Billy Sunday. Ellis William T.

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СКАЧАТЬ it and never faze it." His own platform, on which he does amazing gymnastic stunts at every meeting, is made to withstand all shocks. About the walls of the tabernacle are fire extinguishers, and a squad of firemen and policemen are on duty with every audience.

      There is nothing about a Sunday tabernacle to suggest a cathedral. It is a big turtle-back barn of raw, unfinished timber, but it has been constructed for its special purpose, and every mechanical device is used to assist the speaker's voice. Sunday can make twenty-five thousand persons hear perfectly in one of his big tabernacles. A huge sounding board, more useful than beautiful, hangs like an inverted sugar scoop over the evangelist's platform.

      Behind the platform is the post office, to which the names of converts are sent for the city pastors every day; and here also are the telephones for the use of the press. Adjoining the tabernacle is a nursery for babies, and an emergency hospital with a nurse in attendance. It seems as if no detail of efficient service has been overlooked by this practical westerner. So well organized is everything that the collection can be taken in an audience of eight thousand persons within three minutes.

      While touching upon collections, this is as good a place as any to raise the point of Mr. Sunday's own compensation. He receives a free-will offering made on the last day. The offerings taken in the early weeks are to meet the expenses of the local committee. Mr. Sunday has nothing to do with this. This committee also pays approximately half of the expenses of his staff of workers, and it also provides a home for the Sunday party during their sojourn. Mr. Sunday himself pays the balance of the expenses of his workers out of the free-will offering which he receives on the last day. These gifts have reached large figures – forty-four thousand dollars in the Pittsburgh campaign.

      There is a quality in human nature which will not associate money with religion, and while we hear nobody grumble at a city's paying thousands of dollars a night for a grand opera performance; yet an evangelist who has sweetened up an entire city, lessened the police expense, promoted the general happiness and redeemed hundreds of thousands of lives from open sin to godliness, is accused of mercenariness, because those whom he has served give him a lavish offering as he departs.

      Although much criticized on the subject of money, Mr. Sunday steadfastly refuses to make answer to these strictures or to render an accounting, insisting that this is entirely a personal matter with him. Nobody who knows him doubts his personal generosity or his sense of stewardship. Intimate friends say that he tithes his income.

      Three important departments of the Sunday organization are the choir, the ushers, and the personal-work secretaries. Concerning the first more will be said in a later chapter. The ushers are by no means ornamental functionaries. They are a drilled regiment, each with his station of duty and all disciplined to meet any emergency that may arise. In addition to seating the people and taking the collection, they have the difficult task of assisting the officers to keep out the overflow crowds who try to press into the building that has been filled to its legal capacity. For it is quite a normal condition in the Sunday campaigns for thousands of persons to try to crowd their way into the tabernacle after the latter is full. Sometimes it takes foot-ball tactics to keep them out.

      Without the assistance of the personal-work secretaries the rush forward when the invitation is extended would mean a frantic mob. The recruits have to be formed into line and directed to the pulpit where they take Mr. Sunday's hand. Then they must be guided into the front benches and the name and address and church preference of each secured. While the invitation is being given personal workers all over the building are busy gathering converts. The magnitude of the Sunday evangelistic meetings in their results is revealed by the necessity for systematically handling the converts as vividly as by any other one factor.

      The tabernacle by no means houses all of the Sunday campaign. There are noon shop meetings, there are noon meetings for business women and luncheon meetings, there are services in the schools, in the jails, in the hospitals, and there are special afternoon parlor meetings where social leaders hear the same message that is given to the men of the street. In a phrase, the entire community is combed by personal activity in order to reach everybody with the Sunday evangelistic invitation.

      The personnel of the Sunday party has varied during the years. The first assistant was Fred G. Fischer, a soloist and choir leader who continued with the evangelist for eight years. At present the staff numbers about a dozen workers. Among past and present helpers have been Homer A. Rodeheaver, the chorister; Charles Butler, the soloist; Elijah J. Brown ("Ram's Horn" Brown); Fred. R. Seibert, an ex-cowboy and a graduate of the Moody School, who is the handy man of the tabernacle; Miss Frances Miller, Miss Grace Saxe, Miss Anna MacLaren, Mrs. Rae Muirhead, Rev. L. K. Peacock, B. D. Ackley, Albert G. Gill, Joseph Seipe, the builder, Mrs. and Mr. Asher and Rev. I. E. Honeywell. As the magnitude of the work increases this force is steadily augmented, so that the evangelist must not only be a prophet but a captain of industry.

      The Sunday Campaign clearly reveals that as Kipling's old engineer, McAndrew, says,

      "Ye'll understand, a man must think o' things."

      CHAPTER VIII

      "Speech – Seasoned with Salt"

      I want to preach the gospel so plainly that men can come from the factories and not have to bring along a dictionary. – Billy Sunday.

      Sunday is not a shepherd, but a soldier; not a husbandman of a vineyard, but a quarryman. The rôle he fills more nearly approximates that of the Baptist, or one of the Old Testament prophets, than any other Bible character. The word of the Lord that has come to him is not "Comfort ye! comfort ye!" but "Arouse ye! arouse ye!" and "Repent! repent!"

      Evangelist Sunday's mission is not conventional, nor may it be judged by conventional standards. He is not a pastor; probably he would be a failure in the pastorate. Neither would any sensible person expect pastors to resemble Billy Sunday; for that, too, would be a calamity.

      Taking a reasonable view of the case, what do we find? Here is a man whose clear work it is to attract the attention of the heedless to the claims of the gospel, to awaken a somnolent Church, and to call men to repentance. To do this a man must be sensational, just as John the Baptist was sensational – not to mention that Greater One who drew the multitudes by his wonderful works and by his unconventional speech.

      In the time of Jesus, as now, religion had become embalmed in petrified phrases. The forms of religious speech were set. But Christ's talk was not different from every-day speech. The language of spirituality, which once represented great living verities, had become so conventionalized that it slipped easily into cant and "shop talk." It is a fact which we scarcely like to admit that myriads of persons who attend church regularly do not expect really to understand what the preacher is talking about. They admire his "zeal" or "unction," but as for understanding him as clearly and definitely as they understand a neighbor talking over the back fence – that is not to be thought of.

      When God called this man whom the common people should hear gladly, he took him straight out of the walks of common life with no other vocabulary than that of ordinary "folks." We Americans use the most vivid language of any people. Our words are alive, new ones being born every hour. "Slang" we call these word pictures, and bar them from polite speech until the crowbar of custom has jimmied a way for them into the dictionary. And the most productive slang factory of our time is the realm of sports in which Sunday was trained.

      So he talks religion as he talked baseball. His words smack of the street corners, the shop, the athletic field, the crowd of men. That this speech is loose, extravagant and undignified may be freely granted: but it is understandable. Any kind of a fair play that will get the runners to the home plate is good baseball; and any speech that will puncture the shell of human nature's complacency and indifference to religion is good preaching. Neither John the Baptist nor Jesus was dignified, and highly correct Pharisees despised them as vulgarians; "but the common СКАЧАТЬ