Little wonder that persons of discernment journey long distances to attend a Sunday meeting, and to witness this appeal for converts to "hit the trail." I traveled several hundred miles to see it for the first time, and would go across the continent to see it again. For this is vital religion. If a wedding casts its dramatic spell upon the imagination; if a political election stirs the sluggish deeps of the popular mind; if a battle calls for newspaper "extras"; if an execution arrests popular attention by its element of the mystery of life becoming death—then, by so much and more, this critical, decisive moment in the lives of living men and women grips the mind by its intense human interest. What issues, for time and eternity, are being determined by this step! The great romance is enacted daily at the Sunday meetings.
For these converts are intent upon the most sacred experience that ever comes to mortal. Through what soul struggles they have passed, what renunciations they have made, what futures they front, only God and heaven's hosts know. The crowd dimly senses all this. There is an instinctive appreciation of the dramatic in the multitude. So the evangelist's appeal is followed by an added tenseness, a straining of necks and a general rising to behold the expected procession.
A more simple and unecclesiastical setting for this tremendous scene could scarcely be devised. The plain board platform, about six feet high, and fifteen feet long, is covered by a carpet. Its only furniture is a second-hand walnut pulpit, directly under the huge sounding board; and one plain wooden chair, "a kitchen chair," a housewife would call it. Then the invitation is given for all who want to come out on the side of Christ to come forward and grasp Sunday's hand.
See them come! From all parts of the vast building they press forward. Nearly everyone is taking this step before the eyes of friends, neighbors, work-fellows. It calls for courage, for this is a life enlistment. Behold the young men crowding toward the platform, where the helpers form them into a swiftly moving line—dozens and scores of boys and men in the first flush of manhood. Occasionally an old person is in the line; oftener it is a boy or girl. There goes a mother with her son.
How differently the converts act. Some have streaming eyes. Others wear faces radiant with the light of a new hope. Still others have the tense, set features of gladiators entering the arena. For minute after minute the procession continues. When a well-known person goes forward, the crowd cheers.
As I have studied Mr. Sunday in the act of taking the hands of converts—one memorable night more than five hundred at the rate of fifty-seven a minute—the symbolism of his hand has appealed to my imagination.
Surprisingly small and straight and surprisingly strong it is. Baseball battles have left no scars upon it. The lines are strong and deep and clear. The hand is "in condition"; no flabbiness about it. There are no rings on either of Mr. Sunday's hands, except a plain gold wedding ring on the left third finger.
No outstretched hand of military commander ever pointed such a host to so great a battle. Is there anywhere a royal hand, wielding a scepter over a nation, which has symbolized so much vital influence as this short, firm hand of a typical American commoner? The soldier sent on a desperate mission asked Wellington for "one grasp of your conquering hand." A conquering hand, a helping hand, an uplifting hand, an upward-pointing hand, is this which once won fame by handling a baseball.
Conceive of the vast variety of hands that have been reached up to grasp this one, and what those hands have since done for the world's betterment! Two hundred thousand dedicated right hands, still a-tingle with the touch of this inviting hand of the preacher of the gospel! The picture of Sunday's right hand belongs in the archives of contemporary religious history.
No stage manager could ever set so great a scene as this. The vastness of it—sixteen or seventeen thousand eyes all centered on one ordinary-looking American on a high green-carpeted platform, a veritable "sea of faces"—is not more impressive than the details which an observer picks out.