"Say, boys," he demanded, leaning so far over the platform it seemed he must have fallen, "are you fellows willing to slap Jesus Christ in the face in order to have some one come up and slap you on the back and say you are a good fellow and a dead-game sport? That is the surest way to lose out in life. I am giving you the experience of a life that knows.
"Pilate had his chance and he missed it. His name rings down through the ages in scorn and contempt because he had not the courage to stand up for his convictions and Jesus Christ. Aren't you boys doing the same thing? You are convinced that Jesus Christ is the son of God, but you are afraid of the horse-laugh the boys will give you.
"God will have nothing to do with you unless you are willing to keep clean," he said. "Some people think they are not good enough to go to heaven and not bad enough to go to hell, and that God is too good to send them to hell, so they fix up a little religion of their own. God isn't keeping any half-way house for any one. The man who believes in that will change his theology before he has been in hell five minutes.
"There's just one enemy that keeps every one from accepting Christ, and that is your stubborn, miserable will power. You are not men enough to come clean for Jesus.
"I don't care whether you have brains enough to fill a hogshead or little enough to fill a thimble, you are up against this proposition: You must begin to measure Christ by the rules of God instead of the rules of men. Put him in the God class instead of in the man class; judge Christ by his task and the work he performed, and see if he was only a man."
The University of Pennsylvania would be turning out bigger men than Jesus Christ, he said, if Christ were not the son of God. The conditions and the opportunities are so much greater in these days, he showed, that a real superman should be the product of our day if education, society, business, politics and these varied interests could produce such a thing.
"Jesus Christ is just as well known today as old Cleopatra, the flat-nosed enchantress of the Nile, was known hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
"Don't swell up like a poisoned pup and say that 'it doesn't meet with my stupendous intellectual conception of what God intended should be understood.' God should have waited until you were born and then called you into counsel, I suppose. Say, fellows, I don't like to think that there are any four-flushing, excess-baggage, lackadaisical fools like that alive today, but there are a few.
"On the square, now, if you want to find a man of reason, would you go down in the red-light district, where women are selling their honor for money, or through the beer halls or fan-tan joints? You don't find intellect there," he continued.
In contrast to these places, the evangelist described with remarkable accuracy and emotion the scenes surrounding the death of President McKinley and the burial ceremony at Canton, Ohio; how the great men of the nation, all Christian men, passed by the flag-covered casket and paid their silent tribute to the man who had died with Christian confidence expressed in his last words.