Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1915 — “Billy” Sunday Pays Compliment to the Newspapers. [ARTICLE]

“Billy” Sunday Pays Compliment to the Newspapers.

■‘Billy” Sunday, the noted evangelist, recently paid the following compliment to the newspapers: “A newspaper can be one of the greatest moral forces hi the . -universe,” he said. “I have known the liquor forces to go into small towns and offer $5,000 for the use of the editorial page during a revival, and I know that the editor of the paper has replied: ‘You go to hell; I need the money, but I need the manhood more.’ ■ . . : ■ “I believe the newspapers can clean up the co u n try from New York to San Francisco, and there is hardly a town that does not need to be taken down to God’s bathhouse and have the hose turned on it. . “Rid this world of Christianity and you will sound the death knell of morality. You might as well try rosink a battle-ship with a shotgun, to batter down the rock of Gibraltar with green peas and a blowpipe or vain Niagara with hairpins and to’othpirks as to try to have morality without Christianity .and newspapers., ' . “The whole gang of thieves and panderers and , gOo.d-for-uor hing, lickspittle, grafting, pie-coufiter, free lunch politicians would beat it if the newspapers got after them. “Tlie mission of a newspaper, a’s I look at it, boys, is to enlighten the public, and if it performs,its mission rightly it is bound to be the greatest of moral forces, if every newspaper were suppressed tomorrow crime would increase 100 per cdht in twenty-four hours. All the bod,filers and grafters and loan sharks ami thugs and the redlight district woTOI join in a jubilee. All the forces of good government would pray to have the newspapers restored.” «. ,