"'Yes, I'll come tonight.'
"I said: 'All right, the Lord bless you and I will pray for you.' He came; the seats were all filled and they crowded him down the side aisle. I can see him now standing there, with his hat in his hand, leaning against the wall looking at me. He never took his eyes off me. When I got through and gave the invitation he never waited for them to let him out. He walked over the backs of the seats, took his stand for Jesus Christ, and in less than a week seventy-eight men followed him into the kingdom of God. They elected that man chairman of the civic federation and he cleaned the town up for Jesus Christ and has led the hosts of righteousness from then until now. Men do care to talk about Jesus Christ and about their souls. 'No man cares for my soul.' That's what's the trouble. They are anxious and waiting for some one to come."
[CHAPTER XV]
Giving the Devil His Due
I know there is a devil for two reasons; first, the Bible declares it; and second I have done business with him.—Billy Sunday.
The Prince of Darkness was no more real to Martin Luther, when he flung his ink-well at the devil, than he is to Billy Sunday. He seems never long out of the evangelist's thought. Sunday regards him as his most personal and individual foe. Scarcely a day passes that he does not direct his attention publicly to the devil. He addresses him and defies him, and he cites Satan as a sufficient explanation for most of the world's afflictions.
There are many delicate shadings and degrees and differentiations in theology—but Billy Sunday does not know them. He never speaks in semitones, nor thinks in a nebulous way. His mind and his word are at one with his baseball skill—a swift, straight passage between two points. With him men are either sheep or goats; there are no hybrids. Their destination is heaven or hell, and their master is God or the devil.
He believes in the devil firmly, picturesquely; and fights him without fear. His characterizations of the devil are hair-raising. As a matter of fact it is far easier for the average man, close down to the ruck and red realities of life, to believe in the devil, whose work he well knows, than it is for the cloistered man of books. The mass of the people think in the same sort of strong, large, elemental terms as Billy Sunday. The niceties of language do not bother them; they are the makers and users of that fluid speech called slang.
William A. Sunday is an elemental. Sophistication would spoil him. He is dead sure of a few truths of first magnitude. He believes without reservation or qualification in the Christ who saved him and reversed his life's direction. Upon this theme he has preached to millions. Also he is sure that there is a devil, and he rather delights in telling old Satan out loud what he thinks of him. Meanness, in Satan, sinner or saint, he hates and says so in the language of the street, which the common people understand. He usually perturbs some fastidious folk who think that literary culture and religion are essentially interwoven.
Excoriation of the devil is not Sunday's masterpiece. He reaches his height in exaltation of Jesus Christ. He is surer of his Lord than he is of the devil. It is his bed-rock belief that Jesus can save anybody, from the gutter bum to the soul-calloused, wealthy man of the world, and make them both new creatures. With heart tenderness and really yearning love he holds aloft the Crucified as the world's only hope. That is why his gospel breaks hearts of stone and makes Bible-studying, praying church workers out of strange assortments of humanity.