48 The Fundamentals then and there asked them to form with him. They liked the novelty of the idea, and the class was formed, the members sitting on the back of a seat while their teacher faced them, standing. Under the scaffolding, amid dirt and plaster, he taught his first men’s class, praying and telling the lesson story in simple language. From that beginning the young crockery merchant got more and more interested in bringing together young men for organized Bible study in Sunday School classes. In six months his class of eighteen had grown to one hundred and eight. In the next seventeen years, three hundred and fifty- two men were won to Christ in that one class. He gave up his crockery business to give his whole time to young men’s Sunday School Bible classes. After he had brought three hundred thousand men into the Sunday School for organized effort and systematic Bible study, his ideas got large, and he went on until he actually began to talk about wanting a million—not dollars, but men. It is not as easy to get a mil lion men enrolled in an organized Bible class movement as it is to get three hundred thousand, even if you have a whole continent to work in; and perhaps some didn’t expect to see “the man who wants a million,” as he liked to call himself, succeed during his life-time in his expansive wish. But he got his million; and now he signs his letters, “Yours for a million more.” Marshall A. Hudson, Founder and President of the World’s Baraca Bible Class Union, has shown what just one department of the true Sunday School can be and do as a mighty evangelistic agency. His work would not stay limited to men, but has reached out to a similar work for women, the Philathea movement.* The quiet, persistent, undefeatable evangelistic work of *Two little books telling of Mr. Hudson’s methods, one on the Baraca work for men, the other on the Philathea work for women, may be had from the Baraca Supply Company, Syracuse, New York, a t 50c each.
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