Although an ordained minister, in all of his twenty-seven years’ experience as an evangelist, Mr. Sunday has united but one couple in marriage. And that, he declares, he did very reluctantly.
In nearly every city where Billy has a campaign, he is besieged by young men and young women who want him to marry them. But Billy states that there is absolutely nothing doing in that line. He has performed his first and last marriage ceremony, and says he will stick to plain evangelism, and leave the marrying part to other ministers.
EVERY PALACE IS NOT A HOME.
“I have walked and ridden and driven over the hills and through the valleys and looked at your beautiful homes and your spacious lawns and your happy children; you can build your palaces and amass your fortunes; your sideboards can groan beneath the weight of gold and silver, cut glass and hand-painted china; and you can let your little ones play over your Brussels carpet or your Persian or Axminster rugs; and you can have a retinue of servants to wait upon you and do your bidding and satisfy your slightest desire; and you can loll upon your oriental divans and breathe the perfumed air and watch the sparkling water as it spurts from fountains; and you can look at your rare paintings and ransack Europe in order to find the masterpieces; and you can lie there with some one to fan you, and take your afternoon siesta; and you can sit and gormandize upon all the viands that the earth can produce; and your chef may be a Frenchman whose ability would command a princely fortune even in the homes of the crowned heads of Europe.
“But, after all, if you sit behind the tapestry and look out through the plate-glass and wait for the staggering reeking, vomiting, spewing, drink-soaked, drunken sot of a son, or you wait for the coming of the steps of a girl who has lost her virtue, I tell you, all that wealth can bring you will fly and you will think you are sitting in a sepulchre and the rich furniture will simply become the bones of other days and other faces, for nothing can make happy the father or the mother who has a drunken sot of a boy, as many of them have today, and nothing can make happy the father or the mother of a girl who has sold her womanhood for gain. And I tell you, not only should our homes be the center of all that is pure, but all that is cheerful and bright.”
DRAWING THE LINE ON CHRISTIANS.
Too many of you kneel at the communion table and then beat down the wages of your employes so their children go to bed hungry at night.
What God wants is workers and boosters; not knockers and iconoclasts.