Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certain rich young man, perhaps a thousand times as rich as any that lived in Palestine. This young man came to Billy and said: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" And Billy told him to keep the commandments—"Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother." The young man answered; "All these have I kept [211] from my youth up." And Billy said: "Yet lackest thou one thing; sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come follow me." And when he heard this he was very sorrowful, for he was very rich.
—No, I have got the story mixed up. That is what happened in Palestine. What happened in New York is that Billy said, "I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Rockefeller." And Mr. Rockefeller said, "Come be my guest at my palace in the Pocantico Hills; and then we will go together and you may preach submission to my wage-slaves in the oil-factories at Bayonne and elsewhere." And Billy went to the palace, and went and preached to the wage-slaves, telling them to beware the "stinking Socialists", and to concentrate their attention on the saving of their souls; so the rich young man was delighted, and he sent for all the newspaper reporters to come to his office at 26 Broadway, and told them what a great and useful man Billy Sunday is. As the New York "Times" tells about it:
Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviews and certainly he has never been charged with having an excess of verbally expressed enthusiasm on any subject. But he talked for an hour and a half about the evangelist. He was full of the subject of Billy Sunday. "Billy did New York a lot of good," he said. He went on to tell of 187 meetings held in 100 different factories, attended by 50,000 men. "That's good work." And he expressed his satisfaction with Sunday's theology: "He believes the Bible from cover to cover and that is good enough for me." The Sunday campaign had cost $200,000, and "If it had stopped here, if it was not kept up, it would be poor business; a poor dividend on the $200,000 and the work invested. But we expect to get dividends in the next year."
Again you note the symbolism of the counting-house! [212]
Rhetorical Black-hanging
It is the duty of the clergy, not merely to defend large-scale merchants while they live, but to bury them when they die, and to place the seal of sanctity upon their careers. Concerning this aspect of Bootstrap-lifting I quote the opinion of an earnest hater of shams, William Makepeace Thackeray:
I think the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is the most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies—all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous Threnodies which have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hanging....
And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but to kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall Street. Leland Stanford, son of a great king of Western railroads, died; and standing over his coffin, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop, preached a sermon of fulsome flattery, wherein he likened young Leland to the boy Christ. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly reward in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout his lifetime a notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew Stanley Quay was his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical connections, was free to state the facts about him:
He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press, got his grip on the public service, including even the courts; imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon the last three Presidents—making the latter provide for the offal of his political machine, which even Pennsylvania could no longer stomach—and [213] all without identifying his name with a single measure of public good, without making a speech or uttering a party watchword, without even pretending to be honest, but solely because, like Judas, he carried the bag and could buy whom he would.
Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was expressed by a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend Dr. J.S. Ramsey, who stood over the coffin of "Matt", and without cracking a smile declared that he had been "a statesman who was always on the right side of every moral question!"