mother

E. Howard Cadle's mother was a Christian, but his father was an alcoholic. 

By age twelve, Cadle was emulating his father, drinking and out of control. 

Soon he was in the grip of sex and gambling and in the clutches of the Midwest crime syndicate.

"Always remember, Son," his worried mother often said, "that at eight o'clock every night I'll be kneeling beside your bed, asking God to protect my precious boy." But her prayers didn't seem to slow him until one evening on a rampage, he pulled a gun on a man and squeezed the trigger. The weapon never fired and someone quickly knocked it away. 

Cadle noticed that it was exactly eight o'clock, and somehow he'd been spared from committing the crime of murder.

He continued headlong in vice, however, and presently his health broke. 

The doctor told him he had only six months to live. 

Dragging himself home, penniless and pitiful, he collapsed in his mother's arms, saying, "Mother, I've broken your heart. I'd like to be saved, but I've sinned too much."

The old woman opened her Bible and read Isaiah 1:18: "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." That windswept morning, March 14, 1914, E. Howard Cadle started life anew. The change in him was dramatic and permanent.

With Christ now in his heart, he turned his con skills into honest pursuits and started making money hand over fist, giving 75 percent of it to the Lord's work. He helped finance the crusades of the far-famed evangelist Gipsy Smith in which thousands were converted. Then he began preaching the Gospel himself on Cincinnati's powerful WLW, becoming one of America's earliest and most popular radio evangelists.

He once said: "Until my end, I shall preach the same Gospel that caused my sainted mother to pray for me. And when I have gone to the last city and preached my last sermon, I want to sit at His feet and say, 'Thank You, Jesus, for saving me that dark and stormy day from a drunkard's and a gambler's Hell.'"