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"I'm going to ask every one of you to get up out of your seat—over here, in the balcony, everywhere—and come, quietly and reverently. I don't want a person to leave the Garden, not one person. I'm not asking you to join a church tonight. I am not asking you to come to some particular denomination. I am asking you 'that need Christ, your heart is hungry for Christ.
"You may be a deacon or an elder, I don't know. You may be a Sunday-school teacher. You may be a choir member. You may be an usher, but you need Christ tonight. Young man, young woman, father, mother, whoever you are, come right now. Just get up out of your seat and come now. Quickly right now, from everywhere you come, from up in the balconies all around, up here, back there. All of you that are coming, come right now, we're going to wait. You come on now."
The Dialogues. They come. Streaming down from all over the Garden, old and young, poker-faced and moist-eyed, respectable and not so respectable—they come silently and slowly to stand before the fern-banked platform while Billy's voice goes on. Then, when it seems that all who will "decide for Christ" that night have come forward, Graham and the counselors direct them downstairs to the "Inquiry Tent" in the Garden's cellar. There Graham or another speaker joins them for a brief talk. Then the counselors take over.
The murmured dialogues between the "inquirers" and the counselors are timeless with man's hope and the need to help his fellow. One night last week a grey-haired, smartly dressed counselor said to the woman beside her: "Honey, you're on your way to heaven!" A fiftyish male counselor: "You're not giving up anything to believe in the Lord . . ." "I know," replied a sprightly man of 60: "He's giving things up to take me in!"
A ten-year-old Negro girl in a bright pink dress bowed her head with her counselor, a plain, smiling girl of not more than 16. Together they murmured the Ten Commandments, alternating verse by verse, their hands clasped in the childish position for prayer. When they had finished, they looked up and smiled at each other. "Congratulations," beamed the counselor.
A plump, plain girl with glasses sobbed silently. "I'm crying because my mother died," she explained. "This doesn't make me sad . . . it's just that I always think of her."
A dark girl with wavy black hair spoke intently in a French accent to a thin, pale girl. "You will be possessed . . . possessed with God. And when the Devil, he come to you, what you say?" "No?" the girl offered, shyly. "Right. You will say: 'Devil, you can't come in here, God is here!' It is my one interest in life, to tell people this."