"Billy" Sunday, the man and his message, with his own words which have won thousands for Christ

Front matter

Cornell University Library

The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text.

CHAPTER I One of God's Tools

God's Man Sent in God's Time — Sunday's Converts — Religion and the Common People — ^A Great City Shaken by the Gospel — Popular Interest in Vital Religion — Simday a Distinctively American Type 15

CHAPTER II Up from the Soil

Simday's Sympathy with Every-day Folk — Early Life — The Soldiers' Orphanage — The Old Farm — Earning a Living. — The School of Experience — First Base-ball Ventures 22

CHAPTER HI A Base-Ball "Star"

Fame as a Base-ball Player — Eagerness to "Take a Chance" — Record Rim on the Day Following his Conversion — The Parting of the Ways 33

Chapter IX

An Effective Foe of the Liquor Business — "Dry" Victories Following Sunday Campaigns — "De Brewer's Big Hosses" — The Famous "Booze" Sermon — Interest in Manhood — Does the Saloon Help Business? — The Parent of Crimes — The Economic Side — Tragedies Born of Drink — More Economics — The American Mongoose — The Saloon a Coward — God's Worst Enemy — What WiU a Dollar Buy?— The Gm Mill— A Chance for Manhood — Personal Liberty — The Moderate Drinker — What Booze Does to the System 80

CHAPTER X "Give Attendance to Reading" page

Sunday's Reverence for "Book Learning" — No Claim to Originality — Some Sources of His Sermons — God's Token of Love— The Sinking Ship— "What If It Had Been My Boy?" — A Dream of Heaven— The Battle with Death — "Christ or Nothing" — Calvary — The World for God— A Word Picture— The Faithful Pilot. . 121

Chapter XI

Platform Gjnnnastics — The Athlete in the Preacher — Sunday's Sense of Humor Stronger than His Sense of Pathos — His Voice and Manner — Personal Side of Sunday 138

CHAPTER XII "The Old-Time Religion"

Sunday's Power of Positive Conviction — His Ideas of Theology— ^The Need of Old-time Revival — The Gospel According to Sunday — Salvation a Personal Matter — "And He Arose and Followed Him" — At the Cross-roads — "He Died for Me" 146

CHAPTER XIII "Hitting the Sawdust Trail"

Origin of the Phrase, "The Sawdust Trail" — Impressive Scenes as Converts by the Hundred Stream Forward- Vital Religion — Mr. Simday's Hand — ^All Sorts and Conditions of People 158

CHAPTER XIV The Service of Society paqe

Social and Ethical Results of Sunday's Preaching — The Potent Force of the Gospel — Religion in Every-day Life — Testimony of Rev. Joseph H. Odell, D.D. — ^Testimony of Rev. Maitland Alexander, D.D. — The "Garage Bible Class" — Making Religion a Subject of Ordinary Conversation— Lasting Results — ^A Life Story 167

Chapter XV

Sunday's Sense of the Reality of the Devil — ^Excoriation of the Devil — "Devil" Passages from Sermons 182

Chapter XVI

Storm of Criticism a Tribute — Preaching "Christ Crucified" — Recognition from Secretary Bryan — ^Pilgrimage of Philadelphia Clergymen — Heaven's Messenger — ^Plain Speech from Simday Himself 188

Chapter XVII

Clean-mindedness of the Man — ^A Plain Talk to Men — Christian Character — Common Sense — No Excuse for Swearing — Family Skeletons — Nursing Bad Habits — The Leprosy of Sin — "But the Lord Looketh on the Heart"— The Joy of Religion — A Plaui Talk to Women — ^Hospitality — ^Maternity Out of Fashion — The Girl Who Flirts— The Task of Womanhood 202

CHAPTER XVIII "Help Those Women" p^Q^ Sunday's Honor of Womanhood — The Sermon on "Mother" — ^A Mother's Watchfuhiess — ^A Mother's Bravery — Good Mothers Needed— God's Hall of Fame— A Mother's Song — ^A Mother's Love — ^A Mother's Responsibility— ^Mothers of Great Men 231

CHAPTER XIX Standing on the Rock

The Old-Fashioned Loyalty of the Evangelist to the Bible- Some of His Utterances on the Bible 249

CHAPTER XX Making a Joyful Noise No Gloom in a Sunday Revival — The Value of a Laugh — The Value of Music — The Tabernacle Music — The Campaign Choirs — ^A Revival of Song 261

CHAPTER XXIV An Army With Banners page

Unique Plans for Reaching the Masses of the People — Visiting Delegations — Parade at Close of Campaign — "Spiritual Power" — Derelicts in the Church — The Meaning of Power — Church Needs Great Awakening — Lost Power'. 299

Chapter XXV

A Life Enlistment Some Notable Instances of the Lasting Results of Svmday Revivals — "Gospel Teams" — Sermon on "Sharp-Shooters"—The Value of Personal "Work— "My Father's Business" — Feeding the Spiritual Life — The Dignity of Personal Work — Five Classes of People 311

CHAPTER XXVI "A Good Soldier of Jesus Christ"

Astounding Number of Conversions — Statistics of Campaigns in Various Cities — Sunday's "Consecration" Sermon — God's Mercies — The Living Sacrifice — A Glass of Champagne — Denying One's SeK — Thinking for God— What God Asks 326

CHAPTER XXVII A Wonderful Day at a Great Universily

Visit to University of Pennsylvania — "What Shall I Do

With Jesus?"— "Real Manhood"— "Hot-cakes Off the

Griddle" — Comment of Old Penn — Opinions of Students

— Comment of Religious Press 343

CHAPTER XXVIII "The Holy Spirit" — No Universal Salvation — Happiest

Nation on Earth — ^Ambassadors of God — Holy Spirit

a Person — The Last Dispensation — "Little Things" —

The Fame of a Christian 359

'i

CHAPTER XXIX A Victorious Sermon page

Conquests by the Sermon on "The Unpardonable Sin" — What It Is — Resisting the Truth — "Too Late"— Representative of the Trinity — Death-bed Confessions — A Forgiving God — Power of Revivals 370

Chapter XXX

Eternity! Eternity!

"What Shall the End Be?"— Men Beheve in God— At the

Cross — The Judgment of God — Glad Tidings to All —

The Atonement of Christ — God's Word — Eternity and

Space — God's Infinite Love— Preparing for Eternity —

A Leap in the Dark— "The End Thereof" 383

Chapter XXXI

"Heaven"— "I, Too, Must Die" — No Substitute for Religion— Morality Not Enough — The Way of Salvation — Rewards of Merit — A Place of Noble People — "A Place for You"— The Missing 404

Chapter XXXII

"Atonement" — Suffering for the Guilty — Jesus' Atoning Blood — No Argument Against Sin — "There is Sin" — "How Long, O God?" 424

CHAPTER I One of God's Tools

I want to be a giant for God. — BiiiLT Sdndat.

HEAVEN often plays jokes on earth's worldly-wise. After the consensus of experience and sagacity has settled upon a certain course and type, lo, all the profundity of the sages is blown away as a speck of dust and we have, say, a shockingly unconventional John the Baptist, who does not follow the prescribed rules in dress, training, methods or message. John the Baptist was God's laugh at the rabbis and the Pharisees.

In an over-ecclesiastical age, when churchly authority had reached the limits a poor monk, child of a miner's hut, without influence or favor, was called to break the power of the popes, and to make empires and reshape history, flinging his shadow far down the centuries. Martin Luther was God's laugh at ecclesiasticism.

While the brains and aristocracj' and professional statesmanship of America struggled in vain with the nation's greatest crisis, God reached down close to the soil of the raw and ignored [Middle West, and picked up a gaunt and imtutored specimen of the common people — a man who reeked of the earth until the earth closed over him — and so saved the Union and freed a race, through imgainlj' Abraham Lincoln. Thus again Heaven laughed at exalted procedure and conventionahty.

In our own day, with its blatant worldly wisdom, with its flaunting prosperity, with its fashionable chm-chliness, with its flood of "advanced" theology overwhelming the pulpit, God needed a prophet, to call his people back to simple faith and righteousness. A nation imperiled by luxury, greed, love of pleasure and imbeUef cried aloud for a deliverer. Surely this crisis required a great man, learned in all the ways of the world, equipped with the best preparation of American and foreign universities and theological seminaries, a man trained in ecclesiastical leadership, and approved and honored by the coiirts of the Church? So worldly wisdom decreed. But God laughed — and produced, to the scandal of the correct and conventional, Billy Sunday, a common man from the common people, who, hke Lincoln, so wears the signs and savor of the soil that fastidious folk, to whom sweat is vulgar and to whom calloused hands are "bad form," quite lose their suavity and poise in calling him "unrefined."

That he is God's tool is the first and last word about Billy Sunday. He is a "phenomenon" only as God is forever doing phenomenal things, and upsetting men's best-laid plans. He is simply a tool of God. For a special work he is the special instrument. God called, and he answered. All the many owUsh attempts to "explain" Billy Sunday on psychological and sociological grounds fall flat when they ignore the fact that he is merely a handy man for the Lord's present use.

God is still, as ever, confounding all human wisdom by snatching the condemned baby of a Hebrew slave out of Egypt's river to become a nation's deUverer; by calling a shepherd boy from his sheep to be Israel's greatest warrior and king; and by sending his only-begotten Son to earth by way of a manger, and training him in a workingman's home and a village carpenter shop. ' ' My ways are not your ways,' ' is a remark of God, which he seems fond of repeating and illustrating.

There is no other explanation of Billy Sunday needed, or possible, than that he is God's man sent in God's time. And if God chooses the weak and fooUsh things of earth to confoim.d the mighty, is not that but another one of his inscrutable ways of showing that he is God?

Why are we so confident that Billy Sunday is the Lord's own man, when so many learned critics have declared the contrary? Simply because he has led more persons to make a public confession of disciplesiup to Jesus Christ than any other man for a century past. Making Christians is, from all angles, the greatest work in the world. Approximately two hundred and fifty thousand persons, in the past twenty-five years, have taken Sunday's hand, in token that henceforth their fives belong to the Saviour.

That amazing statement is too big to be grasped at once. It requires thinking over. The huge total of dry figures needs to be broken up into its component parts of fiving human beings. Tens of thoiisands of those men were husbands — ^hundreds of whom had been separated from their wives and children by sin. Now, in reunited homes, whole families bless the memory of the man of God who gave them back husbands and fathers. Other tens of thousands were sons, over many of whom parents had long prayed and agonized. It would be hard to convince these mothers, whose sons have been given back to clean fiving and to Christian service, that there is anything seriously wrong with Mr. Sunday's language, methods or theology. Business men who find that a Simday revival means the paying up of the bad bfils of old customers are ready to approve on this evidence a man whose work restores integrity in commercial relations.

Every conceivable type of hmnanity is included in that total of a quarter of a million of Sunday converts. The coUege professor, the prosperous business man, the eminent pofitician, the farmer, the lawyer, the editor, the doctor, the author, the athlete, the "man about town," the criminal, the drunkard, the society woman, the college student, the workingman, the school boy and girl: the whole gamut of life is covered by the stream of hxunanity that has "hit the sawdust trail" — a phrase which has chilled the marrow of every theological seminary in the land. But the trail leads home to the Father's House.

One must reach into the dictionary for big, strong words in characterizing the imiqueness of Billy Sunday's work. So I say that another aspect of his success is fairly astounding. He, above all others in our time, has broken through the thick wall of indifference which separates the Church from the world. Church folk commonly avoid the subject of this great fixed gulf. We do not like to face the fact that the mass of mankind does not bother its head about conventional reUgious matters. Even the majority of churchgoers are blankly uninterested in the general affairs of reUgion. Sad to teU, owe bishops and board secretaries and distinguished preachers are reaUy only local celebrities. Their names mean nothing in newspaper offices or to newspaper readers: there are not six clergymen in the Uni''.ed States with a reaUy national reputation. Each in his own circle, of locahty or denomination, may be Somebody with a big S. But the world goes on imheeding. Great ecclesiastical movements and meetings are entirely unrecorded by the secular press. The Chm-ch's problem of problems is how to smash, or even to crack, the partition which shuts off the world from the Church.

Billy Sunday has done that. He has set all sorts and conditions of men to talking about reUgion. Go to the lowest dive in New York's "Tenderloin " or in San Francisco's "Barbary Coast," and mention the name "Billy Sunday," and everybody will recognize it, and be ready to discuss the man and his message. Stand before a session of the American Philosophical Society and pronounce the words "Billy Simday" and every one of the learned savants present will be able to talk about the man, even though few of them know who won last season's base-baU championship or who is the world's champion prize-fighter.

This is a feat of first magnitude. All levels of society have been made aware of Billy Sunday and his gospel. When the evangelist went to New York for an evening address, early in the year 1914, the throngs were so great that the police were overwhelmed by the surging thousands. Even Mr. Sunday himself could not obtain admittance to the meeting for more than haK an hour. Andrew Carnegie could not get into the haU that bears his name. Probably a greater number of persons tried to hear this evangelist that night than were gathered in all the churches of greater New York combined on the preceding Sunday night. To turn thousands of persons away from his meetings is a common experience of Mr. Sunday. More than ten thousand, mostly men, tried in vain to get iato the overcrowded Scranton tabernacle at a single session. Every thoughtful man or woman must be interested in the man who thus can make religion interesting to the common people.

The despair of the present-day Church is the modem urban center. Our generation had not seen a great city sha,ken by the gospel until BiUy Sunday went to Pittsburgh. That he did it is the unanimous report of press and preachers and business men. Literally that whole city was stirred to its most sluggish depths by the Simday campaign. No base-ball series or poUtical campaign ever moved the community so deeply. Everywhere one went the talk was of Billy Sunday and his meetings. From the bell boys in the hotels to the millionaires in the Dusquesne Club, from the workmen in the mills and the girls in the stores, to the women in exclusive gatherings, Sunday was the staple of conversation.

Day by day, all the newspapers in the city gave whole pages to the Sunday meetings. The sermons were reported entire. No other topic ever had received such full attention for so long a time at the hands of the press as the Sunday campaign. These issues of the papers were subscribed for by persons in all parts of the land. Men and women were converted who never heard the sound of the evangeUst's voice. This series of Pittsburgh meetings, more than anything else in his experience, impressed the power of Sunday upon the metropolitan centers of the nation at large; the country folk had long before learned of him. -- Any tabulation of Mr. Sunday's influence must give a high place to the fact that he has made good press "copy": he has put religion on the front pages of the dailies;, and has made it a present issue with the milUons. Under modern i conditions, no man can hope to evangelize America who has not also access to the columns of the newspapers. Within the memory of living men, no other man or agency has brought rehgion so powerfully and consecutively into the press as William A. Sunday, whom some of his scholarly

-critics have called "illiterate."

AH of which proves the popular interest in vital, contemporaneous religion. Men's ears are dulled by the "shop talk" of the pulpit. They are weary of the worn platitudes nf prnfoFfinnal pipty. Nobody cares for the language of Canaan, in which many ministers, with reverence for the dead past, have tried to enswathe the hving truths of the Gospel, as if they were mummies. In the coUoqiiial tongue of the conamon people, Jesus first proclaimed his gospel, and "the common people heard him gladly," although many of the learned and aristocratic ecclesiastics of his day were scandalized by his free and popular way of putting things, by his "common" stories, and by his disregard for the precedents of the schools. Whatever else may be said about Billy Sunday's much-discussed forms of speech, this point is clear, and denied by nobody: he makes himself and his message clearly imderstood by all classes of people. However much one may disagree with him, nobody fails to catch his meaning. He harnesses the common words of the street up to the chariot of divine truth. Eyery-dayiolk,

the uncntic?^^, nriRnhnlarly f^rnwd nf us, find nn fault, with

the fact^hat Sunday uses the same sort of terms„tiiat-JEe doTjTnlresh, vigorous, gripping style, he makes his message unmistakable.

College students like him as much as do the farmers and mechanics. In a single day's work at the University of Peimsylvania, when thousands of students crowded h^ meetings, and gave reverent, absorbed attention to his message, several himdred of them openly dedicated their Uves to Christ, and in token thereof pubHcly grasped his hand. Dr. John R. Mott, the world's greatest student leader, once said to me, in commenting upon Simday:

'God likes a Little Humor, as Evidenced by the Fact that He

MADE THE MONKEY, THE PaRROT — AND SoME OF YoU PEOPLE."

"You cannot fool a great body of students. They get a man's measure. If he is genuine, they know it, and if he is not, they quickly find it out. Their devotion to Mr. Sunday is very significant."

This man, who meets life on all levels, and proves that the gospel message is for no one particular class, is a distinctively American type. Somebody has said that the circus is the most democratic of American institutions: it brings all sorts and conditions of people together on a common plane and for a common purpose. The Sunday evangehstic meetings are more democratic than a circus. They are a singular exhibit of American life — ^perhaps the most distinctive gathering to be found in our land today. His appeal is to the great mass of the people. The housekeepers who seldom venture away from their homes, the mechanics who do not go to chxu-ch, the "men about town" who profess a cynical disdain for rehgion, the "down and outs," the milhonaires, the society women, the business and professional men, the young fellows who feel "too big" to go to Sunday school — all these, and scores of other types, may be found night after night in the barn-like wooden tabernacles which are always erected for the Simday meet- -ings. Our common American life seems to meet and merge in this base-ball evangeUst, who once erected tents for another evangeirst^~aS3''how' has to have special auditoriums built to hold his own crowds; and who has risen from a log cabin to a place of national power and honor. Nowhere else but in America could one find such an unconventional figure as Billy Sunday.

Succeeding chapters will tell in some detail the story of the man and his work; and in most of them the man will speak his own messages. But for explanation of his power and his work it can only be said, as of old, "There was a man sent from God, whose name was" — BiUy Sunday.

CHAPTER II Up from the Soil

If you want to drive the devil out of the world, hit him with a cradle instead of a crutch. — Billt Sunday.

SUNDAY must be accepted as a man of the American type before he can be understood. He is of the average, every-day American sort. He is one of the "folks." He has more points of resemblance to the common people than he has of difference from them. His mind is their mind. The keenness of the average American is his in an increased degree. He has the saving sense of humor which has marked this western people. The extravagances and recklessnesses of his speech would be incredible to a Britisher; but we Americans understand them. They are of a piece with om- minds.

Like the type, Sunday is not over-fastidious. He is not made of a special porcelain clay, but of the same red soil as the rest of us. He knows the barn-yards of the farm better than the drawing-rooms of the rich. The normal, every-day Americanism of this son of the Middle West, whom the nation knows as "BiUy Sunday, " is to be insisted upon if he is to be understood.

Early apprenticed to hardship and labor, he has a sympathy with the life of the toiling people which mere imagination cannot give. His knowledge of the American crowd is sure and complete because he is one of them. He understands the hfe of every-day folk because that has always been his hfe. While he has obvious natural ability, sharpened on the grindstone of varied experience, his perceptions and his viewpoints are altogether those of the normal American. As he has seen something of hfe on many levels, and knows city ways as well as country usages, he has never lost his bearings as to what sort of people make up the bulk of this country. To them his sermons are addressed. Because he strikes this medium level of common conduct and thought, it is easy for those in all the ranges of American life to comprehend him.

"Horse-sense," that fundamental American virtue, is Simday's to an eminent degree. A modem American philosopher defines this quahty of mind as "an instinctive something that teUs us when the clock strikes twelve." Because he is "rich in saving conmion sense," Sunday understands the people and trusts them to imderstand him. His most earnest defenders from the beginning of his public life have been the rank and file of the common people. His critics have come from the extreme edges of society — the scholar, or the man whose business is hurt by righteousness.

The life of WiUiam A. Sunday covers the period of American history since the Civil War. He never saw his father, for he was bom the third son of pioneer parents on November 19, 1862, four months after his father had enhsted as a private ia Company E, Twenty-third Iowa Infantry Volxmteers.

There is nothing remarkable to record as to the family. They were one with the tjrpe of the middle-western Americans who wrested that empire from the wilderness, and counted poverty honorable. In those mutually helpful, splendidly independent days. Democracy came to its flower, and the American type was born.

Real patriotism is always purchased at a high price; none pay more dearly for war-time loyalty than the women who send their husbands and sons to the front. Mrs. Sunday bade her husband answer the call of his coxmtry as only a brave woman could do, and sent him forth to the service and sacrifices which soon ended in an unmarked grave. Four months after she had bidden farewell to her husband, she bade welcome to his son. To this third child she gave the name of her absent soldier husband.

The mother's dreams of the returning soldier's dehght in his namesake child were soon shattered by the tidings that Private WiUiam Sunday had died of disease contracted in service, at Patterson, Missouri, on December 22, 1862, a Uttle more than a month after the birth of the boy who was to hft his name out of the obscurity of the hosts of those who gave "the last full measure of devotion" to their nation.

Then the mother was called upon to take up that heaviest of all burdens of patriotism — the rearing of an orphan family in a home of dire poverty. The three children in the Sunday home out at Ames, Iowa — ^Roy, Edward and William — ^were unwitting participants in another aspect of war, the lot of soldiers' orphans. For years, Mrs. Sunday, who at this writing is stUl living and rejoicing in the successes of her son, was able to keep her Uttle family together under the roof of the two-roomed log cabin which they caUed home. In those early days their grandfather. Squire Corey, was of muneasured help in providing for and training the three orphan boys.

Experience is a school teacher who carries a rod, as Sunday could well testify. He learned life's fimdamental lessons in the school of poverty and toil. To the part which his mother played in shaping his life and ideals he has borne eloquent tribute on many platforms. When the youngest son was twelve years old, he and his older brother were sent off to, the Soldiers' Orphanage at Glenwood, Iowa. Later they were transferred to the Davenport Orphanage, which they left in June of 1876, making two years spent in the orphanages. Concerning this experience Sunday himself speaks :

"I was bred and bom (not in old Kentucky, although my grandfather was a Kentuckian), but in old Iowa. I am a rube of the rubes. I am a hayseed of the hayseeds, and the malodors of the barnyard are on me yet, and it beats Pinaud and Colgate, too. I have greased my hair with goose grease and blacked my boots with stove blacking. I have wiped my old proboscis with a gunny-sack towel;

I have drunk coffee out of my saucer, and I have eaten with my knife; I have said 'done it,' when I should have said 'did it,' and I 'have saw' when I should 'have seen,' and I expect to go to heaven just the same. I have crept and crawled out from the imiversity of poverty and hard knocks, and have taken postgraduate courses.

"My father went to the war four months before I was born, in Company E, Twenty-third Iowa. I have butted and fought and struggled since I was six years old. That's one reason why I wear that httle red, white and blue button. I know all about the dark and seamy side of life, and if ever a man fought hard, I have fought hard for everything I have ever gained.

"The wolf scratched at the cabin door and finally mother said: 'Boys, I am going to send you to the Soldiers' Orphans' Home.' At Ames, Iowa, we had to wait for the train, and we went to a little hotel, and they came about one o'clock and said: 'Get ready for the train.'

"I looked into mother's face. Her eyes were red, her hair was disheveled. I said: 'What's the matter, mother?' AH the time Ed and I slept mother had been praying. We went to the train ; she put one arm about me and the other about Ed and sobbed as if her heart would break. People walked by and looked at us, but they didn't say a word.

"Why? They didn't know, and if they had they wouldn't have cared. Mother knew; she knew that for years she wouldn't see her boys. We got into the train and said, 'Good-bye, mother,' as the train pulled out. We reached Coimcil Bluffs. It was cold and we turned up our coats and shivered. We saw the hotel and went up and asked the woman for something to eat. She said: 'What's your name?'

"'My name is WilHam Sunday, and this is my brother Ed.'

'"Where are you going?'

"'Going to the Soldiers' Orphans' Home at Glenwood.'

"She wiped her tears and said: 'My husband was a soldier and he never came back. He wouldn't turn any one away and I wouldn't turn you boys away.' She drew her arms about us and said: 'Come on in.' She gave us our breakfast and our dinner, too. There wasn't any train going out on the *Q' until afternoon. We saw a freight train standing there, so we climbed into the caboose.

"The conductor came along and said: 'Where's your

money or ticket?' '"Ain't got any.'

'"I'll have to

put you off.'

'S^^^^il^l "We com-

\WAk>7^^ ^@ menced to cry.

\JWIm,l 1 a N^As"-^ ( M fy^ Mybrotherhanded

him a letter of introduction to the superintendent of the orphans' home.

-The conductor read it, and handed it back as the tears rolled down his cheeks. Then he said: 'Just sit stiU, boys. It won't cost a cent to ride on my train.'

"It's only twenty miles from Council Bluffs to Glenwood, and as we rounded the cmve the conductor said: 'There it is on the hill.'

"I want to say to you that one of the brightest pictures that hangs upon the walls of my memory is the recollection of the days when as a Uttle boy, out in the log cabin on the frontier of Iowa, I knelt by mother's side.

"I went back to the old farm some years ago. The scenes had changed about the place. Faces I had known and loved had long since turned to dust. Fingers that used to turn the pages of the Bible were obUterated and the old