Full text as it appeared in the. Transcribed by AI. Errors may exist.
“Why Call Me Lord, Lord? Asks Billy Sunday as He Hits Hypocrites and Religious Shams. Palladium-Item. Mon, Apr 17, 1922 ·Page 7
Text: Luke 6:46
Christianity Can Save the World, Says Evangelist in Sunday Night Sermon—Some Stingy People Can’t Give Away 10 Cents Without Singing, “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”
The Text—”Why call ye me Lord,
Lord, and do not the things I say?”
Luke 6th chapter, 46th verse.
Billy Sunday delivered the following sermon on Easter Sunday night in the tabernacle:
Why call yourself a Democrat and then vote the Republican ticket?
Why call yourself honest and then lie?
Why say that you are pure and then live in sin?
“Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”
What did Jesus mean? Do you believe he meant the things that are recorded that he said, or do you believe that he said one thing and meant another? Do you believe that he uttered things that were impractical and impossible for us to carry into effect and then told us he’d damn us if we did not live up to it? I don’t believe you are fool enough to charge him with that, and if you are it doesn’t justify the fact that you are a fool if you do it.
Is the Standard High?
Not for Christianity.
Did he put the standard too high for human attainment and then tell us he’d damn us if we didn’t reach it? No!
I read where a Bishop of the English church said that the teachings of Jesus Christ should be regarded as ideal and were never intended to be carried into effect or lived.
I knew of a Y. M. C. A. that had a debating society, and it just decided that under social, political, economical conditions, that the teachings of Jesus should be regarded as ideal and were not intended to be lived, yet they both had the audacity to call themselves Christians.
Another man said Christianity had failed. He lied!
I will admit that Christianity has fallen away beneath love as the original standard. Love is the dominant principle of the world; love can never be defeated. Love may be checked; love may be prevented, for the time being, in accomplishing its aim, but love will drill a tunnel through all the mountains of opposition and reach the goal of a touchdown. Love—it’s the mightiest thing in the world! And the world is starving today for the manifestation of the love of God in the hearts of men and women.
Christ’s Power Will Drive Out Hatred.
I always had a good deal of sympathy with a hobo that went up to the back door of a professing Christian woman’s home and panhandled her for a cup of coffee and mooched her for a flapjack and after much persuasion she came across with a tract on the bread of life, and he began to tear the tract up and curse and mutter. I have no sympathy with his oaths but I have a good deal of sympathy with the feelings that possessed him. What that fellow needed then was a piece of meat with two pieces of bread under it. The shortest course into that fellow’s heart was by the way of his stomach. It was the quickest way to land him there.
I believe that there is no prejudice existing between man and men, between masses and classes, between capital and labor, that can’t be driven from the world by the principles of Jesus Christ manifested in the lives of man and men, masses and classes, capital and labor.
I read of a Scotchman who learned just enough of the French language to say, “God loves you,” and he walked the streets of gay, sinful Paris with the tears trickling down his cheeks and his arms outstretched, crying the words in French. It struck conviction to the hearts of the people until out of that the great All Mission work in Paris was started.
Story Shows How Christianity Works.
I heard of a professor who was a Christian. He had a brother-in-law, a doctor, who was an infidel and this doctor said the reason that all Christians didn’t sin was because they weren’t sufficiently tempted. Somebody challenged the statement, and said, “What’s the matter with your brother-in-law, the Professor?” He said, “He’s like the rest of the bunch, and I’ll bet you ten bucks that I can make him mad.”
The wager was made. These two men had a business transaction and the doctor purposely falsified the count in order to test the religion of his brother-in-law, the professor, and in response to some question that the doctor knew was a lie (for he was trying to sting him and put one over on him, and the professor knew it was) the professor jumped to his feet and said,
“You’re a liar. Get out of my house.”
And he drove him out. And his brother-in-law, the doctor, took up his hat and went, somewhat chagfallen to think that so great and good a man had sidestepped, but he couldn’t think he had rightly interpreted human nature and was a ten in the hole.
So they went to their homes and retired. Soon the old dog was humming off like a Twin-Six, and the old professor was rolling and tossing as if he troubled a troubled mind. But at two o’clock in the morning he dressed, walked four miles across the city and knocked on his brother-in-law’s door. His brother-in-law opened it and he said.
“Yesterday I called you a liar. I am sorry I did it. I have come to ask you to forgive me.”
And he drew him in and said, “If that’s religion, that’s the brand I’m looking for, and I think I’d better take a good old hypodermic injection of the good old-time, worth-dying for religion.
Christ’s Opinion on World Problems.
What did Jesus Christ say? I haven’t time if you had the disposition to hear all that he had to say, but listen! Jesus Christ said, Forgive your debtors.” And the world says, “Sue them for
their dough.”
Jesus Christ said, “It’s more blessed to give than to receive.” The world says, “Get all you can and then can all you get.” Jesus said, “Give to him that asketh of thee, him that would borrow of thee turn not away.”
The world says, “Go to the Associated Charities, I subscribe.” Jesus Christ said, “You can’t serve God and mammon.” The world says, “God on Sunday, mammon through the rest of the week.”
Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The world says, “First come I, then you.”
Jesus Christ said, “Him that smiteth thee on one cheek turn to him the other also.”
The world says, “Call a cop.”
Jesus Christ said, “Let him that is among you without sin cast the first stone.”
The world says, “Choose judges that know the law and will give a decision in your favor if you put them there.”
Jesus Christ said, “Whosoever would be great among you, let him be servant of all.” The world says, “If you want to
be some pumpkins, you must keep a valet.”
Jesus Christ said, ‘What God hath joined together let not man put asunder.’
The world says, “I will divorce you and marry another woman and that will not be sin.”
You lie!
The only Scriptural grounds for divorce is adultery. When it comes to the divorce question I am a Roman Catholic from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I believe the Bible teaches that you have no right, my friend, to get a divorce for any reason, but you never have a right to re-marry as long as the man or woman you are divorced from is alive.
Never Would Marry Divorced Person.
I am an ordained minister of the gospel, and help me God I shall never prostitute my position as a minister to enable calling to unite in marriage any man or woman who has been divorced for any reason, as long as the man or woman from whom he or she is divorced is alive!
One day in Chicago a fellow came up and rang the door-bell, and oh, he was dressed fit to kill! Had on a silk lid, he had a diamond in his shirt front as big as a hickory nut, patent leather shoes, a Prince Albert coat, silk-lined, hung below his knees.
And there was a girl about eighteen years of age—a peach of a girl—one
of these kind of girls you’d involuntarily turn and look at twice if you saw her on the street—standing by his side.
So he tipped his lid and said, “Does the Reverend Mr. Sunday live here?”
I said, “I am he.”
He said, “Will you officiate at our wedding?”I said, “Have you the marriage license?”
He said, “Sure Mike!”
I said, “I’m from Missouri, come across.”
So he pulled it out and I looked at it and I said, “That looks good to me.”
I said, “Have either of you been married before?”
He said, “Not the young lady; I have.”
I said, “Your wife living or dead?”
He said, “She’s alive.”
I said, “Beat it—twenty-three for you, old scout.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “I mean according to my interpretation of the Bible I haven’t any right to hook you up to that girl.
He said, “I have a license here from the county clerk.”
I said, “Some things that are legally right are morally rotten. That’s one of them.”
I said, “Perhaps the fellow that engineers the brick-cheese box around the corner will fix you up for a ten-spot but not your Uncle Fuller.
A man comes to me and says, “I have been married and divorced living unhappily—what will I do?”
I said, “I would go home and get down on my knees and say, ‘Look here, Lord, I’ve sinned against you, transgressed your laws, forgive me. Get up and trot square and go decently.’ That’s the best advice I can give you under the circumstances.”
Now listen! “Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say.”
The Real Essence of Christian Charity.
In the works of benevolence? How much do you give away? I don’t want to do anything to despise scientific charity. I don’t care to do anything of that sort, but listen! That doesn’t mean that if a fellow meets you on the street and asks you for your clothes that you’ve got to yank them off and give them to him and go home clothed in sunshine.
That doesn’t mean if some lazy wop that never worked in his life asks you to get out of your automobile that you climb out and let him get in and drive away and you hot-hoof it.
That doesn’t mean if you work and save your money and build your home that you’ve got to move and give it to somebody—no! Listen!
A Jew wouldn’t speak to a Samaritan, a Samaritan wouldn’t speak to a Jew; a Jew wouldn’t loan to a Samaritan, neither would a Samaritan loan to a Jew. Not at all! Jesus Christ went into Samaria. There he sat on the well-curb—hungry, dust-covered. Out came that woman and he asked her for a drink of water. She said,
“Not on your life, you’re a Jew, I’m a Samaritan. We have no dealings one with the other.”
“Now,” Jesus said, “look here, if you become my disciple you’ve got to loan to a Samaritan if he asks you, the same as a Jew. Give to him that asketh of you and him that would borrow of you turn not away.”
If a Samaritan came to borrow from a Jew, he gave him the cold-shoulder, and vice-versa, but Jesus said,
“Here, if you become my disciple you’ve got to give to him that asks you whether he’s a Jew or a Gentile.”
It doesn’t make any difference sumed annually. Thirty million men and boys smoke. Allowing it takes ten minutes to consume a cigarette, it would take an army of two million six hundred thousand men, smoking ten hours a day, to consume the annual output of the United States. I have heard keen, shrewd men say that they would about as soon their boy would drink as smoke cigarettes. Oh, if you keep on smoking cigarettes the way you are doing you’ll wake up some morning when your brain has run out on the pillow.
It’s almost certain to lead to drink, they say. It grinds a man’s will in to powder, racks his nerves, ruins his heart, deadens his sensibilities. You see him going up the street with a million dollars for dogs. Well, I like a good dog. My favorite is an Airedale. But I don’t like to see a fool woman hugging and kissing a pug-nosed dog. A woman must love something but I don’t call a pug dog something. Perhaps that’s one reason why your husband isn’t more affectionate. Any man with good rich, red blood in his veins don’t care to play second fiddle to a bow-legged
bull dog.
Last year we spent eight hundred million dollars for jewelry. All right! I love to see nice jewelry if you can afford it. I love to see it.
Last year we spent six hundred million dollars for autos. I wish everybody could afford an auto. I think it is one of the grandest inventions for the comfort, the happiness, of the American people. It makes a man forget. He spins out into the country in the motor and forgets his cares. I wish we all could afford it.
We spent three hundred million dollars last year for candy; thirty-six million dollars for soda-water; twenty-six million dollars for chewing gum; we spent more money for gum than we give for missions of all churches of all denominations. Why? “Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say?”
Personal Conduct Is Final Proof.
Is Final Proof.
“Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say”—in your personal conduct? I believe the law of Moses was the best law ever given. The law of Moses said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; limb for limb; the man that sheds blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”
Jesus Christ in his teachings did not abrogate the law of Moses. He said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and if you did there’d be no “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, or limb for limb.”
If everybody loved God and served him, what a happy place this old world would be, and if everybody could do the will of God! Everybody, my friends, has some verse in the Bible that’s hard for you. Here’s the hardest verse in the Bible for me to live up to—honest confession is good for the soul—“Resist not evil. If a man smite thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also.” I don’t know whether I have gotten down to that one cheek basis or not. If a fellow would swat me on one cheek, I think I’d clear for action like a battleship.
“Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you and do good to them that hate you and pray for them that despitefully use and persecute you.”
If you think that’s easy try it out. I’m trying my level best to live up to it. I’ve got a combative nature. I’ve got a temper like a sheet-iron stove—a bunch of shavings and a bundle of paper and a match will make it red hot in two minutes.
I want to think I’m making a little headway. Ask Mrs. Sunday—she’s lived with me nearly thirty years, and see if I’ve changed. If I should happen to get on a two hundred and fifty pound pressure and head out of the yard without orders and run by every danger signal and blow out a cylinder head, break a side-rod and throw a tire and go into the ditch, I’d feel worse about it than you do, but if you think its easy, you get out and take and pray for some old weasel-eyed, hatchet-faced, grim-visaged, cadaverous, lantern-jawed neighborhood gossiper that’s assasi-
nating your character and peddling a ot of lies up and down the neighborhood, get down on your knees, and say–“Now Lord –.”
No Disgrace in Upholding Principle.
Suppose you did turn the right cheek. There isn’t one fellow in a thousand that would eat you, but suppose he would. Suppose he knocked you down, suppose he loosened a molar. Jesus Christ could have had twelve legions of angels to come and fight for him but he didn’t call.
I was preaching in a town in Iowa and I was stopping at a hotel, and the phone rang, wanted me to come to the phone. I went and found a woman’s voice at the other end. She said,
“Mr. Sunday?”
“Yes, mom.”
“Will you please come up to my house? I want to see you.”
“No, mom. I’ll not. I’ve been preaching for twenty years and I’ve never yet crossed the threshold of any man’s home alone.” I’m not afraid of any skirt on God’s dirt, or anybody else. No, sir!
But I want to serve notice on you and the dirty, stinking, black-hearted degenerate, whiskey gang, if I don’t live what I preach I’ll leave the platform and I have never allowed a woman to come and see me alone.
A woman said, “Mr. Sunday, I want to see you alone.”
“I don’t see anybody but Mrs. Sunday alone. If you’ve got anything you want to talk to me about, sis, you do it right out here.”
I said, “I will come up,” she begged so hard, “but I will bring somebody with me.”
I turned to a friend and said, “Let’s go up, and see what’s the matter.” So we went up and she had no phone. Her neighbor had a phone. We went in and found a woman bruised, mutilated, print of a man’s hand upon her cheek, hair disheveled, clothing torn, and I said,
Severe Trials Test Out Our Virtues.
Your virtues are best discerned when subjected to the severest trials. The hammer displays the excellence of the diamond and the furnace ascertains the purity of the gold. Meekness is a dormant quality until injuries call it out.
You let your character be blasted; you let your interests be ruined; then it will appear how far these qualities govern and control you. Remember Christianity is a cross as well as a crown; it is martyrdom as well as coronation; it is exile as well as home; it is tears and partings as well as reunions.
“Why call ye me Lord, Lord and do not the things I say,” my friends, in your home and in your family life?
What motive animated your marriage? Was it the basis of mutual attraction? Why did you marry that girl? Because she was a good looker and could get herself up attractively?
Why did you marry that young fellow? Because you thought that when the old man kicks off and the
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will is probated that he’d get something that he hasn’t the ability to earn? Why did you marry him?
Now, whenever a girl gets too proud to marry a young fellow with a hundred and sixty acres of land and a hundred red hogs and a lot of cows, because he can’t tell a tango from a load of hay—say, you put it down, will you, as a lead-pipe cinch that she’ll either die an old maid or she’ll marry some fellow on ten per with one pair of Hole-proofs.
Girls, if I were you I’d rather marry a man who is man enough to wear a pair of forty-nine cent overalls than to hook up to some Cuthbert who can play the mandolin or the ukelele and smoke Turkish cigarettes and live off the old man’s pension. That’s good dope.
Moral Requisites Needed for Marriage.
If I had the power to enact my convictions into law, I would require and compel that the prospective husband be able to show something more than the mere price of a marriage license. He’d have to show an ability and a disposition to maintain a home; he’d have to show himself sound in mind, sound in body and sound in morals.
I want to tell you, generations yet unborn have the inherent right to be well-born.
The three plagues of modern times are tuberculosis, alcoholism and venereal diseases. The first is subject to some sanitation—tuberculosis. The second, the saloon, alcoholism, is supposed to be restricted by the law, while the third has no control other than the whims and the fancies, the directions and the passions and the lusts of lustful men and of women.
Like produces like—in horses, hogs, cats, dogs, canary birds and human beings. These are days when the farmers of this country are spending millions of dollars to develop the highest, purest strain of blood in animals all over our land. They have learned, my friend, that blood tells. Blood tells.
Somebody has said the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world. The child gets his notion of God or the devil largely from his mother, and the devil finds no fault with the mother who sends her children to play in the street for fear they will wear out the carpet if they stay in the house, and by trying to shine in society she has no light for her own home, and by spinning society yarns a mother helps to make the rope that hangs her own boy.
Mother’s Influence On Child Noticed.
They say that Phidias, erecting a statue of Minerva, so inwrought his image in her shield that it was forever impossible to remove the image without effacing the statue,—so the mother ineffaceably imprints her characteristics upon her child.
They say of Lord Byron that his mother was beautiful, haughty, intolerably proud, and in Lord Byron we have the very essence of those characteristics.
Oh, what a crown awaits for the mother of the Wesleys! I’d rather be old Susanna Wesley, with John and Charles and that brood of kids than to have been Queen Victoria with her Prince of Wales and the crowned
A friend of mine riding on a train out in Iowa—a fellow sitting right behind him reached over and touched him on the shoulder and said, “Say, pard, do you believe in a woman’s love?” My friend said, “Yes.”
“Well, I used to but I changed my mind about all of them but one,” and he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, unrolled it—a photograph—and leaning over he shoved it in front of my friend and he said, “That’s my mother.”
He said, “I was married. The tongues of gossip started; they told my wife I was false—it was all a lie. She believed them, got a divorce, married. Home broken up,” but he said,
“That woman’s mother. She would follow me across the country and if I were condemned she would have a rope put around her neck or sit down in the electric chair, and die for me, sir.”
Young Men Needed In American Church.
You don’t miss them until they are gone. There are fifteen million young men in this country between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five.
Fourteen million of them are not members of any church. Seven million of them attend occasionally.
Nine million never darken a church door. Church memberships increased one and one-half percent last year.
The population increased three percent. Crime increased nineteen percent and seventy percent of our criminals are young men under twenty-one years of age.
“Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say?”—in your home and in your family life and in society?
Wait a minute! I have no quarrel with society—only against the sinful usages of society. I believe in society with both hands up but I believe the most God-forsaken, good-for-nothing, useless women on earth, in an American society, woman whose life is frappes and there is nothing, my friends, to her but a frame upon which to hang fashionable clothes, and a digestive apparatus to digest highly seasoned foods.
Oh, genius and talent are choked by the insane desire to mould ourselves according to the social demands until we become infamous nonentities in the world! And if you only knew the inner life of many of the wealthier class you’d know how unhappy and dissatisfied these social butterflies are with their life and with the emptiness of it all and the way they live.
Right Kind of Society is Approved.
I believe in parties. Jesus Christ didn’t say, “When you have a party simply invite in your friends.” No!
He said, “Go get the poor, the maim- ed, the halt, the blind, the lame; they can’t return the compliment, so there’d be no recompense.” You apply the gospel and it will abolish the sins of society; it will drive them out.
We’ve got today the severest retribution against the impurity that lurks in the alley and in the cellar and in the fan tan, the opium joints and the coke joints, my friends, and all that —the stale beer joints—and we cry against it; we hurl the indignation of the law against it but we become
lenient as impurity arises in affluence, high social standing, and finally we are disposed to palliate if not apologize for their cussedness.
Hags of uncleanness today, they walk our streets, they ride in their limousines, sail in their private yachts, they look from behind French plate-glass and hide behind rich tapestries, they walk over Persian rugs, sit beneath the flash of the candelabra of wealth and they quaff their wine from gold or silver tankard and they eat from Haviland or hand-painted china. And society today is fast hastening to the judgment that overtook Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Sodom and Gomorrah, when God Almighty made old Mount Vesuvius vomit and puke in a hemorrhage of lava until he buried Pompeii fifty feet deep beneath the red-hot cinders and ashes where their vileness was sculptured on the wall and on the pillars of their temples.
I don’t know, people of Richmond, I don’t know how God Almighty will purify, whether he will start with a fire or with a flood or with a famine or with a pestilence or with a war, but he will do something. You can’t defy God all your days and lift your puny, infinitesimal, mediocre, pigmy selves up in defiance of the omnipotent and omnipresent God. No! No!
Here is a bunch, my friends, of high rollers, down in some palatial home; all of them dressed decollete (that means their collar around their waist) and there they have a retinue of servants to wait on them and they are hitting the booze. They are playing bridge to see who will lug home the cream pitcher, my friends, or the diamond or a pair of dancing pumps or silk hose.
“Why call ye me Lord, Lord?”
There seems to be no occasion to use brains in many of our society women. Oh, if you can join gracefully in the inanities of a dinner you will pass muster but if you happen to be familiar with anything that the real men in this country are doing, and happen to show familiarity with it, you will be looked upon as a frightful bore; they will wish that you were out.
Oh, some of our women are selfish, they are piggish, they are content, with comfortable living quarters, a good dinner, polo, bridge, auto, fine clothes, box at the opera. They will play bridge all night and all morning; they will go to a matinee in the afternoon; they will hire a taxi to take them home and then borrow twenty-five cents from the hired girl to start the gas meter.
Oh, many of them are empty shells; they are meaningless, accomplish nothing. The horizon of their lives seems to be bounded by visions and dreams of booze and of flesh-pots.
This Man Did Not Know When to Quit.
Like a fellow out in Iowa. He was the champion hot biscuit and buck-wheat pancake eater in the county– hot flapjacks and sausage with little sage in it would disappear down his old esophagus like flies down the throat of an alligator. One day he undertook the contract of disposing of a large slice of old-fashioned, hickory-curved ham and it scraped its rebellious way down his esophagus for about two inches and it lodged as tight as a bullet in a rusty gun and he hove and hove, like a ship in a storm but it wouldn’t move. His old eyes rolled like two buckeyes in a bowl of clabber but it didn’t move, and his old trombone neck lengthened and shortened in turn but it didn’t budge.
He got up careened across the floor like a horse with the blind staggers, but it didn’t budge, sir, and then his host said to him,
“Bill, you get down on all fours” and he went out and got a clapboard (they used to shingle houses with them when I was a boy) about that wide and about that long made out of hickory or oak. They’d stay on for twenty or thirty years and so he went out and got an old-fashioned hickory clapboard.
“You get down on all fours and when I hit, you swaller.” And he wound himself up like a calf player and he swung round a he swatted Bill on both hemispheres.
He jumped up and he said, “My Gosh! It’s gone.” So you people are being choked to death trying to gulp down the forbidden things of the world. It may take some of the good hard clapboard raps of the gospel to dislodge it but I have come as your friend to help you and I hope I might, lest it choke out every spark of manhood and womanhood in the world.
Many of our young men will spoutter, splurge, spend their daddy’s fortune, engage in four years of convention and never utter a sensible sentence, spend their money on fast women and wine, haven’t brains enough to amuse and entertain a playful kitten, and many of our girls—oh, they will flirt and they will paint, if you would kiss one of them you’d die of painter’s colic. When a little sissy comes in with a dress six inches above her shoe-tops and you meet one of these with a rig like that and have prayer-meeting thoughts. No, Sir!
Oh, the painted-faced, manicured- fingered, pencil-browed, fudge-eating, gum-chewing, rag-time, singing, jazzing, whizzing, giggling, nutting, frazzled-haired sissies that sling the batter all over the kitchen —they will sit down at the piano and sing, “Oh, does the spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?”
It’s a good deal harder to marry off a girl that has been pawed over by every yap in the community than it is to fatten a sheep on baked shavings or pineapple ice. You can’t goldbrick a sharp-eyed suitor any easier than you can fasten a pair of pajamas on a billy goat. And by Joe, I’d give more for one good, God-fearing, pant-patching, sock-darning, bread-making, praying mother in Israel than I would for a whole trainload of these little frizzle-headed sissies of our day, my friends, and the way they are living and how they are going. “Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say”—in business?
Wait a minute! I believe God call men to business; I believe that righteousness in business will lead not only to the success of that business but to a tremendous influence upon moral character in the community, as well. You never can separate your manhood from your business and when you divorce your business from religion God Almighty will divorce himself from you.
Some Business Practices Condemned.
Too often business consists in getting all you can and keeping out of the penitentiary. A multimillionaire once asked by a friend of mine, “How many men have you known who reached great wealth, the possession of riches, that not injured their character?”
And he replied, “Not one.”
“Oh, if I don’t sell the sensational papers,” said a newspaper friend to me, “my competitor will.”
And said a barber, “If I don’t keep my shop open on the Sabbath, my neighbor will.”
Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale was commanded by the king of Sweden to appear in the palace and sing for the entertainment of visiting royalty one Sabbath. She refused to go, saying, “I can not.”
And when the king commanded her presence, she refused.
He jumped into the carriage of state and was driven to her home, and as her liege Lord, commanded her to come and entertain the visiting royalty. She arose and said:
“I owe my loyalty and my allegiance to a greater and higher and mightier monarch than thou—Jesus Christ—and I will not go.”
Bluntly put, my friends, I think this: The trouble with America is the lack of moral principle. New moral statues may be needed but statutes cannot put morals where morals do not exist.
I tell you men of Richmond tonight, the thoughtful business men all over this land are awakening to the perils that threaten our cities and our civilization in the wide-spread disregard for the old-time principles of integrity, honesty and manhood and business men everywhere are recognizing as never before that if civic righteousness prevails, if graft in high places is overthrown, if the great avalanche of vice that threatens our nation is stopped, if the tidal wave of intemperance and dissipation that threatens the young manhood of our land and imperils our destiny as a nation — if these evil forces are going to be defeated it will be done by and through the religion of Jesus Christ. That’s the only religion.
“Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say—” in politics?I am not a partisan. I believe in the man instead of the party. Al- though I am a Republican, anti-sa- loon Republican, I vote for a Demo- crat if he is a better man than the Republican. I didn’t vote for Wilson, but I’ll back him to the last ditch, because he’s a great man.
“Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say—” in politics?
The trouble is, my friend, that the Lincoln, the Clay, the Webster, the Sumner, the Calhoun and the Doug- las type of American statesman have been supplanted by the good-for-no- thing, God-forsaken, rat-hole, tin- horn, weasel-eyed, peanut grafting politicians of our day and yet the day of politicians of that kind and of that brand is over with; they are through with that type of politicians in America. We are getting through with that class of fellows.
The trouble is we have no God in American politics; we’ve got a gang of devils. We’ve got the devil of of- fice-seeking, we’ve got the devil of fraud, we’ve got the devil of graft, we’ve got the devil in justice, we’ve got the devil of wastefulness; we’ve got no God; we’ve got plenty of rum, we’ve got plenty of rye, we’ve got plenty of beer, we’ve got plenty of pork barrels, we’ve got plenty of city, plenty of state, plenty of nat- ional frauds—no God.
I do not believe in the union of church and of state. No, sir! And you never can unite, sir, and dictate and run this government by any ecclesiastical power on God Almighty’s dirt. Never! Never!
We will swim our horses, my friends, in blood to their bridles first.
I don’t believe in the union of church and of state, but I’d like to see a party recognize open and above board, without disguise, without can- the God in whose name Columbus discovered America, the God in whose name George Washington and the Continental Army won our victory in the dark days of ’76.
I’d like to see them come out openly and acknowledge the God who protected our armies of ’76, of 1812, of 1848, of 1861, of 1898, and the God who hovered over the Stars and Stripes in the conflict of the world
the God of our happy homes, the God of our virtuous men and the God of our virtuous women, the God of our little children and the God of our bountiful harvests, the God of our prosperous nation.
God to be Recognized In All Walks of Life.
“Oh,” said a fellow to me in Illi- nois, “Bill, it wouldn’t be fair to put in the plank of a political party the recognition of a God when we’ve got a lot of people in this country that don’t believe in a God.”
Oh, we’ve got a lot of mutts that don’t believe in virtue; we’ve got people that don’t believe in the sanctity of the marriage ties; we’ve got people who don’t believe in property rights; we’ve got people who want to rob, who want to steal; we’ve got people that want to rape; we’ve got panderers, white slavers that want to seduce and sell the flower of our girlhood into slavery; we’ve got men that want to burn; we’ve got men that want to kill; we’ve got men that want to stick a gun under your nose.
Would you refuse to make laws against the criminal element because we have got an element that don’t believe in God, don’t believe in decency, don’t believe in Jesus Christ?
Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) 