It seems hardly two years since our neighbor city, Norfolk, had Billy Sunday to revive its religion and put it over the saw dust trail toward God. But the trail seems to have been just a saw dust trail and nothing more. Even before the echo of Billy Sunday’s strident voice has died away, Norfolkians send for Gipsy Smith, the great English evangelist, to come and save their souls all over again. It is pitiful! It is pitiful.
“Why did you send for me” is the question Gipsy Smith hurls at the congregation of 8,000 fumbling souls that greets him at his first service in the Norfolk tabernacle. It is not written that the 8,000 gave him an answer, but I think I can answer his question. Norfolk sends for Gipsy Smith because Norfolk, like so many other so-called Christian communities, has never caught the vision of Jesus Christ and hasn’t the faith, the courage, the humility and lack of selfishness to give the gospel of the Carpenter an honest-to-God try-out.
We build magnificent churches with stained glass windows and upholstered pews. We employ salaried preachers, salaried musicians and salaried choirs. We dole out our money, toll our bells and attend services at certain times. We endow schools to train more preachers and we send missionaries to the heathen to try to explain to them how one part of us will get to heaven by being thorly soused, while the other part expects to get there by merely having a few drops of water sprinled on their kokos. But we are not Christians.
We do not love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
We do not do unto others as we would have others do unto us.
We do not forgive our enemies.
To those who would borrow of us, we do not lend without contract.
And if one sues us at law for our coat, we do not give him our cloak also, but hasten to employ a lawyer to bring a counter suit.
And yet we go right on calling ourselves Christians and boasting of a Christian civilization which hasn’t enough Christianity or enough civility to keep from destroying itself. We open a world conference on arms limitation with an invocation to God in the name of his Son Jesus. And the conferees have no idea of getting any nearer world peace than an agreement that in future they will fight with only a gun in each hand, instead of having a gun in each hand two other guns in the hip pockets.
We are not Christians. We are only Christian fakers, trying to hold on to a good thing with one hand and grab everything else for self with the other hand; eating our cake on this earth and trying to hoodwink St. Peter into keeping a feast warm for us in heaven. And that is why Norfolk sends for Gipsy Smith. And that is why Elizabeth City would like to have Gipsy Smith. And that is why every community is paying out good money for peripatetic evangelists to blow in and punch them up, making a big noise for three or six weeks, but not fooling God Almighty even a little bit.
The church should accept the teachings of Jesus or reject its claims to Christian leadership. It can do this by a candid study of what Jesus taught, without the help of Billy Sundays or Gipsy Smiths.
From the editorial page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, Dec. 2, 1921
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