God used it as a type of sin. A man who is able
to understand this disease, its beginning and its progress, might
be approached by a man who was thus afflicted and might say to him,
"Hurry! hurry! Show yourself to the priest for the cleansing of the
Mosaic law."
"Why?" says the man addressed. "What is the trouble?" The other man
would say, "Do hurry and show yourself to the priest." But the man
says, "That is only a fester, only a water blister, only a pimple,
nothing more. I say there is no occasion to be alarmed. You are unduly
agitated and excited for my welfare."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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