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

by William T. Ellis

You mothers are worse fools to encourage your daughter to marry some old lobster because his father has money and when he dies, maybe your daughter can have good clothes and ride in an auto instead of hoofing it. Look at the girls on the auction block today. Look at the awful battle the average stenographer and average clerk has to fight. You cannot work for six dollars a week and wear fine duds and be on the square as much as you are without having the people suspicious.

In a letter to Miss Borson, President Roosevelt said: "The man or woman who avoids marriage and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow as to dislike having children is, in fact, a criminal."

Is it well with thee? Is it well with your husband? "The best man in the world," you answer. Very well; is it well with the child? I think its responsibilities are equal, if they don't outweigh its privileges, and when God is in the heart of the child, I don't wonder that that home is a haven of peace and rest.

I have no motive in preaching except the interest I have in the moral welfare of the people. There is not money enough to hire me to preach. I tell you, ladies, we have to do something more than wipe our eyes, and blow our nose, and say "Come to Jesus." Go out and shell the woods and make them let you know why they don't "come to Jesus."

I believe the time will come when sex hygiene will form part of the high-school curriculum. I would rather have my children taught sex hygiene than Greek and Latin. A lot of the high-school curriculum is mere fad. I think the time will come when our girls will be taught in classes with some graduated woman physician for an instructor.

Women live on a higher plane, morally, than men. No woman was ever ruined that some brute of a man did not take the initiative. Women have kept themselves purer than men. I believe a good woman is the best thing this side of heaven and a bad woman the worst thing this side of hell. I think woman rises higher and sinks lower than man. I think she is the most degraded on earth or the purest on earth.

Our homes are on the level with women. Towns are on the level with homes. What women are our homes will be; and what the town is, the men will be, so you hold the destiny of the nation.

I believe there is something unfinished in the make-up of a girl who does not have religion. The average girl today no longer looks forward to motherhood as the crowning glory of womanhood. She is turning her home into a gambling shop and a social beer-and-champagne-drinking joint, and her society is made up of poker players, champagne, wine and beer drinkers, grass-widowers and jilted jades and slander-mongers—that comprises the society of many a girl today. She is becoming a matinee-gadder and fudge-eater.

The Girl Who Flirts

I wish I could make a girl that flirts see herself as others see her. If you make eyes at a man on the street he will pay you back. It doesn't mean that you are pretty. It means that if you don't care any more for yourself than that why should he? The average man will take a girl at her personal estimate of herself.