The backslider likes the preaching that wouldn't hit the side of a house, while the real disciple is delighted when the truth brings him to his knees. There would be more power in the prayers of some folks if they would put more white money in the collection basket. What have you given the world it never possessed before you came? Temptation is the devil looking through the keyhole. Yielding is opening the door and inviting him in. CHAPTER IX Battling with "Booze" The man who votes for the saloon is pulling on the same rope with the devil, whether he knows it or not.--BILLY SUNDAY. There is a tremendous military advantage in having a definite enemy. The sermons that are aimed at nothing generally hit it. Billy Sunday is happiest and most successful when attacking the liquor evil. Down among the masses of men he learned for himself the awful malignity of strong drink, which he deems the greatest evil of our day. So he fights it. Everybody will admit--the saloon-keeper first of all--that Billy Sunday is the most effective foe of the liquor business in America today. Small wonder the brewers spend large sums of money in circulating attacks upon him, and in going before him to every town where he conducts meetings, spreading slanders of many sorts. There is a ghastly humor in the success the brewers have in enlisting the preachers to make common cause with them in discrediting this evangelist. Shrewd men have come quite generally to the conclusion that they will not give aid and comfort to the enemies of righteousness whose interests are best served by criticism of Billy Sunday. All incidental questions aside, Sunday does the Lord's work and is on the Lord's side. It is a pitiable spectacle to see the Lord's servants attacking him; though it is quite understandable why the liquor interest should spend large sums of money in antagonizing Sunday. It would be worth a million dollars to them any day if he could be put out of action. Wherever Sunday goes a great temperance awakening follows. In eleven of fifteen Illinois towns where he campaigned "dry" victories were won at the next election. Fifteen hundred saloons were put out of business in a single day in Illinois, largely as the result of his work. With characteristic indifference to figures and tabulated results, Sunday has kept no record of the communities which have gone "dry" following his meetings. That consequence is common. His recent presence in Pennsylvania is the surest token that the Keystone State will not much longer be the boasted Gibraltar of the liquor interests. Even up in Pennsylvania's coal regions, with their large foreign population, many communities are going "dry," while individual saloons are being starved out. Within about a year of Sunday's visit there, the number of saloons was reduced by more than two hundred.