"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message / With his own words which have won thousands for Christ

by William T. Ellis

Up in Chicago several years ago there was a long-continued strike and the last division of the union treasury had given each man twenty-five cents. A man went into the railroad yards and got a bag of coal from one of the cars. They pinched him and he came up before a judge. He told the judge that he had only the twenty-five cents of the last division and he spent that for food. His wife and two children were at home starving and he had no fire. He stole the coal to cook their food. The judge thundered, "Get out of this room and get home and build that fire as quickly as you can."

Say, boys, if I was on a jury and you could prove to me that a father had stolen a loaf of bread to keep his wife from starving you could keep me in the room until the ants took me out through the keyhole before I'd stick him. That may not be law, I don't know; but you'll find there is a big streak of human nature in Bill.

There isn't a fellow in this crowd but what would be disgusted if his wife or sister would cuss and hit the booze like he does. If she would put fifteen or twenty beers under her belt, he'd go whining around a divorce court for a divorce right away and say he couldn't live with her. Why, you dirty dog, she has to live with you.

I heard of a fellow whose wife thought she would show him how he sounded around the house and give him a dose of his own medicine. So one morning he came down and asked for his breakfast. "Why you old blankety, blank, blank, bald-headed, blankety, blankety, blank, you can get your own breakfast." He was horrified, but every time he tried to say anything she would bring out a bunch of lurid oaths until finally he said, "Wife, if you'll cut out that cussing I'll never swear again."

I have sometimes tried to imagine myself in Damascus on review day, and have seen a man riding on a horse richly caparisoned with trappings of gold and silver, and he himself clothed in garments of the finest fabrics, and the most costly, though with a face so sad and melancholy that it would cause the beholder to turn and look a second and third time. But he was a leper. And a man unaccustomed to such scenes might be heard to make a remark like this: "How unequally God seems to divide his favors! There is a man who rides and others walk; he is clothed in costly garments; they are almost naked while he is well fed," and they contrast the difference between the man on the horse and the others. If we only knew the breaking hearts of the people we envy we would pity them from the bottom of our souls.

I was being driven through a suburb of Chicago by a real estate man who wanted to sell me a lot. He was telling me who lived here and who lived there, and what an honor it would be for me and my children to possess a home there. We were driving past a house that must have cost $100,000 and he said: "That house is owned by Mr. So-and-So. He is one of our multi-millionaires, and he and his wife have been known to live in that house for months and never speak to each other. They each have separate apartments, each has a separate retinue of servants, each a dining-room and sleeping apartments, and months come and go by and they never speak to each other." My thoughts hurried back to the little flat we called our home, where we had lived for seventeen years. I have paid rent enough to pay for it. There wasn't much in it; I could load it in two furniture vans, maybe three, counting the piano, but I would not trade the happiness and the joy and the love of that little flat if I had to take that palatial home and the sorrow and the things that went with it.

Family Skeletons

Suppose you were driving along the street and a man who was intimately acquainted with the skeletons that are in every family, should tell you the secrets of them all, of that boy who has broken his father's heart by being a drunkard, a blackleg gambler, and that girl who has gone astray, and that wife who is a common drunkard, made so by society, and the father himself who is also a sinner.

Leprosy is exceedingly loathsome, and as I study its pathology I am not surprised that God used it as a type of sin. A man who is able to understand this disease, its beginning and its progress, might be approached by a man who was thus afflicted and might say to him, "Hurry! hurry! Show yourself to the priest for the cleansing of the Mosaic law."

"Why?" says the man addressed. "What is the trouble?" The other man would say, "Do hurry and show yourself to the priest." But the man says, "That is only a fester, only a water blister, only a pimple, nothing more. I say there is no occasion to be alarmed. You are unduly agitated and excited for my welfare."