Ironside Broadside

About to set out from Chicago on an evangelistic tour one day late last July, a broad-shouldered little preacher turned to his secretary, exclaimed: "I just remembered. The American Tract Society asked me a year ago to write a treatise. Here the contest closes Sept. I and I haven't written a line!" With that Rev. Dr. Henry Allan Ironside grabbed a handful of pencils, a package of copy paper. On an eastbound train, he had a chapter ready to mail from Canton, Ohio. By the time Evangelist

Ironside had finished preaching on a circuit ringing Stony Brook, L. I., Asbury Park, N. J. and Winona Lake, Ind., he had written 50,000 words which his secretary finished typing on the last day of August, mailed to the American Tract Society in Manhattan. There a committee representing six different denominations unanimously agreed that Dr. Ironside's treatise was the best of 29 submitted by U. S. ministers and professors in competition for a $1,000 prize offered by Mrs. Finley Johnson Shepard, great & meritorious daughter of the late & notorious Jay Gould.

Announcement of the prize award was made last week while Dr. Ironside's work was on the presses. By the terms of the contest it was a "scholarly, up-to-date, popular treatise" written from a conservative standpoint, Mrs. Shepard being a stout Fundamentalist. Called Except Ye Repent, Dr. Ironside's broadside against sin and irreligion states its thesis thus : "To repent is to change one's attitude toward self, toward sin, toward God, toward Christ." Reason why Harry Ironside forgot the American Tract Society's prize contest was that last summer he spent, in the Holy Land, his first vacation in 45 years.

Now 60, he preached his first sermon at 14, joined the Salvation Army the same year, became its youngest U. S. officer.

At 23, Harry Ironside published Notes on the Book of Esther, has since turned out 30 books, dozens of pamphlets. Though Preacher Ironside, an ordained minister of the Church of the Plymouth Brethren, has evangelized all over the U. S., delivering some 500 sermons a year, he held no pastorate until 1930. Then he accepted a call to Chicago's famed Moody Memorial Church. Booming three strictly orthodox homilies from this pulpit every Sunday and one on Friday, Harry Iron side still-maintains a full schedule of out side engagements for which he accepts any emolument offered. For all his Funda mentalism, Evangelist Ironside hand somely admits: "I know the King James's Version didn't fall from heaven bound in morocco."

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