Excerpt from Billy Sunday the Man and His Message: With His Own Words, Which Have Won, Thousands for ChristI want to be a giant for God. - Billy Sunday.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 theprofundity 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 limit, 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 aristocracy 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 untutored 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 ungainly Abraham Lincoln. Thus again Heaven laughed at exalted procedure and conventionality.In our own day, with its blatant worldly wisdom, with its flaunting prosperity, with its fashionable churchliness, 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 unbelief cried aloud for a deliverer.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.