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

by William T. Ellis

Mothers are always brave when the safety of their children is concerned.

"Don't give a Pug-nosed Bulldog the Love a Baby ought to be Getting."

This incident happened out West. A mother was working in a garden and the little one was sitting under a tree in the yard playing. The mother heard the child scream; she ran, and a huge snake was wrapping its coils about the baby, and as its head swung around she leaped and grabbed it by the neck and tore it from her baby and hurled it against a tree.

Fathers often give up. The old man often goes to boozing, becomes dissipated, takes a dose of poison and commits suicide; but the mother will stand by the home and keep the little band together if she has to manicure her finger nails over a washboard to do it. If men had half as much grit as the women there would be different stories written about a good many homes. Look at her work! It is the greatest in the world; in its far-reaching importance it is transcendently above everything in the universe—her task in molding hearts and lives and shaping character. If you want to find greatness don't go to the throne, go to the cradle; and the nearer you get to the cradle the nearer you get to greatness. Now, when Jesus wanted to give his disciples an impressive object lesson he called in a college professor, did he? Not much. He brought in a little child and said: "Except ye become as one of these, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of God." The work is so important that God will not trust anybody with it but a mother. The launching of a boy or a girl to live for Christ is greater work than the launching of a battleship.

Moses was a chosen vessel of the Lord and God wanted him to get the right kind of a start, so he gave him a good mother. There wasn't a college professor in all Egypt that God would trust with that baby! so he put the child back in its mother's arms. He knew the best one on earth to trust with that baby was its own mother. When God sends us great men he wants to have them get the right kind of a start. So he sees to it that they have a good mother. Most any old stick will do for a daddy. God is particular about the mothers.

Good Mothers Needed

And so the great need of this country, or any other country, is good mothers, and I believe we have more good mothers in America than any other nation on earth. If Washington's mother had been like a Happy Hooligan's mother, Washington would have been a Happy Hooligan.

Somebody has said: "God could not be everywhere, so he gave us mothers." Now there may be poetry in it, but it's true "that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world," and if every cradle was rocked by a good mother, the world would be full of good men, as sure as you breathe. If every boy and every girl today had a good mother, the saloons and disreputable houses would go out of business tomorrow.

A young man one time joined a church and the preacher asked him: "What was it I said that induced you to be a Christian?"