"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
Several years ago in the city of Chicago a young man of good parents,
good character, one Sunday crossed the street and entered a saloon,
open against the law. He found there boon companions. There were
laughter, song and jest and much drinking. After awhile, drunk,
insanely drunk, his money gone, he was kicked into the street. He found
his way across to his mother's home. He importuned her for money to buy
more drink. She refused him. He seized from the sideboard a revolver
and ran out into the street and with the expressed determination of
entering the saloon and getting more drink, money or no money. His fond
mother followed him into the street. She put her hand upon him in a
loving restraint. He struck it from him in anger, and then his sister
came and added her entreaty in vain. And then a neighbor, whom he knew,
trusted and respected, came and put his hand on him in gentleness and
friendly kindness, but in an insanity of drunken rage he raised the
revolver and shot his friend dead in his blood upon the street. There
was a trial; he was found guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life
imprisonment, and when the little mother heard the verdict--a frail
little bit of a woman--she threw up her hands and fell in a swoon. In
three hours she was dead.
In the streets of Freeport, Illinois, a young man of good family became
involved in a controversy with a lewd woman of the town. He went in
a drunken frenzy to his father's home, armed himself with a deadly
weapon and set out for the city in search of the woman with whom he
had quarreled. The first person he met upon the public square in the
city, in the daylight, in a place where she had a right to be, was one
of the most refined and cultured women of Freeport. She carried in her
arms her babe--motherhood and babyhood, upon the streets of Freeport
in the day time, where they had a right to be--but this young man in
his drunken insanity mistook her for the woman he sought and shot her
dead upon the streets with her babe in her arms. He was tried and Judge
Ferand, in sentencing him to life imprisonment said: "You are the
seventh man in two years to be sentenced for murder while intoxicated."
In the city of Anderson, you remember the tragedy in the Blake home.
A young man came home intoxicated, demanding money of his mother.
She refused it. He seized from the wood box a hatchet and killed his
mother and then robbed her. You remember he fled. The officer of the
law pursued him and brought him back. An indictment was read to him
charging him with the murder of the mother who had given him his birth,
of her who had gone down into the valley of the shadow of death to give
him life, of her who had looked down into his blue eyes and thanked
God for his life. And he said, "I am guilty; I did it all." And Judge
McClure sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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