Billy Sunday

The second point is that the most vigorous speech is used earliest in an evangelistic campaign. That is one way of stirring up the Church, and of attracting attention to the meetings. Sunday goads Christians to an interest. Apparently he purposely speaks to arouse resentment, if no other form of interest is awakened in his hearers. The latter part of a Sunday campaign is singularly free from his denunciations, from his invective and from his slang. There is a clear method in his procedure, which is always followed in about the same course.

Sunday would be the last man to expect everybody to approve all that he says, either in form or in substance. I don't; and I know no other thinking observer of his meetings who does. No more do I expect him to approve all that is said in this book. Nevertheless, there remains the unanswerable rejoinder to all criticism of Evangelist Sunday's utterances and message: he "delivers the goods." He does arouse communities to an interest in religion as no other preacher of our generation. He helps people "get right with God." His campaigns promote righteousness, diminish wickedness and strengthen the Church.

As samples of the pungent sort of speech with which Sunday's discourses are flavored I have selected these shakings from his salt-cellar:

Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.

You can find anything in the average church today, from a humming bird to a turkey buzzard.

The Lord is not compelled to use theologians. He can take snakes, sticks or anything else, and use them for the advancement of his cause.

The Lord may have to pile a coffin on your back before he can get you to bend it.

Don't throw your ticket away when the train goes into a tunnel. It will come out the other side.

The safest pilot is not the fellow that wears the biggest hat, but the man who knows the channels.

If a man goes to hell he ought to be there, or he wouldn't be there.

I am preaching for the age in which I live. I am just recasting my vocabulary to suit the people of my age instead of Joshua's age.

The Church gives the people what they need; the theater gives them what they want.

Death-bed repentance is burning the candle of life in the service of the devil, and then blowing the smoke into the face of God.

Your reputation is what people say about you. Your character is what God and your wife know about you.

When your heart is breaking you don't want the dancing master or saloon-keeper. No, you want the preacher.

Don't you know that every bad man in a community strengthens the devil's mortgage?

Pilate washed his hands. If he had washed his old black heart he would have been all right.

It takes a big man to see other people succeed without raising a howl.

It's everybody's business how you live.

Bring your repentance down to a spot-cash basis.

I believe that cards and dancing are doing more to dam the spiritual life of the Church than the grog-shops – though you can't accuse me of being a friend of that stinking, dirty, rotten, hell-soaked business.

If you took no more care of yourself physically than spiritually, you'd be just as dried up physically as you are spiritually.

We place too much reliance upon preaching and upon singing, and too little on the living of those who sit in the pews.

The carpet in front of the mirrors of some of you people is worn threadbare, while at the side of your bed where you should kneel in prayer it is as good as the day you put it down.

Some persons think they have to look like a hedgehog to be pious.

Look into the preaching Jesus did and you will find it was aimed straight at the big sinners on the front seats.

If you live wrong you can't die right.

"You are weighed in the balance" – but not by Bradstreet's or Dun's – you are weighed in God's balance.

A revival gives the Church a little digitalis instead of an opiate.

It isn't the sawdust trail that brings you to Christ, it's the Christ that is in the trail, the Christ that is in your public confession of sins.

Some sermons instead of being a bugle call for service, are nothing more than showers of spiritual cocaine.

Theology bears the same relation to Christianity that botany does to flowers.

Morality isn't the light; it is only the polish on the candlestick.

Some homes need a hickory switch a good deal more than they do a piano.

Churches don't need new members half so much as they need the old bunch made over.

God's work is too often side-tracked, while social, business and domestic arrangements are thundering through on the main line.

A lot of people, from the way they live, make you think they've got a ticket to heaven on a Pullman parlor car and have ordered the porter to wake 'em up when they get there. But they'll get side-tracked almost before they've started.

I believe that a long step toward public morality will have been taken when sins are called by their right names.

The bars of the Church are so low that any old hog with two or three suits of clothes and a bank roll can crawl through.

You will not have power until there is nothing questionable in your life.

You can't measure manhood with a tape line around the biceps.

The social life is the reflex of the home life.

There are some so-called Christian homes today with books on the shelves of the library that have no more business there than a rattler crawling about on the floor, or poison within the child's reach.

Home is the place we love best and grumble the most.

I don't believe there are devils enough in hell to pull a boy out of the arms of a godly mother.

To train a boy in the way he should go you must go that way yourself.

The man who lives for himself alone will be the sole mourner at his own funeral.

Don't try to cover up the cussedness of your life, but get fixed up.

Wrong company soon makes everything else wrong. An angel would never be able to get back to heaven again if he came down here for a week and put in his time going with company that some church members would consider good.

The devil often grinds the axe with which God hews.