Billy Sunday succeeded in moving the city of Pittsburgh from one end to the other. That, to my mind, was the greatest result of the meetings. It is easy to talk about religion now in Pittsburgh. Men especially are thinking of it as never before, and the great majority are no longer in the middle of the road. They are on one side or the other. I never knew a man who could speak to men with such telling effect as Billy Sunday. I covet his ability to make men listen to him.
It was necessary in my own church, which when packed, holds 3200 persons, to hold special meetings for different groups, such as lawyers, doctors, bankers, etc., and they were always crowded. In the big tabernacle, which was built for the campaign and holds more than 20,000 persons, the men from the big steel shops, after the second week, came in bodies of from one to three thousand, in many cases headed by their leading officers.
Dr. Alexander said that up to the time of this address the Sunday campaign had added 419 members to his own church.
One of the striking consequences of the Sunday campaign in Scranton was the development of the "Garage Bible Class." This was originally a Wilkes-Barre poker club. As the story was told by Mr. William Atherton, a Wilkes-Barre attorney, to the same New York meeting that Dr. Alexander addressed, the Garage Bible Class was originally a group of wealthy men meeting at different homes every week for a poker game. One man bet a friend fifteen dollars that he wouldn't go to hear Billy Sunday. One by one, however, the men found themselves unable to resist the lure of the Tabernacle. As a result the poker club was abandoned, and in a garage belonging to one of the men they organized a Bible class which now has about a hundred members. They have adopted a rule that no Christian shall be added to their ranks. They make their own Christians out of the unconverted.
From this episode one gets some conception of the tug and pull of the Sunday Tabernacle. The temptation to attend becomes well nigh irresistible. All the streams of the community life flow toward the great edifice where the baseball evangelist enunciates his simple message. A writer in The Churchman said, following the Pittsburgh campaign:
This evangelist made religion a subject of ordinary conversation. People talked about their souls as freely as about their breakfast. He went into the homes of the rich, dropped his wildness of speech, and made society women cry with shame and contrition. One's eternal welfare became the topic of the dinner table, not only in the slums but in the houses of fashion. It sounds incredible, and it is not a fact to be grasped by the mere reading of it, but the citizens of Pittsburgh forgot to be ashamed to mention prayer and forgiveness of sin; the name of Christ began to be used with simpleness and readiness and reverence by men who, two months ago, employed it only as a by-word. City politicians came forward in the meeting and asked for prayer. The daily newspapers gave more space to salvation than they did to scandal, not for one day, but for day after day and week after week. As a mere spectacle of a whole modern city enthralled by the Gospel it was astonishing, unbelievable, unprecedented, prodigious.
Because he preaches both to employers and to employed, Sunday is able to apply the healing salt of the gospel at the point of contact between the two. From Columbus it is reported that a number of business men voluntarily increased the wages of their helpers, especially the women, because of the evangelist's utterances.
A horse jockey out West reached the core of the matter when he said to a friend of mine concerning Billy Sunday, "He sets people to thinking about other people." There you have the genesis and genius and goal of social service. No other force that operates among men is equal to the inspirations and inhibitions of the Christian religion in the minds of individuals. The greatest service that can be done to any community is to set a considerable proportion of its people to endeavoring honestly to live out the ideals of Jesus Christ.
It is simply impossible to enumerate anything like a representative number of incidents of the community value of Billy Sunday's work. They come from every angle and in the most unexpected ways. A banker, who is not a member of any church, showed me the other day a letter he had received from a man who had defrauded him out of a small sum of money years before. The banker had never known anything about the matter and did not recall the man's name. What did amaze him, and set him to showing the letter to all of his friends, was this man's restitution, accompanied by an outspoken testimony to his new discipleship to Jesus Christ, upon which he had entered at the inspiration of Billy Sunday.
The imagination is stirred by a contemplation of what these individual cases of regeneration imply. Consider the homes reunited; consider the happy firesides that once were the scene of misery; measure, if you can, the new joy that has come to tens of thousands of lives in the knowledge that they have given themselves unreservedly to the service of Jesus Christ.
The dramatic, human side of it strikes one ever and anon. I chanced to see a young man "hit the trail" at Scranton whose outreachings I had later opportunity to follow. The young man is the only son of his parents and the hope of two converging family lines. Grandparents and parents, uncles and aunts, have pinned all of their expectations on this one young man. He was a youth of parts and of force and a personality in the community. When, on the night of which I write, he came forward up the "sawdust trail" to grasp the evangelist's hand, his aged grandfather and his mother wept tears of joy. The grandfather himself also "hit the trail" at the Scranton meetings and has since spent his time largely in Christian work. It is impossible to say how this young man's future might have spelled sorrow or joy for the family circle that had concentrated their hopes on him. But now it is clear that his conversion has brought to them all a boon such as money could not have bought nor kings conferred.