"Ye'll understand, a man must think o' things."
CHAPTER VIII
"Speech – Seasoned with Salt"
I want to preach the gospel so plainly that men can come from the factories and not have to bring along a dictionary. – Billy Sunday.
Sunday is not a shepherd, but a soldier; not a husbandman of a vineyard, but a quarryman. The rôle he fills more nearly approximates that of the Baptist, or one of the Old Testament prophets, than any other Bible character. The word of the Lord that has come to him is not "Comfort ye! comfort ye!" but "Arouse ye! arouse ye!" and "Repent! repent!"
Evangelist Sunday's mission is not conventional, nor may it be judged by conventional standards. He is not a pastor; probably he would be a failure in the pastorate. Neither would any sensible person expect pastors to resemble Billy Sunday; for that, too, would be a calamity.
Taking a reasonable view of the case, what do we find? Here is a man whose clear work it is to attract the attention of the heedless to the claims of the gospel, to awaken a somnolent Church, and to call men to repentance. To do this a man must be sensational, just as John the Baptist was sensational – not to mention that Greater One who drew the multitudes by his wonderful works and by his unconventional speech.
In the time of Jesus, as now, religion had become embalmed in petrified phrases. The forms of religious speech were set. But Christ's talk was not different from every-day speech. The language of spirituality, which once represented great living verities, had become so conventionalized that it slipped easily into cant and "shop talk." It is a fact which we scarcely like to admit that myriads of persons who attend church regularly do not expect really to understand what the preacher is talking about. They admire his "zeal" or "unction," but as for understanding him as clearly and definitely as they understand a neighbor talking over the back fence – that is not to be thought of.
When God called this man whom the common people should hear gladly, he took him straight out of the walks of common life with no other vocabulary than that of ordinary "folks." We Americans use the most vivid language of any people. Our words are alive, new ones being born every hour. "Slang" we call these word pictures, and bar them from polite speech until the crowbar of custom has jimmied a way for them into the dictionary. And the most productive slang factory of our time is the realm of sports in which Sunday was trained.
So he talks religion as he talked baseball. His words smack of the street corners, the shop, the athletic field, the crowd of men. That this speech is loose, extravagant and undignified may be freely granted: but it is understandable. Any kind of a fair play that will get the runners to the home plate is good baseball; and any speech that will puncture the shell of human nature's complacency and indifference to religion is good preaching. Neither John the Baptist nor Jesus was dignified, and highly correct Pharisees despised them as vulgarians; "but the common people heard him gladly." With such examples before him on one side, and a Church waterlogged with dignity on the other, Sunday has "gone the limit" in popularized speech.
Perhaps he is not as polite as is professionally proper for a preacher. He seems to have recovered some of the prophet's lost art of denunciation. He dares call sin by its proper name. He excoriates the hypocrite. He cares not for feelings of the unfaithful preacher or of the double-living church member. As for the devil and all his lieutenants, Sunday has for them a sizzling, blistering vocabulary that helps men to loathe sin and all its advocates. His uncompromising attitude is shown by this gem, culled from one of his sermons:
"They say to me, 'Bill, you rub the fur the wrong way.' I don't; let the cats turn 'round."
Again, "It isn't a good thing to have synonyms for sin. Adultery is adultery, even though you call it affinity."
Again, "Paul said he would rather speak five words that were understood than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue. That hits me. I want people to know what I mean, and that's why I try to get down where they live. What do I care if some puff-eyed, dainty little dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain Anglo-Saxon words."
Two important points are to be considered in connection with Sunday's vigorous vocabulary; the first is that what he says does not sound as bad as it seems in cold type. Often he is incorrectly reported. The constant contention of his friends is that he should be heard before being criticized. The volume of testimony of all the men who have heard him – preachers, professors and purists – is that his addresses which seem shocking when reported are not shocking when heard.
On the public square in Scranton a great sign was displayed by the local committee:
One Scranton business man put it this way: "Type is cold; his sermons are hot."
Sunday speaks with his eyes, with his gestures and with every muscle of his body; and all this must be taken into account in weighing his words. Assuredly his message in its totality does not shock anybody. That is why preachers sit through his arraignment of a deficient church and ministry and applaud him. They find in his severest utterances a substantial volume of undoubted truth.
The second point is that the most vigorous speech is used earliest in an evangelistic campaign. That is one way of stirring up the Church, and of attracting attention to the meetings. Sunday goads Christians to an interest. Apparently he purposely speaks to arouse resentment, if no other form of interest is awakened in his hearers. The latter part of a Sunday campaign is singularly free from his denunciations, from his invective and from his slang. There is a clear method in his procedure, which is always followed in about the same course.
Sunday would be the last man to expect everybody to approve all that he says, either in form or in substance. I don't; and I know no other thinking observer of his meetings who does. No more do I expect him to approve all that is said in this book. Nevertheless, there remains the unanswerable rejoinder to all criticism of Evangelist Sunday's utterances and message: he "delivers the goods." He does arouse communities to an interest in religion as no other preacher of our generation. He helps people "get right with God." His campaigns promote righteousness, diminish wickedness and strengthen the Church.
As samples of the pungent sort of speech with which Sunday's discourses are flavored I have selected these shakings from his salt-cellar:
Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.
You can find anything in the average church today, from a humming bird to a turkey buzzard.
The Lord is not compelled to use theologians. He can take snakes, sticks or anything else, and use them for the advancement of his cause.
The Lord may have to pile a coffin on your back before he can get you to bend it.
Don't throw your ticket away when the train goes into a tunnel. It will come out the other side.
The safest pilot is not the fellow that wears the biggest hat, but the man who knows the channels.
If a man goes to hell he ought to be there, or he wouldn't be there.
I am preaching for the age in which I live. I am just recasting my vocabulary to suit the people of my age instead of Joshua's age.
The Church gives the people what they need; the theater gives them what they want.
Death-bed repentance is burning the candle of life in the service of the devil, and then blowing the smoke into the face of God.
Your reputation is what people say about you. Your character is what God and your wife know about you.
When your heart is breaking you don't want the dancing master or saloon-keeper. No, you want the preacher.
Don't you know that every bad man in a community strengthens the devil's mortgage?
Pilate washed his hands. If he had washed his old black heart he would have been all right.
It takes a big man