The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion volume,

The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our Rights ...

It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare

A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible!

—The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark,

And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning,

And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions,

In spite of learned unbelief,—we hold it all plain truth:

Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study;

Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and Colenso ...

The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian nation ...

The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square,

The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws ...

Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salvation.

One of Billy Sunday’s boasts is that the liquor interests hate him. “That dirty, stinking bunch of moral assassins hires men to sit in the audience to hear me, to write down what I say and then try to find some author who said something like it, and accuse me of having stolen my ideas. I know that $30,000 was offered a man in New York City to write a series of articles attacking me. All right; if you know anything about me that you want to publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is a dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole thing is a frame-up from A to Izzard. I’ll fight them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a pair of skates. By the grace of God, I’ve helped to make Colorado and Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice on the dirty gang that I’ll help to make the whole nation dry.” (New York Times, April 19th, 1917.)

Assuming these points to be well taken, there is still great room to doubt the deep religious effect of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like William Allen White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf in Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many hundred human beings for moral stimulus in a time of need. In spite of the thousands who have hit the sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that more than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously affected by him. The great majority of those who hit the trail are people who merely want to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of seriousness or “conversion.” The atmosphere of the tabernacle, bright with electric light and friendly with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is seldom a contagious note. His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a remarkable public entertainer, and much that he says has keen humor and verbal art and horse sense. But for all his militancy, for all his pugnacious vociferation, he leaves an impression of being at once violent and incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but not a guide or a friend.

Still, as between Billy Sunday’s gymnastics and the average oyster soup, Messrs. Wanamaker and Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday. Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of carpets and socks, Socony and Nujol, and if Christ could have been put over in the same way, by live-wire salesmanship, Billy was the man.

FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET

I

“Though you do not know it, I have a soul. Behold, across the way, my library. When the night shrouds those lions and the fresh young trees shake out their greenery against the white stonework, do you not catch a suggestion of atmosphere, something of a mood? And the black cliffs around, with the janitress lights making jeweled bars the width of them, are they not monuments? I cleave brilliantly, up and down this dormant city. It is for you, late wayfarer. Pay no heed to the plodding milk-wagon or the hatless young maiden speeding her lover’s motor. Heed my long silences, my slim tall darknesses. My human tide has ebbed. My buildings come about me to muse and to commune. Receive, for once on Fifth Avenue, the soul that is imprisoned in my stone and steel.”

It is not for the respectable, this polite communication. Theatre and club and restaurant have long since disgorged these. New York has masticated their money. They have done as they should and are restored uptown. Even the old newswoman, she who had spent starving months in the Russian woods, caught in the first eddies of the war, she has tottered from her stand down by the station. The Hungarian waiter in Childs’ is still there, still assuaging the deep nocturnal need for buckwheat cakes, but that is off the avenue. It is three, the avenue is nearly empty. It is ready to disclose its soul.

But before this subtle performance there is a preliminary. It is a very self-respecting avenue and at three on a pleasant morning, when no one is around to disturb it, it proceeds to take its bath. Perhaps a few motors go by—a taxi rolling north, heavy with night thoughts, a tired white face framed in its black depth; or a Wanamaker truck clanking loosely home in the other direction, delivered of its suburban chores. The Italian acolytes are impartial. They spray the wheels of a touring car with gusto, ignored by its linked lovers, or drive a powerful stream under the hubs of a Nassau News wagon trundling to a train. The avenue must be refreshed, the brave green of the library trees nodding approval, the sparrows expecting it. It must be prepared for the sun, under bold lamps and timid stars.

A fine young morning, the watchman promises. A bit of wind whiffles the water that is shot out from the white-wing’s hose, but it is clearing up above and looks well for the day. The hour beckons memories for the watchman—fine young mornings he used to have long ago, in Ireland, a boy on his first adventure and he driving with the barley to Ross.