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

by William T. Ellis

Imagine a lumberman lost in the big woods. He has wandered, bewildered, for days. Death stares him in the face. Then, spent and affrighted, he comes to a trail. And the trail leads to life; it is the way home.

There we have the origin of the expression "Hitting the sawdust trail," used in Mr. Sunday's meetings as a term similar to the older stereotyped phrases: "Going forward"; "Seeking the altar." The more conventional method, used by the other evangelists, is to ask for a show of hands.

Out in the Puget Sound country, where the sawdust aisles and the rough tabernacle made an especial appeal to the woodsmen, the phrase "Hitting the sawdust trail" came into use in Mr. Sunday's meetings. The figure was luminous. For was not this the trail that led the lost to salvation, the way home to the Father's house?

The metaphor appealed to the American public, which relishes all that savors of our people's most primitive life. Besides, the novel designation serves well the taste of a nation which is singularly reticent concerning its finer feelings, and delights to cloak its loftiest sentiments beneath slang phrases. The person who rails at "hitting the trail" as an irreverent phrase has something to learn about the mind of Americans. Tens of thousands of persons have enshrined the homely phrase in the sanctuary of their deepest spiritual experience.

The scene itself, when Mr. Sunday calls for converts to come forward and take his hand, in token of their purpose to accept and follow Christ, is simply beyond words. Human speech cannot do justice to the picture. For good reason. This is one of those crises in human life the portrayal of which makes the highest form of literature. A Victor Hugo could find a dozen novels in each night's experience in the Sunday Tabernacle.

This is an hour of bared souls. The great transaction between man and his Maker is under way. The streams of life are here changing their course. Character and destiny are being altered. The old Roman "Sacramentum," when the soldiers gave allegiance with uplifted hand, crying, "This for me! This for me!" could not have been more impressive than one of these great outpourings of human life up the sawdust aisle to the pulpit, to grasp the preacher's hand, in declaration that henceforth their all would be dedicated to the Christ of Calvary.

The greatness of the scene is at first incomprehensible. There are no parallels for it in all the history of Protestantism. This unschooled American commoner, who could not pass the entrance examinations of any theological seminary in the land, has publicly grasped the hands of approximately a quarter of a million persons, who by that token have said, in the presence of the great congregation, that they thereby vowed allegiance to their Saviour and Lord. Moody, Whitefield, Finney, have left no such record of converts as this.

A dramatic imagination is needed to perceive even a fragment of what is meant by this army of Christian recruits. The magnitude of the host is scarcely revealed by the statement that these converts more than equal the number of inhabitants of the states of Delaware or Arizona at the last census, and far surpass those of Nevada and Wyoming. Imagine a state made up wholly of zealous disciples of Christ! Of the one hundred largest cities in the United States there are only nineteen with more inhabitants than the total number of persons who have "hit the trail" at the Sunday meetings.

Break up that vast host into its component parts. Each is an individual whose experience is as real and distinctive as if there never had been another human soul to come face to face with God. To one the act means a clean break with a life of open sin. To another it implies a restored home and a return to respectability. To this young person it signifies entrance upon a life of Christian service; to that one a separation from all old associations. Some must give up unworthy callings. Other must heal old feuds and make restitution for ancient wrongs. One young woman in accepting Christ knows that she must reject the man she had meant to marry. To many men it implies a severance of old political relations. Far and wide and deep this sawdust trail runs; and the record is written in the sweat of agonizing souls and in the red of human blood.

The consequences of conversion stagger the imagination: this process is still the greatest social force of the age.