"O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years ... in wrath remember ."  (Heb. 3:2).     God has the right to deal with us any way He pleases; I pray that He will not give us what is coming to us, but will bear a little more patiently with us, kiss away our stains of guilt and give us another chance.     We are reminded by that verse that we are in the midst of the years -- the one in which we are living. It is a good thing to take and occasional retrospective view, then and introspective view, than a prospective view and try to discover by the introspective what caused you to do the things that make you to hang your head in shame, the things that loom up out of the midst of the past like the periscope of a submarine.     There are a good many things that remind you that the sands of the hourglass of time are fast shifting for many of you. It will not be long until the undertaker will pump you full of embalming fluid and a quartet will sing, "Lead, kindly Light, amid th' en circling gloom; Lead Thou me on."     This prophet, Habakkuk, is supposed to have lived contemporary with Jeremiah, and his prophecy was uttered in anticipation of that old Jewish captivity, which captivity was the result of the people of God mingling, mixing and amalgamating with the people whom God told them to pass up like a bum would a pay car or hobo a wood pile. But they would not listen to God. They thought they could give the Lord cards and spades, that He was a little too old foggish. They imagined His religion was a little out of date. So the prophet looked down and saw, that there was but one inevitable outcome from all that conglomerate mixture and amalgamation; and that was the Babylonish captivity and the baring of their backs to the blows of their task masters. So he prayed "O Lord, revive thy work." Revive the Crowd     The only way to keep that crowd safe is to revive them. Is what the world needs today more money? Oh, no! It isn't conservation of natural resources nor irrigation projects nor free silver of gold standard that the old world needs; it needs a baptism of the old-time religion that has warmed the world's heart for two thousand years.     There are people who suppose -- I suppose they always will suppose -- that the only way to promote religion is to move along uniformly in the same old rut. There are two crowds in every church -- the ruts and the anti-ruts. So long as they will deliver the goods, I don't give a rap how old the methods are; I don't care if they are moss-covered. But if they don't, there is one place for them and that is the scrap pile.     Some people are scared to death that somebody may do something out of the ordinary that will keep a sinner out of Hell. Some of them would rather see a person go to Hell than for things not to be don "decently and in order>"     Now, what is the nature of a revival? It is an increase in religious things. We are facing the growing dominance of the material over the spiritual. You can take a basket of nickels on your arm, walk down the average street, scatter them and then lead the bunch so close to Hell that they could smell the sulphur fumes vomiting from the inferno below.     This is a busy age in which we live. Man has hardly time to stop and comb his hair, or get shaved. You rush into a depot, the brakeman pokes his head in the door, "Twenty minutes for lunch," and you rush over, grab a cup of coffee and a sinker. Then later you go down and spend seventy-five bones getting cured for what cost you a jitney. Isms, Schism, Ologies     This is a day of isms and schisms and ologies. There never was time when there were more isms wriggling their carcasses out of the pit of Hell to lead people off on a tangent from the true God, than in your day and mine. The Devil has transformed himself into an angel of light. Fifteen years ago he was assaulting the church through infidelity, led boy the archangel of infidelity, Bob Ingersoll. But today the church is being assaulted by isms and schisms and there isn't religion enough in them to float their dirty fallacies! The Devil is a smart guy; he's been preying on this old world for six thousand years. He never has appendicitis of peritonitis; he's always Johnny-on-the-spot.     It's an axiom in regard to all enterprises that the measure of one's preparedness will in a degree determine the measure of his success. Just in proportion as you are prepared to have the Spirit of God move upon your heart and through your heart into the community, in that proportion will the Spirit of God move to bring this city to its knees in repentance. Years ago when Moody was in New York, some of the preachers were knocking him. They said he was crude and a jabberer. His eccentricities and idiosyncrasies greatly astonished and alarmed them.     That reminds me of a lady who came to my tabernacle. Somebody asked her, "What do you think of Mr. Sunday?"     She drew in her diaphragm and said, "Well, he seems to be desperately in earnest. He is a man of contrast. He is January and he is June. He is Mount Vesuvius in a hemorrhage of lava; now he's raining daffodils. Now he's refined and chaste as a lamb; he's as slangy as a hobo in a stale beer joint asking for a handout."     So I try to be all things to all people that I might win some to God, and if I don't stick to my text, I will try to stick to my crowd.     Dr. Booth got up before the ministerial association of New York and said of Moody: "Here's a man who has done for weeks what all the Methodist preachers combined could not do. He has arrested, gripped and held the attention of this pleasure-mad community. Instead of growling and grumbling, I think it's up to us to pray."     He said, "I went home with that conviction and prepared a sermon on the text, 'Come; for all things are now ready.' I had two heads -- 'Come,' and 'Come now.' I preached and gave the invitation. Three young men went into an afternoon meeting weeping their way from sin to salvation."     That was three more, my friends, than they had had for years in that great religious refrigerator.     The man who magnifies the Word of God and the blood of Jesus Christ in his preaching is a man whom God will hurl like a thunderbolt against the mountains of sin that dare lift their heads against the forces of truth! Men of Fearlessness     Why is it that the names of Wesley, Whitefield, Jonathan Edward, Finney, Moody and multitudes of others stand out as clean-cut as a cameo upon the pages of history? I will tell you! They were men who were conspicuous because of their fearlessness in their assaults upon every form of evil and evil doers -- rich, poor, black, white, native-born or foreign born. They hurled the anathemas of God into the ranks of sin, irrespective of who might sit and listen. That is the kind of man God will honor, no matter who he may be.     I want to say to this city now, right at the kickoff, that I believe the Bible is the Word of God from cover to cover. So you high-brow preachers know where I stand on this subject.     I believe it, not because I can understand it all; not because I can harmonize it with the philosophies of men, but because the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it and it has delivered the goods for all these centuries. When some big wig who has dreamed his theories over the beer mugs, tobacco smoke and the battle fumes of Heidelberg and Leipsig butts into me and says to me, "Mr. Sunday, the consensus of the latest scholarship has decreed thus and so regarding the divine origin of the Scriptures," I say, "When the consensus of the latest scholarship says one thing and the Word of god says another, the latest scholarship can go plumb to Hell for all we care."     We may determine tonight whether we will have a spiritual awakening and put the Devil in the hospital before the Fourth of July. The responsibility has never bee with God, never! It never will be! I used to say that I could see a revival cloud the size of a man's hand. I used to say, "There is a coming revival." Oh, bless God, I have learned that the promises of God are in the present tense. We can have it now if we will do what God tells us. If your city sags morally; if men are staggering, reeling, vomiting, spewing down the street; if girls are selling their womanhood; if girls hang around cabarets, hotels and restaurants over-perfumed, over-jeweled, over-fed and under-dressed, it is your fault. A man couldn't look at one of them very long with prayer-meeting thoughts. Don't you forget it! I wonder today that there are as many fellows who keep their decency and their morals as they do, with what is flaunted in their faces.     If the city sags morally, oh, the trouble is not with God but with the citizenship. It's up to you. If the church is losing her power, degenerating into a third-rate amusement bureau and reducing religion to form and ceremony, ritual and an ethical code, the trouble is not with God. If the preachers preach to wood and varnish instead of folks, the trouble isn't with God. If the Devil can scare up more church members at a leg show than at prayer-meeting, the trouble isn't with God -- it is with the members of that church. You can't blame the Lord for these things. No!     I plead not for a modern revival. I don't know anything about your modern dope. Mine is as old as the cross of Jesus; is as old as the nails that were driven through His hands. I plead for and old Pentecostal revival that will make drunkards sober, that will make thieves to steal no more, that will make blasphemers to pray, that will make men who are keeping somebody on the side and disgracing their wives and children go home and be decent, that will make dead-beats pay their debts and transform this old God-forsaken, whiskey-soaked, Christ-baiting, Sabbath-breaking, Lord-damning, harlot-ridden world into a paradise of peace and benediction and blessing.     It's not objectionable. Some people say, "A revival is an abnormal condition."     I say, "You lie!" A revival is a normal condition; and this low, dead, lifeless proposition -- that is abnormal. Do you mean to insult God by saying that anything that makes a man pray, kiss his wife instead of beating her up, pay his debts, is an abnormal condition? Do you mean to say that it is normal when a man goes home drunk? Or that it is abnormal when he is sober and decent?     You say, "It is followed by reaction."     I say, "That's a lie," again.     It isn't true. But if it were true it is worth all the money spent, all the energy put forth, all the sleepless nights and all the meals you forgot; for by and through a revival the hearts and minds of a community will be gripped and turned toward God, and the tide will be turned from the saloons toward the church, toward the Sunday School, toward decency, toward sobriety, toward virtue. Lord, Revive Thy Work     If you have a child who is ill, you summon a physician. He diagnoses the difficulty, prescribes for the malady. The medicine binds up the disintegrating tissue, puts the bloom of health on the cheek of you little one so that he may stay in your arms twelve months longer than he could have done had the doctor not come. It is worth every dollar that you paid the doctor for the happiness and the joy you have had of kissing your baby twelve months longer than you could have done had he not come. If some man will stagger down that aisle, give me his hand, walk home sober for year, give his wife his pay, let his children climb on his knees and rub their hands through his hair -- if at the end of a year he again staggers home drunk, it was worth every dollar spent to let that wife sleep for twelve months.     "O Lord, revive thy work!" The history of the church is a history of revival. How can any minister have the audacity to insult God by lifting himself against revivals and still claim to be a preacher? In my opinion he is a disgrace to the church. If he is your preacher, you can tell him so -- I don't care whether he buttons his collar in front or behind..     You ask the man or woman who sits by your side, "When did you turn from sin to Jesus Christ? and you will be dumb founded to discover that about seven out of every ten will say, "At a time of special awakening."     I take issue with you right there.     The economy of nature provides for the occasional copious downpour of rain, but you would be a fool to grumble because it didn't rain all the time.     It isn't unwise to have revivals in business -- Oh, no! I never heard of a community or a commercial club saying they were doing too much business. It isn't unwise to have a revival in politics -- not at all! The government spends millions of dollars on educational buildings and books and teachers. And once in four years we hire hall, newspapers, editors, magazines and orators and this republic becomes a university in which to train voters. A number of them have backslidden and therefore some Democrats are going to vote the Republican ticket, and some Republicans are going to vote the Democratic ticket; some are utterly indifferent. So we have a political revival, and they have a political evangelist chasing up and down the country spouting their doctrines from the rear end of a train. It is nothing but a great political revival, or awakening, that is being had -- that's all! And so it is all through, no matter what it may be.     In the business world you have to make a market for the goods as well as to make the goods. A man may be an automaton and make the goods, but it takes a higher grade of intelligence to make a market for the goods than to make the goods. The highest grade of intelligence you can find today in any one class is the traveling man, for he has to be a fellow with a good bean on him to sell the goods. Business Revival     Every community has a Chamber of Commerce, and all that, to create a business revival. We have an auto -- show that is nothing but an auto revival to show us the new designs. We have a horse show -- that is nothing but a horse revival to show how magnificently we are developing horse flesh to a standard of perfection. Colleges observe commencements -- that keeps up the spirit of loyalty. What commencement is to colleges, revival is to religion; what health is to an individual, revival is to religion; what education is to culture, a revival is to religion.     It is the church's business to create a spirit of unrest in the hearts of the people and disgust them with sin so they will forsake their iniquities and become as God wants them. That is the mission of the church.     You cut the day of Pentecost out of civilization; you cut Peter and Paul out of civilization -- what you have left would not do to make a rummage sale.     If a man opens his soul toward business, he becomes a businessman; toward politics, a politician; toward dishonesty, a thief; toward the saloon, a booze hoister; toward Jesus Christ, a Christian. My challenge to you, sir, is this:  show me your faith by your works.     Oh, a boy can pick up a stone and break the cathedral window -- yes, but it takes an artist to build it. A fool can light a match and burn down a structure that takes a skilled contractor and architect to erect. Oh, anybody can yank the leaves from a rose, but it takes God to make it and kiss it with the sunlight. A mob spat in the face of Jesus Christ, nailed Him to the cross, but God wakened Him and He rose from the dead. Let those who sneer at revivals find something that has produced a blessing and benefit equal to that in a revival of religion before they open their old jaws.     Horace Bushnell, one of the brightest tutors that Yale College produced for forty years, was pastor of the First Congregational Church of Hartford, Connecticut. Horace Bushnell said that if any man expects to carry on the cause of Jesus Christ on a steady, dead level, fearful lest the axles of God's chariot might kindle into a flame, he is too big a coward to be a leader of the Lord's hosts. When the preaching is faithful, when the prayers are earnest, when the lives of the people are pure, a revival will follow as naturally as the sun will shine. Does It Cause Disrespect?     Somebody says: "A revival causes disrespect or brings disrespect to the cause of Christ." No! Because by and through the revival we confess that we have declined spiritually and need something to arouse us. You don't put the community in possession of some information they haven't already on tap -- not at all! Honest confession is good for the soul!     You say, "A revival is temporary." So is a rain shower. So is a Pentecost. So was the reformation under Martin Luther -- but the world feels the benefit of its blessings today.     A revival temporary? So is a bath! Take one, it will do you good!     "You say it exalts the evangelist."     It does nothing of the kind. The evangelist has his place in the divine economy as much as the pastor. I am sick and disgusted with a lot of fellows knocking somebody who does not do the same thing just the way he should. Ho, sir! I've got my place in God's divine economy just as much as January and February and October and November have in the calendar in the swinging of the sun. Where the word "pastor" is mentioned once in the Bible, "evangelist" is mentioned twice; so I've go him skinned two to one.     Now hold on a minute! I've got a great admiration for a man who can serve the church year in and year out and build the people up in their faith. God bless him! He has my prayers. God doesn't call me to do it. There is many a man whom God honors and blesses as the pastor of a church who would be a fizzle as an evangelist. On the other hand, He will bless an evangelist who would be a failure as pastor of a church.. I never was called as pastor of a church but once, and that was when a man offered to give thirty-five hundred dollars a year toward my salary; but I didn't accept it. If I ever did make up my mind to do it, I would buy a round trip ticket -- take it from me! But you can bet I would skin the gang while I was on the job.     A Revival is a conviction of sin in the church. Backsliders are aroused, sinners are brought to Christ through a revival, and your faith is strengthened. The average man or woman today is blind to those conditions. Pray! Get your own heart and life right, then you begin to yearn and long to see other people right for Jesus Christ and for His truth. Oh, the truths of the Bible are a dream; they are a mirage to a great many people today. They never become a reality to them because they are in such a backslidden state and condition themselves.     I was in a town out in Iowa preaching in a little tent. An old farmer, a rich old fellow, asked me to go out to his house for dinner. I went with him one time. As we sat in the parlor he was pulling his bird-tall whiskers and trying to hit the spittoon thirty feet away -- like that! Pretty soon he got up, walked across to the wall, took down a copy of Jane's Almanac and began to turn the leaves. He said, "I am looking to see when the moon changes."     I said, "What for?"     "I want to mark my calves; I cut the slits out of ears of some of them and they bled to death. I was told if I marked them in a certain time of the moon they would be all right."     "Do you believe that? I asked.     He said, "Yes, I've had one of these almanacs in the house for twenty years."     I said, "That's queer that you will believe that. You have two kids, and if you would put them on the market tomorrow they wouldn't bring as much as one of those black-polled steers you have out in the field."     The trouble with people is that they spend too much time getting their hogs and cattle ready for market and too little time getting boys and girls ready for Heaven.     Revival?  Get right yourself! You begin to realize that without Jesus Christ you are lost and drifting away from Christ and His truth! "O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years ... in wrath remember mercy."     When is revival needed? When religion is not ideal. Christianity does not consist of trotting out to church Sunday morning, keeping little spots seventeen inches square warm for a half hour, listening to a sermonette, putting a plugged, counterfeit cent into the collection plate and then singing, "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder."     A preacher came to me out in Iowa and he said, "Bill, I thought I had done my duty when I held up the bleeding form of Jesus Christ and dilated upon His precepts. I find now that I've got a right to preach against sin." Where Revival Is Needed     Many a man isn't fit for the balm of Gilead until you have given him the good old-fashioned curry comb of the law and he begins to realize he needs Jesus Christ and something besides soothing syrup. Therefore, a revival is needed when there are feuds, factions, quarrels.     I owe more to Dr. Chapman that I ever became a preacher than to any other man. I traveled with him as an assistant for two years. He picked me out of the corn rows of Illinois.     One time we went to a town up in Kansas to conduct a series of meetings. We were accustomed to having union meetings, but when we arrived on the scene in this town we found that they could have had a union meeting had it not been for a quarrel with the Presbyterian church. They had a fuss and there were a few people alive and awake, up-to-date, who said they would withdraw. So they went down to the bank of the river, built a church, had a good live-wire preacher there who was going at a good gait all the time on high gear, while the other fellow had the brakes set.     We were being entertained in the home of this preacher in whose church we were holding the meeting. These two preachers lived side by side on the bank of the river. They had a high board fence right on the line, nine feet high, so the kids and wives couldn't scrap back and forth. I said to Doc one day, "I'd like to meet the pastor of the other church, the Presbyterian church."     He said, "Well, perhaps."     We were strolling down the street one day. His white necktie was flapping back and forth; he was wearing a silk hat and was twirling a cane. He said, "YOnder comes the pastor of the other church."     I said, "I'd like to meet him."     When we got in close quarters, they turned, looked in the opposite direction, as though the world or on another smelled bad. I said, "It's evident that you two fellows don't speak as you pass by."     He said, "No, sir! I haven't spoken to him for eight years."     I said, "Have you been preaching in the interim?"     He said, "Yes, sir."     I said, "Have you been administering the ordinance of communion and of baptism?"     He said, "Yes, sir."     I said, "If you died you would deserve to be in Hell now. If you are a Presbyterian, you believe in predestination, foreordination, the final preservation of the saints. What sort of a Bible have you? My Bible says, 'If you forgive not men their trespasses.' I would like to see the theological gymnastics that you display to sidestep that.     We stayed there a week; nobody was converted. We packed our trunks and left. The Spirit of God fled from the scene of strife and discord. You might as well expect people to be converted in a cold world of fault finding, growling preachers.     A friend of mine was preaching in a town in Iowa when he took sick. He had to go to the hospital and have an operation. The ministerial association asked me to come and take the meeting in his absence. I was scheduled to begin another meeting in another town on the Lord's day, but I said, "If you can fix it up with the preachers in that other town, I'll be glad to do it."     They did, and wired me. I went and preached a week. The ministers had preached two weeks in that little town. They sent a man up there to preach in the interim, and he preached a week; then I went up and preached a week, but there wasn't a man, woman or child converted -- not a one!     I preached but they seemed to sit spellbound. One day a Methodist minister came up to see me, looking sad. He said, "Bill, one of my leading members was Doc Stewart. He asked me for a letter of dismissal."     I said, "I wouldn't give it to him."     He said, "Well, we've done everything we can and we can't convince him that he is wrong. He is one of these bull headed Scotchmen; you couldn't move him." Trouble of One Man     I said, "What's the trouble?"     He said, "Doc Stewart was steward of the Methodist church. The mayor of the town was steward in the same church. The school board was looking around for a site upon which to erect a new school building and Doc Stewart had a site to sell. A man who owed the mayor four hundred dollars had a site to sell. The school board voted to buy the site from this fellow who owed the mayor, and Doc charged the mayor of pulling strings so he could get his dough."     "You couldn't convince him that he was wrong. You couldn't turn Doc. When they met on the street they passed the lie, put up their dukes and went at it. The mayor gave an upper cut that sent Doc to the mat. He painted his eye."     One night I turned to the Presbyterian preacher, a fellow named Jordan, and said, "Who will I ask to pray?"     So I asked Doc Stewart to pray and he was game. He go up, cleared his throat and went at it.     Did you ever hear a threshing machine start up in the fall after she had stood out all winter and all summer without any grease? Well, you can know that Old was going some when sweated out a celluloid collar.     He staggered through, and I said, "Now you get those fellows together and see if you can't fix it up."     So they go them and a number of the leading men together. Finally they got up, shook hands and buried the hatchet.     "Now," they said, "Everybody in town knows about it."     The town was built this way -- the courthouse was in the middle and the town was built around it. I said: "Lock arms, walk around town, around the courthouse square, and let everybody know it."     So they locked arms, walked around the courthouse square, then catacornered through it. Everybody in town rubbered. That night you couldn't get within a hundred feet of the building. I preached. Nobody was converted. People sat crying. I saw a woman get up and start down the aisle; she was so big she had to move in sections. She went through a cross aisle like that one, stopped by another woman, threw her arms around her and let out a yell like a Comanche Indian. She threw her arms up in the air like a Dutch windmill. I said, "What's the matter?"     Two society women had been scrapping for three or four years to see who would be recognized as society leader. A pastor said: "That big fat woman is a Methodist; the one sitting down is a Baptist. The are trying to settle the scrap."     I preached. Nothing happened. The next day I had a day of fasting and prayer. That afternoon tow women who hadn't spoken to one another for four years got into the same home to pray. They spoke to everybody there and were cordial to everyone except one another. I hear about it and mentioned the fact. I said, "It's a disgrace; I'm ashamed to hear it." One woman sitting in the back near a post got up and said, "Brother Sunday, I feel horribly chargrined. I'm one of the two to whom you refer. I have made up my mind that I am going to get right tomorrow."     I said, "Sis, you had better do it now. You might die before tomorrow." She got up and beat it.     That night when I gave the invitation fifty-seven men and women came weeping down the aisle; hundreds were swept into the kingdom of God. They built a Methodist church out of it that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Baptist church community was stirred. Oh, the Spirit of God flees from strife and discord! Against Worldly Spirit     A revival is needed when there are prejudices and feuds and factions and fusses. A revival is needed when there is a worldly spirit. It isn't necessary to do something grossly inconsistent with the standards of morality and decency. No! A ship will ride the waves until the water gets into her; she was made to ride the water and not for the water to be in her.     The church is all right as long as she is in the world; she is all wrong when the world is in her. One of the troubles of the church today, my friends, is that she has joined the world, and that is the reason why the world won't join the church. It has lowered the standard of the church in the universe. Oh, the world is lousy with humbugs today -- absolutely.     The churches are full of sour-faced religious crabapples who are trying to hand God a lemon.     Whoever works for the Devil will get his pay from the Devil. He will give you hell here and Hell when you are through; and you play both ends against the middle. You are a big fool to follow the Devil. I tell you, religion has done too much good for this old world for any buckeyester and sawdust-filled fellow to knock. Don't forget that! No, sir! There are some men in some churches who are bigger rogues than some of the convicts in Sing Sing.     Live the way you ought to live for God. Hell is seldom preached nowadays -- that may be one reason why we have so much hell here on earth. It is not preached enough. We don't preach enough of it to the people. If you don't want to hear about Hell, don't come around here. I don't believe in Gehenna or Hades; I believe in plain, old-fashioned H-e-l-l -- Hell.     It is no argument against religion, my friends, that there are black sheep in the flock. Please remember thatthe Devil at one time lived in Heaven. He had a chance but he passed it up. So if you mind your own faults yhou will have less time to find fault with other people. It will keep yhou busy looking our for yourself!     "O Lord, revive thy work." A revival is needed when there is spiritual desolation among the multitude. I read in the paper that twentyh-five thousand Presbyterians went to New York and backslid. You couldn't find them with a fine-tooth comb or a search warrant. Lost. Not doing a thing for the church of God!     You will find them in every denomination -- Episcopal, the Methodist, the Baptist, the Lutheran, The Reformed, and all! We have a hundred million population in the United States and there are seventy-two million who are not identified with any church -- Catholic or Protestant! Last year 7,500 made reports that not one accession on confession of faith did they have. They are a lot of dead ones -- a lot of dead ones! That is what's the matter. Need Panic in Religion     Oh, we need a panic in religion!  The world doesn't need reforming, the world needs transforming by the blood of Jesus Christ! Mighty few people are being saved. Every church has its constituency. Some men go to church -- yhou, a Methodist; you, a Reformed; you a Lutheran; you, an Episcopalian; you, a Presbyterian -- why? Oh, your wife goes there, your mother was a member there, yourf children go to that Sunday School. So you have your property and your religion in your wife's name!     Every church has its constituency; whenever you go, you go there. If you feel at home under these circumstances, all right. Take the Sunday School. How few of the Sunday School scholars are being saved and brought into the church! How few people are being saved! Most men are touched by chourch influence some time, but they are allowed to drift away -- no family altars in our homes! Oh, we are letting our children grow up like wild ass's colts today. No family altar; no wonder they are going to the Devil. No wonder that, with the dew of yhouth on their brows, your girls feed the red light districts! No wonder the age of the prostitute in the last nine years in this country has fallen from twenty-three and twenty-six, down to fifteen and seventeen. This is the average age of the prostitute today -- fifteen to seventeen! Ten years ago it was from twenty-three to twenty-six. No wonder!     Seventy-two percent of our criminals are young men under twenty-one.     "O Lord, revive thy work." May God yield the success that attends the preaching of the Word. If the preacher stands up to speak the truth, some God-forsaken old mountebank will object. But take it from me, Bud; I want to tell you you have no more business to run the church because you have a little dough than that fellow who sits there who hasn't got a sou. Take your money and go to the Devil. You can dictate to some preachers because you've got a little money, but you won't tell this preacher how to preach. You have put your eyeball on one whom you can't tell how to preach. It won't do you any good. Not that I know all about it, but I know I am preaching for God, I am preaching for God and preaching to God. Any time you don't like it you can beat it.     "O Lord, revive thy work." Another thing. A revival is needed when sinners are careless; licentious, grafting, Sabbath-breaakers. My friends, we've got to have a general religious awakening in this country or it will mean the dissolution of the home and of the church and of the state. I want you to know that I am no pessimist about that, either. America Up Against It You have to judge by past history, and America is up against it good and strong. I don't know why it should be. I don't know why people are sick. I don't know why God wants us to plant seed in March or April -- I don't know anything about that. I don't know why God Almighty had a blood sacrifice to save the world. But the history of the world reveals the fact that you can find the lowest state of morals in individuals and communities and nations at the greatest height of prosperity, and that the highest standard of morals have walked hand-in-hand with periods of great affliction, my friends, or of war or of something that has chastised the nation; and God Almighty will start the suffeing. You can't work a shell game on God all your life! You can't hand Him the hot end of the poker all your days!     "O Lord, revive thy work." And against this revival you will find every black-legged gambler; you will find every brewer of the state; you will find every madame of the red light; you find every gunman; you will find good-for-nothing God-forsaken hobo, riffraff, plug-ugly, ragshag and bobtail of society who feed and fattens and gormandizes upon the virtues, the manhood, the womanhood of others. They will lift themselves against this revival. Think twice if you want to line up with a dirty buncy like that.     "O Lord, revive thy work." Now, why haven't we had a revival? I will tell you. Listen! It's because you have no faith in them. You thought you could get along without God's way of doing things. Oh, but wait a minute! God Almighty won't allow the church, God won't allow the preachers, God won't allow the community to lose faith in this form of service, God Still Calls Evangelists for Revivals Oh, some fellows with their mutton-chop whiskers, their white neckties and their bell-bottomed trousers have said the days of revivals are over. Oh, bless them! One day when they shouted, God Almighty stopped making worlds. He fell down, leaned over the battlements of glory, called down into the coal mine and said: "O-h-h, Roberts, come here."     And that Welsh coal miner, with his cap on, with his face grimied with coal and burnt powder, with his lamp burning, crawled up out of the bowels of the earth and said: "Who called me? What do You want, Lord?"     "I haven't got a preacher or a college professor in all Wales whom I can trust with the job and I want you to start a religious awakening."     God Almighty, through that crude, illiterate coal miner, started one of the greatest religious awakenings that has been recorded in the history of the world since Peter preached at Pentecost.     God grabbed up the Welsh revival, hurled it into the faces of the knockers and said: "Take that, you mutt!!"     And God called Torrey. God poked HIs heaad in the door of that university and called for that infidel agnostic professor and sent him out. I would rather sit at the feet of R. A. Torrey and hear him expound the Scriptures that any man I know of in America. God sent him preaching around the world. And God picked up the Torrey and Alexander revival and hurled it into the faces of the knockers and said, "Take that, you mutt!"     They said, "The days of revival are over."     And God called to my friend, Dr. Chapman, and sent him preaching up and down the land, across the seas and to the antipodes, China, Japan, the Malay peninsula. He held up the bleeding for of Jesus Christ until thousands came weeping into the kingdom of God, and God said, "Oh, take that, you mutts."     "The days of revivals are over!" So you say. Revivals Can Be Had When Preachers and Churches Want Them     When you come to the place that you believe in revivals, then you can have them. Nobody ever heard me say an unkind word against the ministerial institution, and they never will. All I preach against is the fellow who doesn't preach the truth. I want to preach the truth with all the vim I've got.     Nobody has ever heard me ridicule a minister. Nobody has ever heard me argue with any man who differs from me religiously or any other way. I haven't any time to stop to agrue with every little yellow dog that barks along th highway. Yet the responsibility for no revivals has to be thrown at the door of the preachers of the country. If they will stop fighting theological sham battles and go to preaching God's truth, you will see the greatest religious awakening the world has ever looked at. If you have lost your spirit of concern, it's because the preacher has lost his. That's sure!  I will allow no man on earth to go beyond me in paying tribute to culture, intellectual greatness, social distinction; but the man who stands in the pulpit must have the mind and the Spirit of God, sir, and of Christ.     He has to speak with a passion for osuld, and if he tries to sleep, God will awaken him.    You never heard me say an unkind word about the church. I love the churchwith every drop of blood in by body, every corpuscle, every cell, every molecule, vein, artery, hair and cuticle. She's the best institution on the top of God's dirt. But I know her weakness.     What kind of man would you consider me if I would accept the invitation of the ministers of the churches and then stand up and knock the church of God Almighty and knock the ministry as an institution? No, not I! Not with all the strength that God gives me! Never! The church is a blessing. But I'll tell you this: You have had no revivals because the church of God has been indifferent to them. You have had no revival because she's been cold and formal. YOu can't scald a hog in ice water. No, sir!     You have had no revival because you have been as dignified, stiff, staid, cold, my friends, as tombstones. You have had no revival because hyou have been worldly. Spurgeon once preached a sermon, the subject of which was, "How Saints May Help the Devil." One way saints may help the Devil is to discourage the efforts that are being put forth to beat the Devil. The Devil hates a revival, but he is dead stuck on the attitude that some preachers and church members take toward it. It is to try and weaken the hands of those who are trying to make headway against the Devil. It is to dampen the ardor of those who are against the Devil. It is to discourage others from uniting their efforts and their influence.     If I knew all the devils on earth were here and sat in the seats to leer at me with their hot, wilting, burning breath, led by the cohorts of Hell, I would keep shooting away God's truth into their ranks with all the power that I possess. I repeat that the most effective means, in my opinion, that any man or woman can employ to publicly demonstrate your insensibility as a citizen and your absolute indifference to decency, is to oppose a great work and a great campaign like this that has for its only purpose the making of men and woman as God Almighty wants men and women to be. That is all there is to it.     Ifit were not for that purpose, you couldn't get me to come. You haven't got money enough in your bank vaults or in the government subtreasury, my friends, to hire me to come and work on that basis if I didn't believe you were lost and on the road to Hell. You haven't got enought to do it! Christians Care for Other Things More Than Revival "O Lord, revive thy work>" One reason it is so difficult to have the work of God advanced is that there are so many people in the church who care more about other things than they do about a revival. They care more about money. They care more about politics. They care more about business. They care more about society. Some of you women break your fool necks to keep your name on the calling list of some society woman to get the opportunity to stick your feet under her mahogany and drink her booze and champagne and then stagger home soused. You work more at that than to please Jesus Christ. That's your ideal of life and the way to live in the world. On, no!     I tell you there is hardly a city on earth that doesn't need to be tgaken down to God's bathhouse and have the hose turned on it for righteousness and truth in the name of the Lord.     One preacher came to me out in Iowa and said, "Mr. Sunday, what we need is an ethical revival."     I said, "Forget it, Bud! Forget it! You can starve to death on ethical stuff."     Sure you can. Go to Hell with that ethical revival. What we need is a revival that will give us a better home.     Oh, there is a great tendency today to break down the family altar. Father forgets that he is the priest. Mother forgets that she represents Jesus Christ. They turn their kids over to some governess or nurse who is only interested in their children because it means so many dollars a week salary -- that's all. And she hangs around and kisses and hugs a Pomeranian.     This revival, my friend, isone tide from an old sea that has swept the world since Pentecost.     "O Lord, revive thy work." We need a revival that will give us more men for the ministry. We are facing a crisis in the ministry today. More are leaving the ministry. I have been trying to preach in my crude, illiterate, jabbering jargon for twenty years up and down the land, ever since I put off the spikes.     For twenty years I have been going up and down the land holding up the bleeding form of Jesus Christ as God's atonement for sin and doing my best to help people to Jesus. I would rather preach than anything on earth. If President Harding should telegraph me, or telephone me tomorrow, and say, "Bill, will you change jobs with me?" I'd say, "Nothin' doin', Warren."