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

by William T. Ellis

Such passages as this show the uncompromising loyalty of Sunday to the Bible:

"Here is a book, God's Word, that I will put up against all the books of all the ages. You can't improve on the Bible. You can take all the histories of all the nations of all the ages and cut out of them all that is ennobling, all that is inspiring, and compile that into a common book, but you cannot produce a work that will touch the hem of the garment of the Book I hold in my hand. It is said, 'Why cannot we improve on the Bible? We have advanced everything else.' No, sir. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Word shall not.' And so this old Book, which is the Word of God, the Word of Jesus Christ, is the book I intend to preach by everywhere. The religion that has withstood the sophistry and the criticism of the ages, the sarcasm of Voltaire, the irony of Hume, the blasphemy of Ingersoll, the astronomer's telescope, the archæologist's spade and the physician's scalpel—they have all tried to prove the Bible false, but the old Book is too tough for the tooth of time, and she stands triumphant over the grave of all that have railed upon her. God Almighty is still on the job. Some people act as though they had sent for the undertaker to come to embalm God and bury him. But it is the truth; it is not an accident that places the Christian nations in the forefront of the world's battles. It is something more than race, color, climate, that causes the difference between the people that dwell on the banks of the Congo and those in this valley. The scale of civilization always ascends the line of religion; the highest civilization always goes hand in hand with the purest religion."

Rigid as he is in literal interpretation of the Bible, Sunday is celebrated for his paraphrases of favorite passages, a recasting of the familiar form of words into the speech of the day. Some of these "slang versions" of the old Book make one gasp; but generally the evangelist gets the innermost meaning of the Book itself. He is not an interpreter of the Bible but a popularizer of it. He does not expound the Scripture as much as he pounds in the Scripture. The Bible and its place in the life of the Christian are often on the Evangelist's lips.

Here, for instance, is his interpretation of the story of David and Goliath:

"All of the sons of Jesse except David went off to war; they left David at home because he was only a kid. After a while David's ma got worried. She wondered what had become of his brothers, because they hadn't telephoned to her or sent word. So she said to David, 'Dave, you go down there and see whether they are all right.'

"So David pikes off to where the war is, and the first morning he was there out comes this big Goliath, a big, strapping fellow about eleven feet tall, who commenced to shoot off his mouth as to what he was going to do.

"'Who's that big stiff putting up that game of talk?' asked David of his brothers.

"'Oh, he's the whole works; he's the head cheese of the Philistines. He does that little stunt every day.'

"'Say,' said David, 'you guys make me sick. Why don't some of you go out and soak that guy? You let him get away with that stuff.' He decided to go out and tell Goliath where to head in.

"So Saul said, 'You'd better take my armor and sword.' David put them on, but he felt like a fellow with a hand-me-down suit about four times too big for him, so he took them off and went down to the brook and picked up a half dozen stones. He put one of them in his sling, threw it, and soaked Goliath in the coco between the lamps, and he went down for the count. David drew his sword and chopped off his block, and the rest of the gang beat it."