Temperamentally a conservative, Sunday has taken the truth taught him by his earliest teachers and has adapted and paraphrased and modernized it. In the crucible of his intense personality this truth has become Sundayized. His discourses may have a variety of origin, but they all sound like Billy Sunday when he delivers them. A toilsome, painstaking worker, he has made elaborate notes of all his sermons, and these he takes with him in leather-bound black books to the platform and follows more or less closely as he speaks. No other man than himself could use these rough notes. Often he interjects into one sermon parts of another. He has about a hundred discourses at his command at present, and his supply is constantly growing. The early copies of Sunday's sermons were taken down more or less correctly in shorthand, and these have been reproduced in every city where he has gone: consequently they lack the tang and flavor of his present deliverances. He is alert to glean from all sources. In conversation one morning in Scranton I told him how on the previous day a lawyer friend had characterized a preacher with whom I had been talking by saying, "How much like a preacher he looks, and how little like a man." That afternoon Sunday used this in his sermon and twiddled it under his fingers for a minute or two, paraphrasing it in characteristic Sunday fashion. Doubtless it is now part of his permanent oratorical stock in trade. The absolute unconventionality of the man makes all this possible. He is not afraid of the most shocking presentation of truth. Thus when speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, he alluded to a professor who had criticized the doctrine of hell, saying, "That man will not be in hell five minutes before he knows better." Of course that thrust caught the students. A more discreet and diplomatic person than Sunday would not have dared to say this. The gospel preached by Sunday is the same that the Church has been teaching for hundreds of years. He knows no modifications. He is fiercely antagonistic to "modern" scholarship. He sits in God's judgment seat in almost every sermon and frequently sends men to hell by name. All this may be deplorable, but it is Sunday. The Bible which he uses is an interpreted and annotated edition by one of the most conservative of Bible teachers: this suits Sunday, for he is not of the temperament to be hospitable to new truths that may break forth from the living word. This state of mind leads him to be extravagant and intolerant in his statements. His hearers are patient with all of this because the body of his teachings is that held by all evangelical Christians. If he were less cock-sure he would not be Billy Sunday; the great mass of mankind want a religion of authority. After all, truth is intolerant.