A prophet to his own generation is Billy Sunday. In the speech of today he arraigns the sins of today and seeks to satisfy the needs of today. A man singularly free and fearless, he applies the Gospel to the conditions of the present moment. Knowing life on various levels, he preaches with a definiteness and an appropriateness that echo the prophet Nathan's "Thou art the man." By the very structure of Billy Sunday's mentality it is made difficult for him to be abstract. He has to deal definitely with concrete sins. Now a pastor would find it difficult to approach, in the ruthless and reckless fashion of Billy Sunday, the shortcomings of his members and neighbors. He has to live with his congregation, year in and year out; but the evangelist is as irresponsible as John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan. He has no affiliations to consider and no consequences to fear, except the Kingdom's welfare. His only concern is for the truth and applicability of his message. He is perfectly heedless about offending hearers. Those well-meaning persons who would compare Billy Sunday with the average pastor should bear this in mind. A rare gift of satire and scorn and invective and ridicule has been given to Sunday. He has been equipped with powerful weapons which are too often missing from the armory of the average Gospel soldier. His aptitude for puncturing sham is almost without a peer in contemporary life. Few orators in any field have his art of heaping up adjectives to a towering height that overwhelms their objective. Nor does the Church escape Sunday's plain dealing. He treats vigorously her shortcomings and her imperfections. Usually, the persons who hear the first half dozen or dozen sermons in one of his campaigns are shocked by the reckless way in which the evangelist handles the Church and church members. Others, forewarned, perceive the psychology of it. It is clear that in Sunday's thinking the purity of the Church is all-important. Complacency with any degree of corruption or inefficiency on her part he would regard as sin. So he unsparingly belabors the Church and her ministry for all the good that they have left undone and all amiss that they have done. The net result of this is that the evangelist leaves on the minds of the multitudes, to whom the Church has been a negligible quantity, a tremendous impression of her pre-eminent importance. It is true that sometimes, after a Sunday campaign, a few ministers have to leave their churches, because of the new spirit of efficiency and spirituality which he has imparted. They have simply been unable to measure up to the new opportunity. On the whole, however, it is clear that he imparts a new sense of dignity and a new field of leadership to the ministers of the Gospel in the communities he has served. Testimony on this point seems to be conclusive.