Billy and Aimee

I first encountered Billy Graham in 1950 when he came to Boston for a week’s revival. Fresh from Bob Jones College, he then held to the literalness of the King James Version with a fundamentalist fervor that he would later modify in favor of Madison Avenue. Heaven was still to him the four-square city of jasper and gold like unto glass, twelve thousand furlongs in length and breadth, dimensions that he conveniently transcribed for us into modern equivalents. By his calculations the Heavenly City was 1,500 by 1,500 or 2,250,000 square miles—with an urban density of about ten thousand inhabitants to the mile.

Billy was still a long way from the platform that would find the affable gaitered Archbishop of Canterbury seated behind him and Dr. Roger Bannister kneeling among the penitents. In Boston the Catholics held aloof on doctrinal grounds, the Unitarians from antidoctrine and the Episcopalians for social reasons. All the remaining Protestant sects participated, but just the same Billy didn’t quite make expenses.

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Francis Russell

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I first encountered Billy Graham in 1950 when he came to Boston for a week’s revival. Fresh from Bob Jones College, he then held to the literalness of the King James Version with a fundamentalist fervor that he would later modify in favor of Madison Avenue. Heaven was still to him the four-square city of jasper and gold like unto glass, twelve thousand furlongs in length and breadth, dimensions that he conveniently transcribed for us into modern equivalents. By his calculations the Heavenly City was 1,500 by 1,500 or 2,250,000 square miles—with an urban density of about ten thousand inhabitants to the mile.

Billy was still a long way from the platform that would find the affable gaitered Archbishop of Canterbury seated behind him and Dr. Roger Bannister kneeling among the penitents. In Boston the Catholics held aloof on doctrinal grounds, the Unitarians from antidoctrine and the Episcopalians for social reasons. All the remaining Protestant sects participated, but just the same Billy didn’t quite make expenses.