The stuff of which the young man's moral character was made is revealed by the fact that he deliberately rejected a $500-a-month baseball contract in order to serve Christ at a personal sacrifice. This incident reveals the real temper of Sunday, and is to be borne in mind when discussion is raised concerning the large offerings which are made to him now in his successful evangelistic work. That act was not the deed of a money-loving man. If it does not spell consecration, it is difficult to define what it does mean.
Doubtless there were many who thought this ending of a conspicuous baseball career an anti-climax, even as the flight of Moses into the wilderness of Sinai apparently spelled defeat. Out of such defeats and sacrifices as these grow the victories that best serve the world and most honor God.
[CHAPTER IV]
A Curbstone Recruit
You've got to sign your own Declaration of Independence before you can celebrate your Fourth of July victory.—Billy Sunday.
Nobody this side of heaven can tell to whom the credit belongs for any great life or great work. But we may be reasonably sure that the unsung and unknown women of the earth have a large part in every achievement worth while.
Mrs. Clark, saintly wife of Colonel Clark, the devoted founder of the Pacific Garden Rescue Mission in Chicago, is one of that host of women who, like the few who followed Jesus in his earthly ministry, have served in lowly, inconspicuous ways, doing small tasks from a great love. Night after night, with a consecration which never flagged, she labored in the gospel for a motley crowd of men and women, mostly society's flotsam and jetsam, many of whom found this hospitable building the last fort this side of destruction.
A single visit to a down-town rescue mission is romantic, picturesque and somewhat of an adventure—a sort of sanctified slumming trip. Far different is it to spend night after night, regardless of weather or personal feelings, in coming to close grips with sin-sodden men and women, many of them the devil's refuse. A sickening share of the number are merely seeking shelter or lodging or food: sin's wages are not sufficient to live upon, and they turn to the mercy of Christianity for succor. Never to be cast down by unworthiness or ingratitude, to keep a heart of hope in face of successive failures, and to rejoice with a shepherd's joy over the one rescued—this is the spirit of the consecrated rescue-mission worker.
Such a woman was Mrs. Clark, the spiritual mother to a multitude of redeemed men. Of all the trophies which she has laid at the feet of her Lord, the redemption of Billy Sunday seems to human eyes the brightest. For it was this woman who persuaded him to accept Christ as his Saviour: he whose hand has led perhaps a quarter of a million persons to the foot of the Cross was himself led thither by this saintly woman.
When we contemplate the relation of that one humble rescue mission in Chicago, the monument of a business man's consecration to Christ, to the scores of Sunday Tabernacles over the land; and when we connect the streams of penitents on the "sawdust trail" with that one young man of twenty-five going forward up the aisle of the rude mission room, we realize afresh that God uses many workers to carry on his one work; and that though Paul may plant and Apollos water, it is God alone who giveth the increase.