Cantwell-Chicago Lawyer

His speech, some told him later, was unfocused and rambling—surely not well-organized for a trial lawyer, he thought. But for a sophisticated trial lawyer to talk about listening to God packed a punch, and his remarks were highlighted by a heckler. The heckling was handled rather nonchalantly by Sam. For Yager it was a godsend—the sort of thing he expected almost everytime he went into the courtroom. Tonight it brought home to him how “far out” some of his audience was. He must keep his story simple and personal. As he spoke, Louise Nicholl was by no means forgotten, in fact she was the center of what he said. He returned to his seat proud that he had taken less than ten minutes.

“The Nipper” came next, and to him Yager listened in curious wonder. A “butterfly” swimming champion at Princeton, aiming for the ministry. Incredible! And the fellow had his audience in one mirthful paroxysm after another. Sam picked up the laughter and commented, “The Nipper’ will laugh more people into the Kingdom than all the rest of us together, though we use the best of our labored techniques.”

A Jamaican Negro, a minister, told of the social revolution going on on his island, and after him came a New Zealand woman who had been “healed through faith and prayer.” Ralston Young, “Red Cap 42,” also had a few minutes in which he told a story of God at work in Grand Central Station. But to Yager the most impressive speaker of the evening was a high-school student who gave what the Chicago lawyer claimed “may have been the best speech I have ever heard.” As this lad stood up and walked the twenty feet to a place next to Sam, Yager had just enough time to note his sallow, washed-out, somewhat pimply complexion—”his wavy, flaxen hair that looked as if it had been marcelled an hour before”—characteristics that made him as unattractive an adolescent as Yager thought he had ever seen. But when he opened his mouth, all that Yager could assume was that the Holy Spirit Himself must be coming through. “His speech was supernaturally authored,” he said later. In five minutes the boy gave the salient facts about his conversion experience and the new-found life which resulted. But the words Yager remembered, and he may have jotted them down, were these: “I don’t know about most of you older folks, or even about many of you who are my age, but if you haven’t tried life with Jesus Christ, try it! It’s great. It’s just great.”