The Influence of a Bible School

     About forty or fifty years ago in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, two boys grew up side by side. They became inseparable friends in those romantic days. They attended the same school; they plodded along in the self-same grades; they visited one another in their homes, and often slept in the same bed; they picnicked together, fished together, and swam in the same old swimming hole. Finally, they were graduated from the same high school.
     One, because of the influence of Christian parents and friends, had started to attend the Sunday school of a nearby church, in which he learned his lessons about God, and Christ, and honor, purity, truth and righteousness. The other lad, because of the vicious influence of his father and friends, started to attend a school that was called a “Sunday school” for no other reason than that it met on the Lord’s day. It was a school of anarchy, infidelity and socialism. This lad studied a so-called catechism in which one of the questions asked was, “What is my duty to God?” and the answer was, “I have no duty to God; there is no God.”
     The watershed was already in evidence in the lives of those two boys. All unconsciously they came to the Great Divide. The first boy became a student in Oberlin College. During his busy, earnest student days he identified himself with the Congregational church. At length he became an accepted student for the ministry and a candidate for orders. He is now the honored pastor of the Pilgrim Congregational church (Bohemian), Cleveland. There is no greater influence for good among the thousands [29][30] of foreign-speaking peoples of that great cosmopolitan city than Rev. John Prucha.
     The other young man became violently inoculated with the most rabid form of socialism. On September 5, 1901, during the great Pan-American Exposition in the city of Buffalo our great-hearted and well-beloved President William McKinley delivered an address. The next day he was tendered a reception in Music Hall, at which all sorts and conditions of humanity surged forward to be welcomed by him. Among the number was a man with a bandaged hand. A shot rang out, and the President, one of God’s noblemen, collapsed. Who fired the shot? None other than the former playmate and chum of Rev. John Prucha, the despicable coward, the treacherous assassin and murderer, Leon Czolgosz, socialist and infidel. The Great Divide had been away back in those halcyon and tragic days of youth when John Prucha started to Sunday school to learn about Christ and honor and truth, and Leon Czolgosz became a student of socialism and anarchy and atheism.