"If you haven't Jesus in the rooms you live in, it's because you don't want him," he says. "You're afraid of one of two things: you're afraid because of the things he'll throw out if he comes in, or you're afraid because of the things he'll bring with him if he comes in."
Here is how a great newspaper, the Philadelphia North American, characterizes the ethical and political effectiveness of Mr. Sunday:
Billy Sunday, derided by many as a sensational evangelist, has created a political revolution in Allegheny County. What years of reform work could not do he has wrought in a few short weeks. Old line "practical" politicians, the men who did the dirty work for the political gang, are now zealous for temperance, righteousness and religion.
Judges on the bench, grand dames of society, millionaire business men, in common with the great host of undistinguished men and women in homes, mills, offices, and shops, have been fired by this amazing prophet with burning zeal for practical religion.
An unexpected, unpredicted and unprecedented social force has been unleashed in our midst. Not to reckon with this is to be blind to the phase of Sunday's work which bulks larger than his picturesque vocabulary or his acrobatic earnestness.
In the presence of this man's work all attempts to classify religious activities as either "evangelistic" or "social service" fall into confusion.
Sunday could claim for himself that he's an evangelist, and an evangelist only. He repudiates a Christian program that is merely palliative or ameliorative. To his thinking the Church has more fundamental business than running soup kitchens or gymnasiums or oyster suppers. All his peerless powers of ridicule are frequently turned upon the frail and lonely oyster in the tureen of a money-making church supper.
Nevertheless, the results of Sunday's preaching are primarily social and ethical. He is a veritable besom of righteousness sweeping through a community. The wife who neglects her cooking, mending and home-making; the employer who does not deal squarely with his workers; the rich man who rents his property for low purposes or is tied up in crooked business in any wise; the workman who is not on "his job"; the gossip and the slanderer; the idle creatures of fashion; the Christian who is not a good person to live with, the selfish, the sour, the unbrotherly—all these find themselves under the devastating harrow of this flaming preacher's biting, burning, excoriating condemnation. "A scourge for morality" is the way one minister described him; he is that, and far more.
After the whole field of philanthropy and reform have been traversed it still remains true that the fundamental reform of all is the cleaning up of the lives and the lifting up of the ideals of the people. That is indisputably what Sunday does. He sweetens life and promotes a wholesome, friendly, helpful and cheerful state of mind on the part of those whom he influences.
Assuredly it is basic betterment to cause men to quit their drunkenness and lechery and profanity. All the white-slave or social-evil commissions that have ever met have done less to put a passion for purity into the minds of men and women than this one man's preaching has done. The safest communities in the country for young men and young women are those which have been through a Billy Sunday revival.
One cannot cease to exult at the fashion in which the evangelist makes the Gospel synonymous with clean living. All the considerations that weigh to lead persons to go forward to grasp the evangelist's hand, also operate to make them partisans of purity and probity.
Put into three terse phrases, Sunday's whole message is: "Quit your meanness. Confess Christ. Get busy for him among men." There are no finely spun spiritual sophistries in Sunday's preaching. He sometimes speaks quite rudely of that conception of a "higher spiritual life" which draws Christians apart from the world in a self-complacent consciousness of superiority.