Faith is the beginning of something of which you can't see the end but in which you believe.—Billy Sunday.
Destiny's door turns on small hinges. Almost everybody can say out of his own experience, "If I had done this, instead of that, the whole course of my life would have been changed." At many points in the career of William A. Sunday we see what intrinsically small and unrelated incidents determined his future course in life.
If he had not been sitting on that Chicago curbstone one evening, and if the Pacific Garden Mission workers had failed on that one occasion alone to go forth into the highways, Billy Sunday might have been only one of the multitude of forgotten baseball players. If he had not gone to prayer-meeting in his new church home he would not have met the wife who has been so largely a determining factor in his work. If he had not joined the Y. M. C. A. forces in Chicago he would not have become Peter Bilhorn's friend and so Dr. Chapman's assistant.
And—here we come to a very human story—if Dr. J. Wilbur Chapman had not suddenly decided to abandon the evangelistic field and return to the pastorate of Bethany Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Sunday would doubtless still be unknown to the world as a great religious leader. The story came to me from the lips of the evangelist himself one morning. We were discussing certain current criticisms of his work and he showed himself frankly bewildered as well as pained by the hostility displayed toward him on the part of those up to whom he looked as leaders and counselors. Off the platform Sunday is one of the most childlike and guileless of men. He grew reminiscent and confidential as he said to me: "I don't see why they hammer me so. I have just gone on, as the Lord opened the way, trying to do his work. I had no plan for this sort of thing. It is all the Lord's doings. Just look how it all began, and how wonderfully the Lord has cared for me.
"I had given up my Y. M. C. A. work, and was helping Chapman, doing all sorts of jobs—putting up tents, straightening out chairs after the meetings and occasionally speaking. Then, all of a sudden, during the holidays of 1895-96, I had a telegram from Chapman saying that our work was all off, because he had decided to return to Bethany Church.
"There I was, out of work, knowing not which way to turn. I had a wife and two children to support. I could not go back to baseball. I had given up my Y. M. C. A. position. I had no money. What should I do? I laid it before the Lord, and in a short while there came a telegram from a little town named Garner, out in Iowa, asking me to come out and conduct some meetings. I didn't know anybody out there, and I don't know yet why they ever asked me to hold meetings. But I went.
"I only had eight sermons, so could not run more than ten days, and that only by taking Saturdays off. That was the beginning of my independent work; but from that day to this I have never had to seek a call to do evangelistic work. I have just gone along, entering the doors that the Lord has opened one after another. Now I have about a hundred sermons and invitations for more than two years in advance. I have tried to be true to the Lord and to do just what he wants me to do."
That naïve bit of autobiography reveals the real Billy Sunday. He has gone forward as the doors have been providentially opened. His career has not been shrewdly planned by himself. Nobody has been more surprised at his success than he. Of him may be recorded the lines that are inscribed on Emerson's tombstone in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord:
"The passive master lent his hand
To the vast Soul that o'er him planned."