He is alert to glean from all sources. In conversation one morning in Scranton I told him how on the previous day a lawyer friend had characterized a preacher with whom I had been talking by saying, "How much like a preacher he looks, and how little like a man." That afternoon Sunday used this in his sermon and twiddled it under his fingers for a minute or two, paraphrasing it in characteristic Sunday fashion. Doubtless it is now part of his permanent oratorical stock in trade.
The absolute unconventionality of the man makes all this possible. He is not afraid of the most shocking presentation of truth. Thus when speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, he alluded to a professor who had criticized the doctrine of hell, saying, "That man will not be in hell five minutes before he knows better." Of course that thrust caught the students. A more discreet and diplomatic person than Sunday would not have dared to say this.
The gospel preached by Sunday is the same that the Church has been teaching for hundreds of years. He knows no modifications. He is fiercely antagonistic to "modern" scholarship. He sits in God's judgment seat in almost every sermon and frequently sends men to hell by name.
All this may be deplorable, but it is Sunday. The Bible which he uses is an interpreted and annotated edition by one of the most conservative of Bible teachers: this suits Sunday, for he is not of the temperament to be hospitable to new truths that may break forth from the living word.
This state of mind leads him to be extravagant and intolerant in his statements. His hearers are patient with all of this because the body of his teachings is that held by all evangelical Christians. If he were less cock-sure he would not be Billy Sunday; the great mass of mankind want a religion of authority.
After all, truth is intolerant.
Although lacking technical literary training Sunday is not only a master of living English and of terse, strong, vivid and gripping phrase, but he is also capable of extraordinary flights of eloquence, when he uses the chastest and most appropriate language. He has held multitudes spell-bound with such passages as these:
God's Token of Love
"Down in Jacksonville, Florida, a man, Judge Owen, quarreled with his betrothed and to try to forget, he went off and worked in a yellow-fever hospital. Finally he caught the disease and had succumbed to it. He had passed the critical stage of the disease, but he was dying. One day his sweetheart met the physician on the street and asked about the judge. 'He's sick,' he told her.
"'How bad?' she asked.