"It's a sad day for a young man when Bill Taft's overcoat wouldn't make him a vest," he added, amid shouts of laughter, in which even staid, stern-faced professors joined with the students.
"Too many fellows look like men from across the street, but when you get close to them they shrivel up.
"It makes a difference what kind of an example you follow. If Thomas Edison should say to his boy, 'Be an inventor,' the boy would know what he meant, but if some red-nosed, beer-soaked old reprobate should tell his boy to 'be a man,' the boy would be all in. Lots of fellows today turn out bad because their fathers' talk and walk do not agree.
"The best thing that can happen to a young man," said Mr. Sunday, "is to come under the influence of a real man. Every one has a hero, whether it be on the foot-ball field or in the classroom, and if every one would lead right today, there would be no going astray tomorrow.
"There are some men in this world that when they are around you turn up your collar, feel chills running up and down your back and when you look at the thermometer, you find the temperature is about 60 degrees below zero."
Then followed the evangelist's famous story of how David killed Goliath, considerably tempered to suit the culture of his audience. He told how David boldly asked who the "big lobster was," and why he was "strutting around as if he was the whole cheese, the head guy of the opposition party.
"David put down the sword that Saul had given him, for he felt like a fellow in a hand-me-down suit two sizes too large. He picked up one of his little pebbles, slung it across the river and hit poor old Goliath on the koko."
"Some fellows are working so hard to become angels they forget to be men. If you will study your Bible you will find that the men of old were subject to the same temptations as the men of today, but they didn't let their temptations get the best of them.
"If your manhood is buried in doubt and cheap booze, dig it out. You have to sign your own Declaration of Independence and fight your own Revolutionary wars before you can celebrate the Fourth of July over the things that try to keep you down.
"The best time for a man to sow his wild oats is between the age of eighty-five and ninety years. A six-ply drunk is about as good a passport into commercial life as a record for housebreaking, and the youth who goes to the mat with a half-pint of red-eye in his stomach, will be as beneficial to humanity as a one-legged man in a hurdle race."