Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr. Sunday’s small platform is a bower of lovely bouquets, and the first business is the acknowledgment of these offerings. As a means of predisposing the audience in Mr. Sunday’s favor nothing could be more genial. In the body of the hall are seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver’s powerful, commonplace voice invites them to recognition: “Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company here?” All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren. “Fine, fine. We’re glad to see yeh here. We’re glad to welcome yeh. And what hymn would _you_ like to have?” In loud concert the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. delegation shout: “Number forty-nine!” Mr. Rhodeheaver humorously parodies the shout: “Number forty-nine! It’s a good ’un too. Thank yeh, we’re glad to have yeh here.” Not only immense bouquets, but gold pieces, boxes of handkerchiefs, long mirrors, all sorts of presents, mainly from big corporations or their employees, are on the tight platform. One present came from a mill, a box of towels, and with it not only a warm, manly letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept “the product of our industry,” but a little poetic tribute, expressing the hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr. Sunday might have a good bath and take comfort in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and liked it, and gazed amiably at the towels.
The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thousand people had really joined in them the effect would have been stupendous. As it was, they were thrilling, but not completely. The audience was not half abandoned enough.
Then, after a collection had been taken up for a local charity, Mr. Sunday began with a prayer. A compact figure in an ordinary black business suit, it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice that, for all his athleticism, he was tired to the bone. He is fifty-three years old and for nine weeks he had been delivering about fifteen extremely intense sermons a week. His opening was almost adramatic. It had the conservatism of fatigue, and it was only his evident self-possession that canceled the fear he would fizzle.
The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me at first were Elbert Hubbard and George M. Cohan. In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in his physical attitude there was nothing of that greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman of his particular line of wares.