Fourth—Do you practice what you preach?
That's fair. Well, for the first. God knows I am kindly disposed toward you. Second, God knows I would do anything in my power to help you be a better man. I want to make it easier for you to be square, and harder for you to go to hell. Third, I know what I'm talking about, for I have the Bible to back me up in parts and the statements of eminent physicians in other parts. And fourth, "Do I practice what I preach?" I will defy and challenge any man or woman on earth, and I'll look any man in the eye and challenge him, in the twenty-seven years I have been a professing Christian, to show anything against me. If I don't live what I preach, gentlemen, I'll leave the pulpit and never walk back here again. I live as I preach and I defy the dirty dogs who have insulted me and my wife and spread black-hearted lies and vilifications.
I was born and bred on a farm and at the age of eleven I held my place with men in the harvest field. When I was only nine years old I milked ten cows every morning. I know what hard knocks are. I have seen the seamy side of life. I have crawled out of the sewers and squalor and want. I have struggled ever since I was six years old, an orphan son of a dead soldier, up to this pulpit this afternoon. I know what it is to go to bed with an honest dollar in my overalls pocket, when the Goddess of Liberty became a Jenny Lind and the eagle on the other side became a nightingale and they'd sing a poor, homeless orphan boy to sleep. I'm not here to explode hot air and theories to you.
Some men here in town, if their wives asked them if they were coming down here, would say: "Oh no, I don't want to go anywhere I can't take you, dear." The dirty old dogs, they've been many a place they wouldn't take their wife and they wouldn't even let her know they were there.
If sin weren't so deceitful it wouldn't be so attractive. The effects get stronger and stronger while you get weaker and weaker all the time, and there is less chance of breaking away.
Many think a Christian has to be a sort of dish-rag proposition, a wishy-washy, sissified sort of a galoot that lets everybody make a doormat out of him. Let me tell you the manliest man is the man who will acknowledge Jesus Christ.
Christian Character
Christianity is the capital on which you build your character. Don't you let the devil fool you. You never become a man until you become a Christian. Christianity is the capital on which you do business. It's your character that gets you anything. Your reputation is what people say about you, but your character is what God and your wife and the angels know about you. Many have reputations of being good, but their characters would make a black mark on a piece of coal or tarred paper.
I was over in Terre Haute, Indiana, not long ago, and I was in a bank there admiring the beauty of it when the vice-president, Mr. McCormick, a friend of mine, said: "Bill, you haven't seen the vault yet," and he opened up the vaults there, carefully contrived against burglars, and let me in. There were three, and I wandered from one to another. No one watched me. I could have filled my pockets with gold or silver, but no one watched me. Why did they trust me? Because they knew I was preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and living up to it. That's why they trusted me. There was a time in my life when a man wouldn't trust me with a yellow dog on a corner fifteen minutes.
Before I was converted I could go five rounds so fast you couldn't see me for the dust, and I'm still pretty handy with my dukes and I can still deliver the goods with all express charges prepaid. Before I was converted I could run one hundred yards in ten seconds and circle the bases in fourteen seconds, and I could run just as fast after I was converted. So you don't have to be a dish-rag proposition at all.