[CHAPTER X]
"Give Attendance to Reading"
There are some so-called Christian homes today with books on the shelves of the library that have no more business there than a rattler crawling about on the floor, or poison within the child's reach.—Billy Sunday.
"I never heard Billy Sunday use an ungrammatical sentence," remarked one observer. "He uses a great deal of slang, and many colloquialisms, but not a single error in grammar could I detect. Some of his passages are really beautiful English."
Sunday has made diligent effort to supplement his lack of education. He received the equivalent of a high-school training in boyhood, which is far more than Lincoln ever had. Nevertheless he has not had the training of the average educated man, much less of a normal minister of the gospel. He is conscious of his limitations: and has diligently endeavored to make up for them. When coaching the Northwestern University baseball team in the winter of '87 and '88 he attended classes at the University. He has read a great deal and to this day continues his studies. Of course his acquaintance with literature is superficial: but his use of it shows how earnestly he has read up on history and literature and the sciences. He makes better use of his knowledge of the physical sciences, and of historical allusions, than most men drilled in them for years. He displays a proneness for what he himself would call "high-brow stuff," and his disproportionate display of his "book learning" reveals his conscious effort to supply what does not come to him naturally.
Sunday has an eclectic mind. He knows a good thing when he sees it. He is quick to incorporate into his discourses happenings or illustrations wherever found. Moody also was accustomed to do this: he circulated among his friends interleaved Bibles to secure keen comments on Scripture passages. All preachers draw on the storehouses of the past: the Church Fathers speak every Sunday in the pulpits of Christendom. Nobody originates all that he says. "We are the heirs of all the ages."
At the opening of every one of his campaigns Sunday repeatedly announces that he has drawn his sermon material from wherever he could find it, and that he makes no claim to originality. So the qualified critic can detect, in addition to some sermon outlines which were bequests from Dr. Chapman, epigrams from Sam Jones, flashes from Talmage, passages from George Stuart, paragraphs from the religious press, apothegms from the great commentators. It is no news to say that Sunday's material is not all original; he avows this himself. In his gleanings he has had help from various associates. Elijah P. Brown's hand can be traced in his sermons: the creator of the "Ram's Horn" proverbs surely is responsible for Sunday's penchant for throwing stones at the devil.
Sunday is not an original thinker. He has founded no school of Scriptural interpretation. He has not given any new exposition of Bible passages, nor has he developed any fresh lines of thought. Nobody hears anything new from him. In every one of his audience there are probably many persons who have a more scholarly acquaintance with the Bible and with Christian literature.
Temperamentally a conservative, Sunday has taken the truth taught him by his earliest teachers and has adapted and paraphrased and modernized it. In the crucible of his intense personality this truth has become Sundayized. His discourses may have a variety of origin, but they all sound like Billy Sunday when he delivers them.
A toilsome, painstaking worker, he has made elaborate notes of all his sermons, and these he takes with him in leather-bound black books to the platform and follows more or less closely as he speaks. No other man than himself could use these rough notes. Often he interjects into one sermon parts of another. He has about a hundred discourses at his command at present, and his supply is constantly growing.
The early copies of Sunday's sermons were taken down more or less correctly in shorthand, and these have been reproduced in every city where he has gone: consequently they lack the tang and flavor of his present deliverances.