Billy Sunday.

Bruce Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 51, 8 July 1918, Page 5

Billy Sunday.

Mr Beach Thomas, special correspondent of the London DailyMail in America, attended one of the famous Billy Sunday's, revival meetings. Here are his impressions of the unconventional Obut surprisingly successful American religious hustler.

By happy accident of travel I met this week the greater preacher of all 'time, if pop larity and publicity are the tests of greatness, while opening the most, mammoth of his rovivalist meetings—(Billy Sunday, the superevangelist 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. Itevivalisni 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, oven in the neighbouring homes of tho American-Ger-mans, and the sins of alcohol and soeiety with other pulpit targets are allowed to tako an inferior place. Within a week hundreds of thousands of persons have come to regard the Kaiser as "weasel-eyod and bull-necked," and have heard his name inspire a Jeramiad •of galloping adjectives of abuse and have watched his ai&gy smothered under a barrage of contemptuous slang. I attended the opening meeting of this now campaign, and made close acquaintance with the prodigy. A figure or two will explain tho scale of the movemvent. A special hall with 10 aisles and a thousand lights -was built for tho occasion. Tt cost £IO,OOO, and gave room for l ! o,000 people in front of the preacher and a choir of 4000 bohind him. TSv&ry 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, oven pages, of comment and illustration by men and women, lay and clerical. There was never anything like it in the world. It * 'licked creation." Tt is not for nothing that many million people heard and read under the sanction of religion that tho United States had "set out to get the hide of tho scaly Prussian serpent, and was going to fry, frizzle, and boil it." The preacher, who has whipped up such enthusiasm by pure porsonal attraction without any church or body toohind him>, i 9 a national phenomenon, Mid as such worth description. Billy Sunday 22 years ago was among the Mck of baseball players in the world. He holds the record for speed in running the four bases. Ho was a great bowler, a good bat, and a fine outfield, as we should say. One day he gave up his "big salary as a professional player and took a small post as secretary to tho Y.M.C.A. In due tilme he became a preacher, and his circulation grew by leaps and bounds, till he was accepted as a national character, the darling of the press and public. When he goes to bed we are told that Satan hag a reprieve. When ho is massaged in the morning wo hear of the "left uppercut" that Satan or the Kaiser is to receive before noon.

Billy Sunday's secret of is not altogether obscure. It springs from his perception that the qualities which make for success in one profession—to wit, baseball—should be equally useful in any other profession, such as preach-

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 verbsplay hilarious leapfrog. -Reporters could not follow him in his breakneck 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 plirases. 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 prizefighter 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 wfton it strikes a serpent or rat or otlacr vermin. But when he wishes he can hitch all the limbs together in one motion which is rather swifter than any single gesture. •Almost before you. have heard his allusion to Martin Luther 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 Grossmith'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. Scores of periods are punctuated by baseball actions. He is always bowling and throwing over tho heads of Ins audience, and occasionally he dives at a base. Once in an excess of perfervid rage he seized a chair, banged it dowit,

and broke it up—a lucky accident, if it was an accident, for when all was over Ills admirers boarded the pulpitplatform to take away the "bits as holy relics. Well, the value of action in oratory was a favourite theory of Burke's, and Billy Sunday's chair in the £IIO,OOO wooden hall was much more successful than 'Burke's throwing down of the dagger in the House of Com'm'ons. 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 1000 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 1810,000 hall, 'but of the universal ddme 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 ditch." '"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, Tmt 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 unashamed. At that I must leave it without analysis, without evoking the shades of Luther or Wycliffc, or oven Spurgeon, whom Billy Sunday succeeds, at any rate, in date if not apostolieally. It is enough that Billy Sunday is an immense fact.