Do Revivals Pay?

Knoxville Express: The Red Oak Express is green enough to ask: “Do Revivals Pay?” Why, you poor Montgomery county sinner, you ought to be ashamed of your ignorance. Pay? Why, yes, of course they pay. “Billy” Sunday , the former base ball player, closed a meeting at Afton the other day with 200 “accessions” and $800 in “Billy’s” collection. Didn’t that pay, you sordid worlding? And Evangelist Williams of Iowa, is reported to have closed a meeting in Kansas the other day where he carried away $1,600! Didn’t that pay, you miserable unregenerate interrogation point? Cite us to a revival that ever lost money. Do they pay? Why, if that crank at Red Oak don’t quit asking such fool questions, we’ll cut him off our exchange list and leave him groping in the outer darkness! There are towns in Iowa so addicted to the revival habit that they will pay an evangelist more cash for a three weeks’ stand than they pay their hard-working pastor for a year’s work. And then to think that an unregenerate journalistic bullfrog down on the banks at the Nishnabotna river will raise a croak and ask: “Do Revivals Pay?” That’s easy. Let us give the Red Oak Express one that will interest It: “Does the Pastoral Work Pay—going in all kinds of weather to preach to the living, to bury the dead, to marry the young, to visit the old, to cheer the sick, to help the needy, fifty-two weeks in the year, while the traveling evangelist gets the glad hand and all the pie?” This is the real question of the day. Let the Red Oak sheet wrestle with this and give us the result of its deliberations.