Sundayisms, Scranton, PA (1914)

You’ve got to work in harmony with God, or you can’t eat a potato. Try to plant your crop in the winter time.

A revival is the return of the church from her backsliding. Judgment must begin in the House of God.

There is as much sense in talking of a worldly Christian as there is in talking about a heavenly devil.

What would you say of the members of a fire company who kept playing cards and gossiping instead of answering the alarm.

We have so many denominations now that it gives a man brain fever to keep track of them. Somebody gets a new idea of truth, founds a new sect, and takes refuge under the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. There is as much need of more denominations as there is for a cat with more tails.

The average preacher stakes his claim on Jupiter and talks on—God knows what, I don’t.

The slaves would not be free men today if men had not gone on the firing line for $13 a month.

An Iowa preacher asked me: “Why don’t you preach the way I do?” “If I did,” I told him, “I wouldn’t be worth any more than you are.”

Some preachers would rather have people go to hell than preach anything except their sixteenth century religion. My mother used to wear hoops, but she doesn’t now, because there’s a different style.

Too many people windjam with their lips, but they don’t deliver the goods.

No wonder children of today grow up like asses’ colts!

You allow your daughters to go around with fellows whose character

would make a black mark on a piece of tar paper.

If you are not living to stir the devil, then you are a cipher and a

nonentity.

The church hasn’t smelled gunpowder for 150 years. It would do her

good. When she has grown rich, she has become independent of God

Almighty.

Some people think the more they look like a hedgehog the more pious

they are. They’d get to heaven a great deal quicker if they went to the

barber and dentist more often.

If you can’t own an automobile, take a trolley ride for a nickel. Ain’t it

fierce?

If some of you devils were to go a whole day without cussing your wife,

she’d think you were sick and send for the doctor, although she’d rather

send for the undertaker.

If there is any one person in this world that I despise with every atom

of my being, it is the weasel-eyed, lantern-jawed, knock-kneed, stiff-necked,

cadaverous, crooked-nosed, old neighborhood gossip, who can see more

through a keyhole seven blocks away than a decent woman could through

an open door right at her elbow.

The Tribune-Republican. Wed, Mar 04, 1914 ·Page 10