The Spokane press. [volume] (Spokane, Wash.) 1902-1939, 1909-02-04

PRESS CORRESPONDENT SAYS
HE CAME, SAW AND CON-
QUERED AND TELLS WHY
AND HOW he DID IT.
BY TOM DILLON.

pLf MPiA, Feb. 4.-Billy Sunday
came, talked and conquered | saw
1000 men, packed to suffocatlon in
a vitiated atmosphere, jump to
their feet, cheer and scream in the
poignancy of their emotions, as
Billy Sunday, like a Pederewski,
played on them with master
hand.
II Billy Sunday had been before
the legislature making the closing
speech for the local option bill, and
the vote taken as he concluded his
strange, hypnotic mixture OF
prayer, acrobatic tumbling. exhort-
alton and TRADE, the bill would
have become law by an over
whelming majority He would
have swept all opposition before
him by his cyclonic appeal. So in
tense is his emotion, so mighty his
struggle with word and gesture to
express it, that cosmic metaphor is
not ill placed in describing him.
knew of Billy Sunday score
of years back. Shrined in my inn
agination he was hero who shone
with just a mite less briliancy than
old king" Kelley. And when the
news came that Billy Sunday had
quilted the essential and all i'm
portant field of baseball to take up
the inconsequential business of a
minister, in the paganism of youth
I resented it, and mourned him as
lost. After listening to him and
to those who have listened to him,
one must admit that the amount of
good he is doing is incalculable,
beyond computation or mathemat-
fcal conjecture.
Given a great issue. backed by
the irresistible and indisputable
force of morality. an issue suspect
fble of temperamental treatment,
and Billy Sunday is great
preacher and greater pleader
Billy Sunday, armed with cold
logic, unsupported by pathos or
farce, would never rise above medi-
ocrity. But passionately conscious
Of the crimes and treasons or
whisky; with the whole tragic
story of drunkenness in his heart.
with the picture of wretched,
squalid homes, starving, degener-
STE children. despairing and heart
Broken wives before his eye, then
he is himself and reaches the full
scope of his oratorical and dra
matte power.
| doubt if Billy Sunday could ap-
pear before a congress of physi-
clans and change one doctors
theory of tuberculosis, or If he
could convert an educated atheist
to a belief in the trinity OF God or
the immortality of the soul. Billy
Sunday is Moody or a Chapman,
and not a Chapman or Hills. His
appeal is not to the mentality but
to the emotions. Matthew Arnold
would probably have despised him,
Or at the best accorded grudging
praise.
Call him what you will-mounte.
bank, charlatan, faker emotional
ist-you cannot deny that he is the
maximum of efficiency and that his
efficiency is directed toward a
great and noble end.
Billy Sunday is not an orator.
He Is good speaker at all times,
but never attains oratory. He is,
however, strikmgly dramatic or
melodramatic. when he comes to
one of his climaxes. He lifts his
audience with him like Dixie"
when the boys in blue are triumph
Ing on the stage. Billy Sunday is
clever. wonderfully clever, in the
artistic sense None better than
he knows the value of sharp and
unexpected contrasts. I'm clean cut
English he will describe grog-
gerry. and then turn the Bible into
Billy Baxter's phraseology. The
Indictment of bad taste might lie
against him with a critical Jury.
Abraham Lincoln pleaded for a ma
ton In the Douglas debates, never
FOUND It necessary to do stage