All of which proves the popular interest in vital, contemporaneous religion. Men's ears are dulled by the "shop talk" of the pulpit. They are weary of the worn platitudes of professional piety. Nobody cares for the language of Canaan, in which many ministers, with reverence for the dead past, have tried to enswathe the living truths of the Gospel, as if they were mummies. In the colloquial tongue of the common people, Jesus first proclaimed his gospel, and "the common people heard him gladly," although many of the learned and aristocratic ecclesiastics of his day were scandalized by his free and popular way of putting things, by his "common" stories, and by his disregard for the precedents of the schools. Whatever else may be said about Billy Sunday's much-discussed forms of speech, this point is clear, and denied by nobody: he makes himself and his message clearly understood by all classes of people. However much one may disagree with him, nobody fails to catch his meaning. He harnesses the common words of the street up to the chariot of divine truth. Every-day folk, the uncritical, unscholarly crowd of us, find no fault with the fact that Sunday uses the same sort of terms that we do. In fresh, vigorous, gripping style, he makes his message unmistakable. College students like him as much as do the farmers and mechanics. In a single day's work at the University of Pennsylvania, when thousands of students crowded his meetings, and gave reverent, absorbed attention to his message, several hundred of them openly dedicated their lives to Christ, and in token thereof publicly grasped his hand. Dr. John R. Mott, the world's greatest student leader, once said to me, in commenting upon Sunday: "You cannot fool a great body of students. They get a man's measure. If he is genuine, they know it, and if he is not, they quickly find it out. Their devotion to Mr. Sunday is very significant." [Illustration: "GOD LIKES A LITTLE HUMOR, AS EVIDENCED BY THE FACT THAT HE MADE THE MONKEY, THE PARROT--AND SOME OF YOU PEOPLE."]