William Ellis - Billy Sunday

Nearly everybody is stuck up about something. Some people are even proud that they aren't proud.

The average young man is more careful of his company than the average girl.

Going to church doesn't make a man a Christian, any more than going to a garage makes him an automobile.

If we people were able to have panes of glass over our hearts, some of us would want stained glass, wouldn't we?

To see some people, you would think that the essential orthodox Christianity is to have a face so long they could eat oatmeal out of the end of a gas pipe.

God likes a little humor, as is evidenced by the fact that he made the monkey, the parrot – and some of you people.

Wouldn't this city be a great place to live in if some people would die, get converted, or move away?

The normal way to get rid of drunkards is to quit raising drunkards – to put the business that makes drunkards out of business.

You can't shine for God on Sunday, and then be a London fog on Monday.

I don't believe that God wants any man to be a hermit. Jesus Christ did not wear a hair shirt and sleep upon a bed of spikes. He went among the people and preached the Gospel.

If you only believe things that you can understand you must be an awful ignoramus.

There is more power in a mother's hand than in a king's scepter.

I have no doubt that there are men looking into my face tonight who will have "1914" carved on their tombstones.

If God had no more interest in this world than some of you church members have in Johnstown, this city would have been in hell long ago.

I hate to see a man roll up to church in a limousine and then drop a quarter in the collection plate.

Give your face to God and he will put his shine on it.

No fountain under the sun can hold enough to satisfy an immortal spirit.

Jesus Christ came among the common people. Abraham Lincoln said that God must have loved the common people: he made so many of them.

Yank some of the groans out of your prayers, and shove in some shouts.

The Bible says forgive your debtors; the world says "sue them for their dough."

The race will appear as far above us as we are above the harem when godly girls marry godly men.

It is impossible for a saloon-keeper to enjoy a good red-hot prayer-meeting.

I'm no spiritual masseur or osteopath. I'm a surgeon, and I cut deep.

A prudent man won't swallow a potato bug, and then take Paris green to kill it.

If you want milk and honey on your bread, you'll have to go into the land where there are giants.

There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.

God pays a good mother. Mothers, get your names on God's pay-roll.

The man who can drive a hog and keep his religion will stand without hitching.

The right preaching of the Gospel will never hurt anything good.

If you would have your children turn out well, don't turn your home into a lunch counter and lodging house.

Man was a fool in the Garden of Eden, and he has taken a good many new degrees since.

The backslider likes the preaching that wouldn't hit the side of a house, while the real disciple is delighted when the truth brings him to his knees.

There would be more power in the prayers of some folks if they would put more white money in the collection basket.

What have you given the world it never possessed before you came?

Temptation is the devil looking through the keyhole. Yielding is opening the door and inviting him in.

There is a tremendous military advantage in having a definite enemy. The sermons that are aimed at nothing generally hit it. Billy Sunday is happiest and most successful when attacking the liquor evil. Down among the masses of men he learned for himself the awful malignity of strong drink, which he deems the greatest evil of our day.

So he fights it. Everybody will admit – the saloon-keeper first of all – that Billy Sunday is the most effective foe of the liquor business in America today. Small wonder the brewers spend large sums of money in circulating attacks upon him, and in going before him to every town where he conducts meetings, spreading slanders of many sorts.

There is a ghastly humor in the success the brewers have in enlisting the preachers to make common cause with them in discrediting this evangelist. Shrewd men have come quite generally to the conclusion that they will not give aid and comfort to the enemies of righteousness whose interests are best served by criticism of Billy Sunday. All incidental questions aside, Sunday does the Lord's work and is on the Lord's side. It is a pitiable spectacle to see the Lord's servants attacking him; though it is quite understandable why the liquor interest should spend large sums of money in antagonizing Sunday. It would be worth a million dollars to them any day if he could be put out of action.

Wherever Sunday goes a great temperance awakening follows. In eleven of fifteen Illinois towns where he campaigned "dry" victories were won at the next election. Fifteen hundred saloons were put out of business in a single day in Illinois, largely as the result of his work. With characteristic indifference to figures and tabulated results, Sunday has kept no record of the communities which have gone "dry" following his meetings. That consequence is common. His recent presence in Pennsylvania is the surest token that the Keystone State will not much longer be the boasted Gibraltar of the liquor interests. Even up in Pennsylvania's coal regions, with their large foreign population, many communities are going "dry," while individual saloons are being starved out. Within about a year of Sunday's visit there, the number of saloons was reduced by more than two hundred.

So intense is Sunday's zest for temperance that he will go anywhere possible to deliver a blow against the saloon. He has toured Illinois and West Virginia in special trains, campaigning for temperance. During the Sunday campaign in Johnstown ten thousand men in a meeting organized themselves into a Billy Sunday Anti-Saloon League. In Iowa literally scores of towns and counties are reported as having gone dry as a direct result of the Sunday meetings. Muscatine, Ottumwa, Marshalltown, Linwood and Centerville are communities in point. Thirteen out of fifteen towns in Illinois visited by Sunday voted out the saloon. West Virginia's temperance leaders utilized Sunday in a whirlwind campaign through the state. He spoke in ten towns in five days, traveling from point to point in a special car. It is now history that West Virginia went dry by ninety thousand majority. His latest work in the West has been timed to precede elections where the temperance question was an issue. Next to his passion for the conversion of men and women is this consuming antagonism to rum.

More important than his own valiant blows against the saloon is the fact that Sunday makes enemies for the liquor business. Practically all of his converts and friends become enthusiastic temperance workers. In western Pennsylvania he converted practical machine politicians to the old time Gospel and to the temperance cause.

Every campaign is full of incidents like that of the blacksmith, a part of whose business came from a large brewery. When this man became a Sunday convert and a temperance "fanatic," as they termed him, the brewers' business was withdrawn. But the loyalty which Sunday infuses into his followers, rallied to the man's help, and such a volume of Christian business was turned his way that his conversion and the loss of the brewery trade turned out to his profit.

In the Outlook of August 8, 1914, Lewis Edwin Theiss introduces a powerful article, "Industry versus Alcohol," with this Billy Sunday story: