BILLY SUNDAY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1853, 16 July 1918, Page 1

BILLY SUNDAY.

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 revival meetings Billy Sunday, the super-evangelist of America, had at last come to Chicago to revive his native town, writes Mr Beach Thomas in the Daily Mail. This man and his campaign are both prodigious to 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 Ameriean-Germans, 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 ton aisles and a thousand lights was built for the occasion. It cost £IO,OOO, 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 (ho hall by motor car, train, or shanks' mare; and the three sermons of (he. opening day were printed in full by all (he newspapers, with many columns, even pages, of comment and illustration by men and women, lay and clerical.

'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 I hat I lie United .States had “sol out to got the hide of flic scaly Prussian serpent, and was going to fry, Frazzle, and boil it.”

The preacher who lias whipped up such enthusiasm by pare, persona! attraction without any church or body behind him is a national phenomenon, and as such worth description, Billy Similar, 22 years ago, was among the pick of baseball players in the world. He holds the record For speed in running the Four buses, lie was a great howler, a good bat, and a fine outlield, as wo should say. One dav he gave up his big salary as a professional player and took a small post as seerotary to the Y.M.C.A. In due time he became a preacher, and Ids congregation grew by leaps aiid bounds, till lie wits accepted as a national character, the darling of the Press and public. When ho goes to bed we are told that Satan has a reprieve. When lie is massaged in the, morning wc hear of the “left uppercut” that Sa|an or the-* Kaiser is to receive before noon. Billy Sunday’s secret of success is not altogether obscure. It springs from Ids perception that (lie.qualities which make for success in one profession—to wit, baseball —should be equally successful in any other profession, such as prench-

His address at Chicago was the most athletic I ever saw. Every stage of if 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 schoolboys on a slide, and his verbs mostly racy homely, if not vulgar, Saxon verbs —play hilarious leap-frog. Rer porters could not Follow him in his ()regk-ne(ik 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 a willing phrase. His gestures excel his words, in speed.

Re has a peculiar gift of using any part of himself without disturbing the rest. His head twists and turns without affecting the body or prms. 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, stamps it down

with the invisible celerity of the secretory bird when it strikes a serpent or rat or oilier vermin. But when he wishes lie can hitch all Ihe limbs together in one motion which is rather swifter than any single gesture. Almost before you had hoard his allusion to Martin Luther crawling up the steps he was on all fours, moving like a dog across the platfonn. He mentions prayer, and at once tumbles on his knees, excelling the speed of Grossmith’s famous flop in “The Mikado.” Half the time between such an excess of gestures he moves across the platform with the smooth, restless, quick patrol of the Siberian wolf in his.cage at the Zoo.

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 excess 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 bordered the pulpit platform to take away the hits as holy relics. Well, the value of action in oratory was a favourite theory of Burke’s, and Billy Sunday’s chair in the £IO,OOO 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 (lie funnel of his two hands, as if he were testing the ic. properties not of the £IO,OOO tin 11, but of the universal dome of heaven. I took down the last words of three of his most impassioned passages. There were the sentences: “We will light yon dirty dogs to. the last ditch.” And yon go to hell.” “And you keep your dirty rotten hands off.” They do not, as quoted,

sound in the hichc-i vein of spiritmi! oratory or thought, but 50,000 people a day go to hear them, and everyone is Forced to rend them. And what is the final influence of ir all? Thousands hate the “scaly Prim.-iaii serpent” more than they did. That is, at any rale, something. Yet (lie prevailing applause, the standard emotion, was laughter, Free and unashamed. At that I must leave it without analysis, without evoking the shades of But her or WyeliFl'e, or even Spurgeon, whom Billy Sunday succeeds, at any rae, in date if not apostolieally. It is enough that Billy Sunday Is an immense Fact.