BILLY SUNDAY.

Hokitika Guardian, 29 June 1918, Page 4

BILLY SUNDAY.

ATHLETICS IN THE PULPIT

(Bv W. Beach Thomas,.)

Chicago, U.S.A., March 14

By happy accident of travel I met this week the greatest preacher of all time, if popularity and publicity are the tests of greatness, while, opening the most mammoth of his revivalist meetings—Billy Sunday, the sitper-Kvaiigelist of America, had at last come to Chicago to revive his native town.

This man and his campaign are both prodigious in a degree beyond the realisation of other countries. Revivalism on the American scale is in part a war product, and in the hands of Billy Sunday the Kaiser slips quite naturally into the place of Satan. Nor is a word raised in rebuke, even in the. neighbouring homes of the American-Germaus, and the sins of alcohol and society with other pulpit targets are allowed to take an inferior place. Within a week hundreds of thousands of persons have come to regard the Kaiser as “weasel-eyed and bullnecked,’’ and have heard his name inspire a jeremiad of galloping adjectives of abuse and have watched his effigy smothered under a barrage of contemptuous slang. I attended the opening meeting of this new campaign and made close acquaintance with the prodigy. A figure or two will explain the scale of the movement. A special hall with ten aisles and a thousand lights was builc for the occasion. It cost and. gave room for 15,000 people in front of the preacher and a choir of 4,000 behind him. Every newspaper gave information how to reach the hall by motor-car, train, or shanks’ mare; and the three sermons of the opening day were printed in full by all the newspapers, with many columns, even pages, of comment and illustration by men and women, lay and clerical.

“THE SCALY PRUSSIAN SERPENT.” There was never anything like it in the world. It “licked creation.” It is not for nothing that many million people heard and read under the sanction of religion that the United States had “ set out to get the hide of the scaly Prussian serpent, and was going to fry, frizzle, and boil it.

The preacher who has whipped up such' enthusiasm bv pure personal attraction without any Church or body behind him is a national phenomenon, and as such worth description. Billy Sunday 22 years ago was among the pick of baseball players in the world. He holds the record for speed in running the four bases. He was a great bowler, a good bat, and a fine out held, as we should say. One day he gave up his big salary as a professional player and took a small post as secretary to the Y.M C.A. In due time he became a preacher, and his circulation grew by leaps and bounds, ti 1 1 he was accepted as a national character, the darling ol the Press and public. When he goes to bed we are told that Satan had a reprieve. When he is massaged in the morning we hear of the “left upper-cut” that Satan or the Kaiser is to receive before noon. Billy Sunday’s secret ot success i.s not altogether obscure. It springs from his perception, that the qualities which make tor success in one profession—to wit, baseball —should be equally useful in any other profession, such as preaching.

His address at Chicago was the most athletic I ever saw. Every stage of it was a gymnastic feat. His capacity for speed begins with the lips. He speaks 220 words a minute, and all the words are loud and distinct. The adjectives tear after one another like boys on a slide, and his verbs—mostly racy,, homely, if not vulgar Saxon verbs —play hilarious leap-frog. Reporters could not follow him in bis break-neck race if they did not have a very fair idea of what sequence of words was coming, for he is not a speaker who is afraid of overworking willing phrases.

j His gestures excel his words in ■ speed. He has a peculiar gift of using any part of himself without disturbing the rest. His head twists and turns without affecting body or arms. I have seen a prize fighter with the same gift. He can toss an arm about as if it were a crane. He picks up one leg and stamps it down with the invisible celerity of the secretary bird when it strikes a serpent, or rat or other vermin. But when he wishes he can hitch all the limbs together i:i one motion which is rather swifter than any single gesture. Almost before vou had heard his allusion to Martin Luth ,-r crawling up the steps he was on all fours, moving like a dog across the platform. He mentions prayer, and at once tumbles on his knees, excelling the speed of Grossmilh’s famous flop in “ The Mikado.” Half the time between such excesses of gesture he moves across the platform with the smooth, restless, quick patrol of the Siberian wolf in his cage at the “ Zoo.” BASEBALL G ESI URES. Scores of periods are punctuated by baseball actions. He is always bowling and throwing over the heads of his audience, and occasionally he dives at a base. Once in an access of perfervid rage he seized a chair, banged it down, and broke it up—a lucky accident, if it was an accident, for when all was over his admirers boarded the pulpit-plat-form, to take away the bits as holyrelics. Well, the value oi action in orator}' was a favourite theory of I Burke’s, and Billy Sunday’s chair [ in the wooden hall was much more successful than Burke’s throwing down of the dagger in the House of Commons.

In his final peroration Dr Sunday seized a stronger chair, whisked it to the pulpit, leaped on the two, and, leaning forward with a foot on each like the statue of the Greek runner, poured out 1,000 words in two minutes. He frequently megaphoned to heaven through the funnel of his two hands. as if he were testing the acoustic properties not of the £ IO,OOO hall but of the universal dome of heaven.

I took down the last words of three of his most impassioned passages. These were the sentences : “ We will fight you dirty dogs to the last ditcli.” “ And you go to hell.” “ And you keep your dirty rotten hands off.” They do not, as quoted, sound in the highest vein of spiritual oratory or thought, but 50,000 people a day go to hear them, and everyone is forced to read them.

And what is the final influence of it all ? Thousands hate the “ scaly Prussian serpent ” more than they did. That is, at any rate, something. Yet the prevailing applause, the standard emotion, was laughter, free and unshamed. At that I must leave it without analysis, without evoking the shades of Luther or Wycliffe, or even Spurgeon, whom Billy Sunday succeeds, at any rate, in date if not apostolically. It is enough that Billy Sunday is an immense fact.