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

by William T. Ellis

"I'm from Cork, Ireland," said he, "and my name is James O'Toole. Here is a letter of introduction." I read it and it said he was a good Christian young man and an energetic young fellow.

I said, "Well, Jim, my name is Mr. Sunday. I'll tell you where there are some good Christian boarding houses and you let me know which one you pick out." He told me afterwards that he had one on the North Side. I sent him an invitation to a meeting to be held at the Y. M. C. A., and he had it when he and some companions went bathing in Lake Michigan. He dived from the pier just as the water receded unexpectedly and he struck the bottom and broke his neck. He was taken to the morgue and the police found my letter in his clothes, and told me to come and claim it or it would be sent to a medical college. I went and they had the body on a slab, but I told them I would send a cablegram to his folks and asked them to hold it. They put it in a glass case and turned on the cold air, by which they freeze bodies by chemical processes, as they freeze ice, and said they would save it for two months, and if I wanted it longer they would stretch the rules a little and keep it three.

I was just thinking of what sorrow that cablegram would cause his old mother in Cork when they brought in the body of a woman. She would have been a fit model of Phidias, she had such symmetry of form. Her fingers were manicured. She was dressed in the height of fashion and her hands were covered with jewels and as I looked at her, the water trickling down her face, I saw the mute evidence of illicit affection. I did not say lust, I did not say passion, I did not say brute instincts. I said, "Sin." Sin had caused her to throw herself from that bridge and seek repose in a suicide's grave. And as I looked, from the saloon, the fan-tan rooms, the gambling hells, the opium dens, the red lights, there arose one endless cry of "How long, O God, how long shall hell prevail?"

You can't argue against sin. It's here. Then listen to me as I try to help you.

When the Standard Oil Company was trying to refine petroleum there was a substance that they couldn't dispose of. It was a dark, black, sticky substance and they couldn't bury it, couldn't burn it because it made such a stench; they couldn't run it in the river because it killed the fish, so they offered a big reward to any chemist who would solve the problem. Chemists took it and worked long over the problem, and one day there walked into the office of John D. Rockefeller, a chemist and laid down a pure white substance which we since know as paraffine.

You can be as black as that substance and yet Jesus Christ can make you white as snow. "Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow."

Transcriber's Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Base ball, base-ball and baseball have been variously used throughout the original, these have been standardised to baseball. Other variations in hyphenation have been standardised, but variations in punctuation and spelling remain.