he knows that he must live just as high as he preaches, and every sermon he preaches to the multitudes that flock to hear him, he first preaches just as prayerfully to himself.

Could Sunday once be robbed of the comfort, peace and rest he derives from his golden text, and the almost hourly consolation and inspiration he finds flowing out of it, like water from the smitten rock, he would no doubt soon be shorn of his strength. In his constant use of his golden text there seems to be repeated in him the experience of the wrestler in the fable, who was at once made fresh and strong again every time he touched the earth.

Here is a list of the many towns and cities in which Sunday has held meetings:

There are one hundred and forty-two names in the list given above. To say that Sunday has spoken to an average of fifteen thousand different persons for each meeting, would be a very low estimate, and yet it would make the total number to which he has preached, two million one hundred and thirty thousand, and probably half as many more have read printed reports of his sermons. It is not likely that any other man ever preached to so many people.

To say that there have been an average of four thousand converts enrolled for each meeting held, would also be putting it low, but at that figure the grand total would be five hundred and sixty-eight thousand! And yet there are people-and some of them are preachers-who do not believe that God is using Billy Sunday.

XIX

A HARD HITTER OF THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC

T is doubtful if any man in modern times has done

more than Billy Sunday to help the cause of tem

perance. At all events, this is the inference from the vigorous way in which the whisky interests oppose him. The liquor men seem to know his engagements almost as soon as he makes them, and weeks ahead of his meetings they begin to circulate all manner of lying slanders against him. It is well authenticated that they spend thousands of dollars every year in doing

this.

His great booze sermon is one of the most effective

and hard-hitting specimens of eloquence against the saloon that ever fell from the lips of man. If every man in the country could hear him hurl it forth, as Jove hurled thunderbolts, it would hasten the coming of the glad day when the whisky dragon shall be forever destroyed.

Sunday has done effective work for the cause of temperance, not only in his own revival campaigns, but on special occasions between meetings. In his campaigns he always observes Monday as a rest day, but it is seldom a day of rest for him. He is so besieged with calls from other towns and cities to pay them a visit that almost every Monday he is speaking at some other point, fifty or a hundred, or even two hundred miles away from the place of his own meeting, and in such addresses he

generally gives the whisky business some telling sledgehammer blows.

Many times temperance interests have chartered a special Pullman car, into which they have loaded Sunday and several of his party, and sent them out to cover as much territory as could be reached in this way in the few days intervening between meetings. This was done in the state of Illinois with such success that hundreds of saloons were closed, and many counties went dry.

Beginning with the first of January, 1908, Sunday conducted a five weeks' campaign in Bloomington, Ill., a city of twenty-seven thousand in the central part of the state. This meeting resulted in forty-seven hundred people taking their stand for God and righteousness. After a few days' intermission he entered upon another campaign at Decatur, a city of thirty-four thousand, forty miles south of Bloomington, and this meeting resulted in six thousand two hundred and nine conversions. The next meeting was at Charleston, about seventy-five miles southeast of Decatur.

The Illinois spring election came on a Tuesday in the midst of this last campaign. For many days previous Sunday had been going out to different towns and cities over the state, giving his "booze sermon and then rushing back to Charleston for the evening meeting.

When the spring elections were over it was found that fifteen hundred saloons had been knocked out in one day, and much of this was directly the result of Sunday's efforts. In Decatur sixty-three saloons were closed, and in Charleston twenty-one were put out of business.

A goodly number of other towns and cities that had been considered hopelessly wet, were listed in the dry column. And so it is safe to say that many of the hard

est blows the saloon giant has ever received have been dealt it by Billy Sunday.

On the eve of the great campaign for state wide prohibition in West Virginia, Sunday covered the state in a special train, speaking at several places every day, and there is no doubt whatever but that his strenuous labors in that campaign turned the tide that brought in the great wave of an overwhelming majority for the cause of God and public decency.

It is quite fitting, in this connection, to quote a few statements from the "booze sermon," to show how unflinchingly and courageously Sunday deals sledgehammer blows full in the face of the liquor traffic:

The saloon is the sum of all villainies. It is worse than war or pestilence. It is the crime of crimes. It is the parent of crimes, and the mother of sins. It is the appalling source of misery, poverty and sorrow. It causes three-fourths of the crime, and of course is the source of three-fourths of the taxes to support that crime. And to license such an incarnate fiend of hell is the dirtiest, most low down, damnable business on top of this old earth.

The saloons fill the jails and the penitentiaries, the poorhouses and insane asylums. Who has to pay the bills? The landlord who doesn't get the rent, because the money goes for whisky, the butcher and the grocer and the charitable person who takes pity on the children of drunkards, and the taxpayer who supports the insane asylums and other institutions, that the whisky business fills with human wrecks.

"Do away with the accursed business and you will not have to put up to support them. Who gets the money? The saloon keepers and the brewers and the distillers, while the whisky fills the land with misery,