Last Friday night at the McLendon tent meeting, Cyclone Mack’s subject was ”The Story of My Life.” A great crowd was present and heard Mr. McLendon tell how God lifted him from degradation to regeneration. His subject last Saturday night was “The New Birth” and another great congregation filled the big tent. The people were interested in every word of his life story last Friday night, as Mr. McLendon bared is life to public gaze.
The first chapter of the story was one filled with dripping blood, gambling dens, vivid with sordidness and aching with sin and shame. He flashed on the minds of his hearers pictures of grim-faced men around poker tables with the sky as the limit. He visualized dirty, ill-smelling beer stands and barroom that fairly reeked with the odor of stale beer and pungent whiskey.
The second chapter was one filled with aches and tears and heart-throbs. He brought before the people a pleading Christ that was begging for his life. He told of flinging away his dice, giving up his beloved bull dogs and game chickens, and finally yielding to the call to which he was born. The chapter reached a gripping climax as he stood on his chair and cried, “People, I am called to preach. If you ever want to see a man that was called to preach and called through 14 long dreary years, why just look at the man before you.”
The third chapter was filled with fine figures of speech. The preacher pictured the God that pulls down the rainbow, weaves it into a scarf and flings it on the shoulders of the retreating storm. He told how the stars sand and when he came out of the tent after accepting the call that had rung in his ears through all the odor and stench of the first chapter. He told how the trees bowed and said, “We are glad, Mack,” and finally ended the chapter with a stirring plea for a better Lincolnton, and a bigger and truer belief and acceptance of the Christ he preaches.
Many people left the tent with tears still in their eyes and men, big and stalwart men, walked down the aisles and wept as they took the preacher’s hand in a covenant for a better life and a belief in the Savior the evangelist held before the audience.
Mack got down to business Friday night. There was nothing sensational. He used no slang, and his new gestures only emphasized the point he was making. He described how the Lord called him to preach when he was a child 14 years old. He told of how he and his father drove 12 miles to the town of Bennettsville, and hear a marvelous sermon by Dr. Carrodine, who when he called for converts looked back in the rear of the tent and said, “You boys come up here and accept Christ, there are caskets of possibilities locked up in some of you, and no doubt will call some of you boys to preach, if you will yield, you will be a blessing to the world.”
Here Mack told how it dawned upon him that to this end he was born. He said the light flashed and dazzled and scintillated around him and he sat there bewildered with wonder, and amazed at the Great God that weaved the rainbow into the scarf and wrapped it around the shoulders of the dying storm; the God that threw out planets and fixed stars and controlled universes, the God that dipped his fingers in the might sea of eternity and shook out on this world oceans to drop and rivers to stream, had condescended to put his hand on a little insignificant illiterate boy and call him to preach.
Sat and Trembled
“I sat and trembled and shook like a leaf in the autumn wind. For days my meals remained untasted and my sleep left me, and I could see Dr. Carradine walking the rostrum and singing the Prince of Peace is now passing, the light of his face is upon me, and when I was sinking down beneath God’s righteous frown, Christ laid aside his crown for me. I would walk the floor at night and wring my hands and beg God to take the call away from me. Very often at 2 o’clock in the morning I would go way out in an old dark orchard and get on my knees and put my head against an old peach tree that leaned towards the east and beg God to relieve me of the call of preaching.”
Then he told how he left home to get away from a religious atmosphere and a holy environment and deliberately went out into a life of sin to murder that monitor that was in his breast; to kill the footprints of deity, that was in his soul. Here he described how sin stabbed his conscience and although he went north and south and east and west, it made no difference. If he was on the Bowery in New York or five miles under a coal mine or in a saloon slinging stale beer while chips were rattling and dice a rolling and beer bottles popping and men swearing and blaspheming, God would speak and say, “Mack, you are throwing away your life. I have called you to preach.”
Psalm 66:16 “Come and hear all ye that fear God and I will declare what He hath done for my soul.” I hadn’t been to a church or darkened the door of any means of grace in six years except one—I was in Wadesboro and on one occasion my wife, who was from Good Presbyterian stock, persuaded me to go to a little Presbyterian church, and I went to sleep on the pastor, much to her regret and humiliation and to my condemnation. I had gone down the sin line until my brain was clouded by dissipation; a moral derelict, on the mat ready to take the count, nothing more than a danger signal, hung up to warn the coming generation; home a hell, mother’s heart broken, father’s hopes blighted.
I think one of the first things that made me think was this: Brown, who managed my shop, passed by my father’s home and my mother called him in and asked him how I was getting along. I hadn’t been home for some time, and Brown told her that I was going at the same old gait, and he said she looked at him and the tears ran down her face and she sobbed and said: “Baxter, I believe, is gone; we have just about given him up and we have held on to God for him for years and it seems now that he has passed redemption.” She said there was going to be a revival in Bennettsville in a few days and if that didn’t reach me I was gone. Brown came on to the shop and told me the conversation he had with my mother, how she wept over my lost condition. I told him I had trouble of my own and never to mention to me anything that my people said about me. But when I thought of my old broken-hearted mother, with her tear-stained face, weeping over me my happiness, and what little joy I had was turned into wormwood.
. . . .
From the front page of the Lincoln County News, Lincolnton, N.C., Aug. 28, 1922. To read the rest of his story, go to newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068449/1922-08-28/ed-1/seq-4/.
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