All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all this sneering, highbrow, rotten, loathesome, higher criticism, wriggling its dirty, filthy, stinking carcass out of a beer-mug in Leipzig or Heidelberg!

Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers sit upon the platform and smile while Billy thus slangs the devil; and being themselves, poor fellows, at their wits end to draw the crowd, they watch and see how he does it, and then return to their own churches and try the same stunt; so the manners of the baseball diamond spread like a contagion.  I open my morning paper, and find a picture of an intense-looking clerical gentleman, the Rev. J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor of the Baptist Temple.  He is discussing certain slanderous rumors which he has heard about Billy Sunday, and he offers ten thousand dollars reward to anyone who can prove these things; though, as he says,

The dirty, low-down, contemptible, weazen-brained, impure-hearted, shrivelled-souled, gossipping devils do not deserve to be noticed....  Scandal-mongers, gossip-lovers, reputation-destroyers, hypocritical, black-hearted, green-eyed slanderers....  Corrupt, devil-possessed, vile debauches....  Immoral, sin-loving, vice-practicing, underhanded sneaks....  Carrion-loving buzzards and foul-smelling skunks.

You will be prepared after this to hear that when the Socialists were near to carrying Los Angeles, this clergyman preached a sermon in support of the candidate of “Booze, Gas and Railroads”.

In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglected youth of our streets from drinking, gambling and whoring, no one could wish him anything but success; but his besotted ignorance, his childish crudity of mind, make it impossible that he could have any success except of a delusive nature.  He is utterly devoid of a social sense; utterly unaware of the existence of the forces of capitalism which are causing depravity ten times as fast as all the evangelists in creation can remedy it.  So he is precisely like the Catholics with their “charity”, cleaning up loathsome and unsightly messes for a thousand years, and never stopping to ask why such messes continue to come into existence.

More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialism which he fosters does not help the development of evil more than his preaching hinders it.  The newspapers always report the cost of the tabernacle, and of the “free-will offering”, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in each “campaign”.  In each city the expenses are guaranteed by men who are generally the most sinister exploiting forces of the community; they welcome and fete him, and he visits their homes, and is in every way one of the crowd.  After the big silk strike in Paterson, N.J., the employers, Jews and Catholics included, all subscribed a fund to bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was freely proclaimed that the purpose was to undermine the radical union movement.  This was never denied by Sunday himself, and his whole campaign was conducted on that basis.