Your preachers would fight for Christ if some of you fossilated, antiquated old hypocrites didn't snort and snarl and whine.
A godless cowboy once went to a brown-stone church—with a high-toned preacher—I am a half-way house between the brown-stone church and the Salvation Army. They are both needed and so is the half-way house. Well, this fellow went to one of these brown-stone churches and after the preacher had finished the cowboy thought he had to go up and compliment the preacher, as he saw others doing, and so he sauntered down the aisle with his sombrero under his arm, his breeches stuck in his boots, a bandana handkerchief around his neck, his gun and bowie knife in his belt, and he walked over and said: "Hanged if I didn't fight shy of you fellows—but I'll tell you I sat here and listened to you for an hour and you monkeyed less with religion than any fellow I ever heard in my life." They have taken away the Lord and don't know where to find him.
You must remember that Jesus tells us to shine for God. The trouble with some people and preachers is that they try to shine rather than letting their light shine. Some preachers put such a big capital "I" in front of the cross that the sinner can't see Jesus. They want the glory. They would rather be a comet than stars of Bethlehem.
[CHAPTER XVII]
A Clean Man on Social Sins
There are a good many things worse than living and dying an old maid, and one of them is marrying the wrong man.—Billy Sunday.
Sunday's trumpet gives no uncertain sound on plain, every-day righteousness. He is like an Old Testament prophet in his passion for clean conduct. No phase of his work is more notable than the zeal for right living which he leaves behind him. His converts become partisans of purity.
Sunday's own mind is clean. He does not, as is sometimes the case, make his pleas for purity a real ministry of evil. In the guise of promoting purity he does not pander to pruriency. As outspoken as the Bible upon social sin, he yet leaves an impression so chaste that no father would hesitate to take his boy to the big men's meeting which Sunday holds in every campaign; and every woman who has once heard him talk to women would be glad to have her daughter hear him also.
The verdict of all Christians who have studied conditions in a community after one of the Sunday campaigns is that Sunday has been like a thunder storm that has cleared the moral atmosphere. Life is sweeter and safer and more beautiful for boys and girls after this man has dealt plainly with social sins and temptations. Of course, it is more important to clean up a neighborhood's mind than its streets.
Even in cold print one may feel somewhat of the power of the man's message on "The Moral Leper."