"Lord, teach us to pray."
[CHAPTER XXIII]
The Revival on Trial
One spark of fire can do more to prove the power of powder than a whole library written on the subject.—Billy Sunday.
What Evangelist Sunday says to his congregations is sometimes less significant than what he helps his congregation to say to the world. Let us take a sample meeting in the Pittsburgh campaign, with the tremendous deliverance which it made upon the subject of revivals and conversions.
A "sea of faces" is a petrified phrase, which means nothing to most readers. Anybody who will stand on the platform behind Billy Sunday at one of his great tabernacles understands it. More than twenty thousand faces, all turned expectantly toward one man, confront you. The faces rather than the hair predominate. There are no hats in sight.
Like the billows along the shore, which may be observed in detail, the nearer reaches of this human sea are individualized. What a Madonna-face yonder girl has! See the muscles of that young man's jaw working, in the intensity of his interest. The old man who is straining forward, so as not to miss a word, has put a black and calloused hand behind his ear. That gray-haired woman with the lorgnette and rolls of false hair started out with the full consciousness that she was a "somebody": watch her wilt and become merely a tired, heart-hungry old woman. And the rows and rows of undistinguished commonplace people, just like the crowds we meet daily in the street cars.
Somehow, though, each seems here engaged in an individual transaction. A revival meeting accents personality. Twenty or thirty rows down the big congregation begins to blurr in appearance, and individual faces are merged in the mass. The host, which is but an agglomeration of individuals, is impressive. The "sea of faces" is more affecting than old ocean's expanse.
Where else may one so see "the people"; or fundamental human nature so expressing itself? One compares these crowds with the lesser throngs that followed Jesus when he walked the earth, and recalls that "greater works than these shall they do." There is a sermon in every aspect of the Billy Sunday meetings.
Curiously, people will reveal more of themselves, be more candid concerning their inner experiences, in a crowd than when taken one by one. Thus this congregation is a rare laboratory. Tonight the evangelist is going to make an experiment upon revivals and their value.