"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
Although lacking technical literary training Sunday is not only a
master of living English and of terse, strong, vivid and gripping
phrase, but he is also capable of extraordinary flights of eloquence,
when he uses the chastest and most appropriate language. He has held
multitudes spell-bound with such passages as these:
God's Token of Love
"Down in Jacksonville, Florida, a man, Judge Owen, quarreled with
his betrothed and to try to forget, he went off and worked in a
yellow-fever hospital. Finally he caught the disease and had succumbed
to it. He had passed the critical stage of the disease, but he was
dying. One day his sweetheart met the physician on the street and asked
about the judge. 'He's sick,' he told her.
"'How bad?' she asked.
"'Well, he's passed the critical stage, but he is dying,' the doctor
told her.
"'But I don't understand,' she said, 'if he's passed the critical stage
why isn't he getting well?'
"'He's dying, of undying love for you, not the fever,' the doctor told
her. She asked him to come with her to a florist and he went and there
she purchased some smilax and intertwined lilacs and wrote on a card,
'With my love,' and signed her given name.
"The doctor went back to the hospital and his patient was tossing in
fitful slumber. He laid the flowers on his breast and he awoke and
saw the flowers and buried his head in them. 'Thanks for the flowers,
doctor,' he said, but the doctor said, 'They are not from me.'
"'Then who are they from?'
"'Guess!'
"'I can't; tell me.'
"'I think you'll find the name on the card,' the doctor told him, and
he looked and read the card, 'With my love.'
"'Tell me,' he cried, 'did she write that of her free will or did you
beg her to do it?' The doctor told him she had begged to do it herself.
"Then you ought to have seen him. The next day he was sitting up. The
next day he ate some gruel. The next day he was in a chair. The next
day he could hobble on crutches. The next day he threw one of them
away. The next day he threw the cane away and the next day he could
walk pretty well. On the ninth day there was a quiet wedding in the
annex of the hospital. You laugh; but listen: This old world is like
a hospital. Here are the wards for the libertines. Here are the wards
for the drunkards. Here are the wards for the blasphemers. Everywhere I
look I see scarred humanity.
"Nineteen hundred years ago God looked over the battlements of heaven
and he picked a basket of flowers, and then one day he dropped a baby
into the manger at Bethlehem. 'For God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on him should not perish
but have everlasting life.' What more can he do?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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