"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
And we dumped nearly four times the value of the national bank stock
in the United States into the whisky hole last year, and we didn't
fill the hole up at that. What is the matter? Say, whenever the day
comes that all the Catholic and Protestant churches--just when the day
comes when you will say to the whisky business: "You go to hell," that
day the whisky business will go to hell. But you sit there, you old
whisky-voting elder and deacon and vestryman, and you wouldn't strike
your hands together on the proposition. It would stamp you an old
hypocrite and you know it.
Say, hold on a bit. Have you got a silver dollar? I am going to show
you how it is burned up. We have in this country 250,000 saloons, and
allowing fifty feet frontage for each saloon it makes a street from New
York to Chicago, and 5,000,000 men, women and children go daily into
the saloon for drink. And marching twenty miles a day it would take
thirty days to pass this building, and marching five abreast they would
reach 590 miles. There they go; look at them!
On the first day of January, 500,000 of the young men of our nation
entered the grog-shop and began a public career hellward, and on the
31st of December I will come back here and summon you people, and ring
the bell and raise the curtain and say to the saloon and breweries: "On
the first day of January, I gave you 500,000 of the brain and muscle of
our land, and I want them back and have come in the name of the home
and church and school; father mother, sister, sweetheart; give me back
what I gave you. March out."
I count, and 165,000 have lost their appetites and have become
muttering, bleary-eyed drunkards, wallowing in their own excrement, and
I say, "What is it I hear, a funeral dirge?" What is that procession?
A funeral procession 3,000 miles long and 110,000 hearses in the
procession. One hundred and ten thousand men die drunkards in the land
of the free and home of the brave. Listen! In an hour twelve men die
drunkards, 300 a day and 110,000 a year. One man will leap in front
of a train, another will plunge from the dock into a lake, another
will throw his hands to his head and life will end. Another will cry,
"Mother," and his life will go out like a burnt match.
I stand in front of the jails and count the whisky criminals. They say,
"Yes, Bill, I fired the bullet." "Yes, I backed my wife into the corner
and beat her life out. I am waiting for the scaffold; I am waiting."
"I am waiting," says another, "to slip into hell." On, on, it goes.
Say, let me summon the wifehood, and the motherhood, and the childhood
and see the tears rain down the upturned faces. People, tears are too
weak for that hellish business. Tears are only salty backwater that
well up at the bidding of an occult power, and I will tell you there
are 865,000 whisky orphan children in the United States, enough in the
world to belt the globe three times around, punctured at every fifth
point by a drunkard's widow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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