Former professional baseball player-turned urban evangelist. Follow this daily blog that chronicles the life and ministry of revivalist preacher William Ashley "Billy" Sunday (1862-1935)
Cited in: The Philadelphia Evening Ledger. January 5, 1915:5. – William Rader
Billy Sunday is not easily defined. Power conceals its secret. Psychologists would call it hypnotism; theologians, the power of the spirit; the ethical teacher, the gift of truth; the dramatist, the art of the player; while others declare:
His strength is as the strength of ten, Because his heart is pure.
Billy Sunday is a good actor. Each sermon is carefully prepared, and some of it read from manuscript. Certain climaxes are illustrated. At one point he slides to a base; at another, kneels, or leaps upon the pulpit desk, or smashes a chair to pieces. Edward Everett did not more carefully prepare a speech with its proper gestures than does this evangelist build his sermons. The local color with which he decorates his main thought is taken from the city in which he speaks.
His imagination interested me. Speaking on “The Grenadier,” the consideration of his theme invited the use of the imagination, and he gave it full play. The sermon was an application of military attributes to practical life, a rebuke to the “wind-jammer” of the prayer meeting, and an appeal to the man who has taken an oath to be good to go out and honor it. He assailed the “saphead” who criticises the Church, and the description he gave of Daniel in the lion’s den and of the head of John the Baptist on a charger will not be forgotten.
I confess to a liking for his so-called slang. Most of it is plain English with a punch in it. It is the punch which preachers and editors and people who use words generally lack. Words are like shot, made to strike, and especially when used to influence great bodies of people. It is refreshing to hear a man say what he thinks and say it as he pleases—a thing most public men signally fail to do.
Cited from: The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. January 2, 1915:3.
Miss Grace Saxe, “Billy” Sunday’s Prayer Meeting Organizer, Tells of Her Conversion.
“Billy” Sunday’s right-hand woman, whose other name is Miss Grace Saxe, is just as much a woman as though she didn’t hold one of the most important positions in the whole Sunday organization, a position which might make even a man forget all else but the responsibilities of his work.
For one of the very first things she did on arriving in Philadelphia several days in advance of the opening of the campaign was to launch forth on an energetic shopping tour.
“I simply had to have some pretty clothes to wear, to conduct my meetings,” she said, smiling nervously, at “Billy” Sunday’s home, 1914 Spring Garden street, happy, but exhausted, at the termination of her first work in Philadelphia.
Miss Saxe is the person whom Mr. Sunday has selected for the very vital work of organizing the neighborhood prayer meetings in the various cities where the revivals are conducted, and it is her particular duty to bring religion into as many of the private homes as she can possibly get into touch with and to make it a permanent factor of those homes.
“Our work would be a very poor thing indeed,” she said earnestly, “if we worked at these people up to a state of high religious fervor only to let them drop back again and cool off soon after the campaign was over.”
TELLS OF HER CONVERSION
“Although the revivals have not yet started, I cannot help feeling that the way Philadelphia has received us has been nothing short of magnificent. Already 5000 homes have been thrown open to these prayer meetings and more than 15,000 volunteers have come forward and signified their intention of fostering these meetings permanently and keeping the spirit of Christ in the home indefinitely.
“One phase of the work that I am particularly interested in is teaching people how to read the Bible. There are many who have a great desire to study the Book of God, but who do not know how to go about it, and organizing teaching, high school girls and women in city houses, into Bible classes is my chief duty.
Miss Saxe’s career has been an interesting one. Born in Iowa, she “entered” St. Louis to accept a position as court stenographer, and it was while she was energetically hitting the keys in the city that something occurred which, to use her own expression, “made her see the light.”
“Up until that time,” she said, a little shamefacedly, “I was rather an unregenerate creature. I used to come to town in Lyons, Dr. A. B. Simpson came to town and I was engaged to go and take down in shorthand a series of his lectures. There were about ten of them, and in addition to having to hear them I also had to go all over them again, transcribing them on the typewriter.
“TURNS DOWN” ROOSEVELT
“They made me think, and soon after I began a very careful study of the Bible. Later on I was engaged to work with the Rev. Dwight L. Moody, of Chicago, and after that I traveled abroad with Torrey and Alexander. By that time the work of making a Christian out of me was completed.
“Later on I happened to be in Egypt taking a little vacation when I received a request to go up the Nile and meet Mr. Roosevelt at Luxor, there to take down some of his lectures, but I found I was spoiled for that sort of thing. I had become so interested in religious work that nothing else seemed to satisfy, and it was soon after this that I accepted Mr. Sunday’s offer to become a member of his organization, and have worked with him ever since.”
Miss Saxe has the calm, placid Madonna-like face of one who is at peace with the world and herself.
“The test of his wonderful work is in the results that he gets. Day after day hundreds of testimonials come in which show the lasting conversions that he is responsible for.
“Only the other day a man sent a letter from Waterloo, Iowa, where a revival was conducted some three years ago, saying that he was thankful for the change that had been brought about in him, that he was willing even to have his name used if other conversions might be effected thereby.
“For 30 years this Johnny Bates had been a confirmed drunkard. His wife got disgusted and divorced him, his children grew away from him and he went down into the very depths. Three years ago he hit the sawdust trail and since then has never touched a drop. He now holds a splendid lucrative position and his wife has remarried him. That is but one of the many cases which testify to the indisputably good work that Mr. Sunday is doing.”
Cited from: The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. January 2, 1915:3.
One of Billy’s favorite sermons was When chickens come home to Roost. He would preach it often and usually in the first 1-2 weeks of a revival.
What was the sermon about?
In “Chickens Come Home to Roost,” Billy Sunday argues that sin is never isolated or harmless—it inevitably returns with consequences that grow over time. What begins as a small compromise develops into habit, then character, and ultimately destruction. He emphasizes that sin corrupts the individual internally before it manifests outwardly, dulling the conscience and weakening the will. Sunday also stresses that sin is not merely personal; it affects families, communities, and even nations. He dismantles common excuses—denial, delay, and comparison—and insists that no one escapes moral accountability. The sermon builds toward an urgent appeal: repentance must happen now, before sin’s consequences fully mature and bring irreversible damage.
Representative Quote: “Your sin may seem quiet tonight, but it will rise up tomorrow and demand its wages.”
ONE of the most impressive and successful days in the great campaign was Mother’s Day, as suggested by Rev. Mr. Sunday. The following request was published:
Every person is requested to wear a white flower or ribbon to-day in honor of mother. If your mother is alive do her an act of kindness. Telegraph or write to her, or give her a gift to express your love. If mother is not alive, perform an act of kindness to somebody else’s mother. The services at the tabernacle will be for mothers, although everybody is invited. Businessmen are invited to close their places of business from two to four o’clock, or at least to let as many employees off as possible. An offering will be taken at the tabernacle to be given to the Woman’s Club to be distributed to the charities of the city as the club deems best.
The Billy Sunday campaign published a souvenir booklet in 1910 that summarized the Springfield, Illinois campaign (Feb 26 – Apr 12, 1909). The following narrative shared much about the Rev. William A. ‘Billy’ Sunday
Rev. W. A. Sunday
WILLIAM ASHLEY SUNDAY is the best beloved and the most abused, the simplest and the most misunderstood, the most soulful and the most like a vaudeville performer, the most powerful in oratory and the least appealing to the emotions, the most persuasive and the most controversial, the most scholarly and the plainest, not to say coarsest, the greatest poet in essence and the greatest scrapper, of any man on the forum, the platform, or the stage of the world today.
He has been styled, the polygonal preacher, because he has so many sides, each a complete, finished, forceful fact. A character picture of the man, to be complete, must be a description of each of these baker’s dozen sides of his personality, none of which is much more important than any other one. The most that can be done within a small space—or indeed within any limitation of space—is to sketch in broad lines the mere outlines of this evangelist who is preaching the gospel of peace on earth and fighting the devil with the hottest of fire at the same time.
His father was killed in the civil war. The little boy was sent to the Iowa home for soldiers’ orphans. Later he made his own living at a youthful age, and his school teacher of that time says she would often watch him on the playground and wonder whether he would be the greatest crook or the greatest power for good in America—she was even then sure he would be one of the two. The boy took the right hand road.
When a young man he was a locomotive fireman on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and lived at Marshalltown. This was also the home of the famous A. C. Anson, captain of the old Chicagos, who watched Billy Sunday play baseball on corner lots while at home in Marshalltown. Anson took him to Chicago, discovered in him a great baseball player, and Sunday held the record for base running for years, a record which he still holds; was the second man chosen on the All-American team to tour the world—an accident to his knee kept him from making the tour—and was a popular idol of the fans.
An old time catcher for the Louisville team says that in those days when en route the rest of the men would play poker in the Pullman, but Billy Sunday was always back on the cushions with a book. He has kept close to books ever since. He has a remarkable faculty of choosing the very best and most authoritative writing on any particular subject and reading that only—and hence the range of subjects upon which he is thoroughly and accurately informed, includes almost everything from histology to astronomy and from bacteriology to history—it is a little interesting to notice that chemistry is the one topic unmentioned in his sermons. Three medical college professors who met at the end of his sermon which includes a half hour of the deepest microscopical pathology, agreed that William A. Sunday is the only layman they ever heard or read who was accurate in all he said about medical science.
One night a bunch of baseball players strolling along a Chicago street ran into a curbstone evangelist and stopped to be amused. Sunday stayed after the others went on. He went from there to the Pacific Garden mission, where he was converted. He kept on playing baseball, and nobody who ever heard it will ever forget his own description of how the others of that famous Chicago team approved his home run into Christianity.
A little later he was employed by the Chicago Young Men’s Christian Association at a small salary, only part of it paid during the panic of 1893, and refusing offers of $500 a month to return to the diamond. As a part of his work, he addressed groups of men—he always did know men, because of his early life and hard struggles. The addresses became longer and stronger with the growth of the work and experience in it. That great evangelist, Wilbur F. Chapman, took Sunday away from the Chicago Y.M.C.A. to be his assistant. Sunday learned the art of evangelizing and after learning it thoroughly treated it as Napoleon treated the art of war—he re-made it for himself, so that its old practitioners hardly recognize it, and at the same time made it produce victories hitherto undreamed of. The William A. Sunday methods of campaigning for Christ are unlike any others; they include the best of those of the past and many things unique; probably only Sunday could use them successfully in all their details; but it seems certain that they have factors not found in most others which really are the corner stones of successful work in evangelism. Some of the chief parts of the art of evangelism, as practiced by William A. Sunday, are these: Absolute accuracy in every statement made, whether one of the essential parts of the argument, or merely an illustration; hew close to the line that Jesus Christ laid down, regardless of the falling chips, and wherever that line leads; use language that everybody can understand, never talk down to an audience, but be lucid to the most ignorant while you are talking up to the most scholarly persons before you; avoid sectarianism; demand united work from all the evangelical churches in the city, and push united work by all the members of those churches; roast the skin of vice and sin in all its forms, from backsliding and carelessness to murder and adultery, rub salt into the burnt flesh, and then apply a healing balm that causes the object of the criticism to leave the tabernacle chastened in spirit, but loving the rod that smote him; avoid all fads and fancies, all tangential movements of society, but do a common thing in a most unusual way; and—many others. Starting with small towns and a few hundred converts at each series of meetings, the same plan of campaign has been used for all the years involving campaigns in cities of all sizes, and the first meetings years ago were, so far as Mr. Sunday is concerned, almost exactly like the meetings in Springfield. Of course, some minor modifications have been made, but these are few. Always there are the first sermons to get the church members back out of the world into the influence of Christ and to get the public to come to the tabernacle—the public seems to find its greatest attraction in hearing church-member hypocrites and Pharisees skinned like eels. Always the strenuosity of the sermons almost imperceptibly lessens gradually until the preacher who preaches as man never preached before is less athletic and more rhetorical about the middle of the series. Then, to the amazement of people who judged the man from his first pulpit stunts, the Reverend William Ashley Sunday preaches like the great orator that he is, the scholar that he is, the poet-philosopher that he is. This many sided man cannot be even sketched within a hundred pages. There is competent authority for saying of him these superlatives as being strictly true: He understands the minds and feelings of men as few men ever have done. He is one of the greatest orators the world has ever seen—and this is proved by the results of his work.
He is one of the most remarkable stylists in literature, his perfect imitation in one hour of the styles of Carlyle, Gibbon, Ingersoll, and several other writers of individual styles being an unprecedented feat.
He is said by scientists to be the most—and indeed the only—perfectly accurate preacher in matters of science. And a large part of his sermons deal with science.
He appeals entirely to the reason of the people, and rarely or never to their emotions, and in this he is the greatest of evangelists in the opinion of many people.
In numbers of converts, dramatic height of scenes, and wonderful stirring of the audience, several of his meetings have eclipsed anything in the history of evangelism since pentecost—and the most of these have been meetings for men.
Another popular sermon for Billy Sunday during the 1915-1916 campaigns was the Secret of Failure.
In “Secret of Failure,” Billy Sunday argues that failure in life is not accidental but rooted in disobedience to known truth. Using Jeremiah 5:5, he contends that God’s blessings are available, but people forfeit them by breaking His laws. The central issue is not ignorance but willful rebellion—people know what is right yet refuse to do it. Sunday emphasizes that sin is often subtle and socially acceptable, not just gross immorality, and that even church members can live in quiet compromise. He warns that partial obedience, moral neglect, and conformity to the world lead to spiritual defeat. External religion—church attendance, respectability, or profession of faith—cannot substitute for genuine obedience and transformation. True success, he insists, comes from aligning one’s life with God’s revealed will. The sermon builds toward a direct appeal: stop excusing sin, confess it honestly, and live out what you already know to be true, or failure—spiritual and moral—is inevitable.
Quotes from the sermon
“Your failure isn’t because you don’t know better—it’s because you won’t do better.”
“God tells you what to do, and you nod your head—but you never move your feet.”
“Some men are too good to be counted among the wicked—and too bad to be counted among the saved.”
“A half-obedient man is a whole failure.”
“You can sit in church and hear the truth every week—and still go to hell with a Bible in your lap.”
Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) 