Chapter 1 Dwight L. Moody

CHAPTER  I

Dwight L. Moody

   A short biographical sketch of Moody will help one to understand the man in general and his abilities.  Dwight Lyman Byther Moody was born on Sunday, February 5, 1837, in East Northfield, Massachusetts.1  He came from a humble background.  Lyman Abbott, a contemporary of Moody, has written in the following manner about Moody’s  young years, “His father’s death when he was four years old left his widowed mother with nine children, a mortgaged New England farm, and no money.  They were so poor that the creditors, with incredible heartlessness, took from the widow everything she possessed, including the kindling wood from the wood-pile.  All the schooling the boy ever had was given to him by the average village school, and that average never was, and is not now, very high.  He never became a good speller nor a great reader.”
   At seventeen years of age Moody left his mother’s farm to go to Boston, where he became a successful shoe salesman.   His uncle obtained the job for him on the condition that he would attend Sunday school and worship.  It was on April 21, 1855, that Moody was converted from Unitarianism to orthodox evangelicalism.  He was not permitted to be a member of the Calvinistic Mount Vernon Congregational Church until 1856 because one of the deacons did not think that Moody knew enough of the essential doctrines.3
   Moving to Chicago in 1856, Moody prospered rapidly in the boot and shoe business.  Within five years he had an annual income of more than five thousand dollars and had acquired by savings and shrewd investments the seven thousand dollars which had been his goal.4  While in Chicago Moody became active in Christian service.  In1860 he dedicated his life to Christian work and gave up his monetary ambitions.  Between 1861 and 1873 Moody served on the Christian commission of the Young Men’s Christian Association, was president of the Chicago Y.M.C.A. from 1865-1869,5 engaged in Sunday school and slum mission work, and founded Illinois Street Church.
   In June of 1873 in Liverpool, England, he began his career as a professional revivalist.  Within a short time he became the foremost American evangelist of the latter part of the nineteenth century.  Although he was never ordained,  Moody conducted scores of mass evangelistic campaigns in the largest cities of the United States and Great Britain.  At first he faced apathy and opposition, but he was soon thought to belong to the authentic line of American revivalists with Jonathan Edwards and Charles Grandison Finney.  Thousands of persons professed conversion.  His most successful evangelistic meetings were held in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Boston.
   Moody was noted for his simple, colorful, and dramatic sermons which were delivered with intense conviction.  His meetings were greatly enhanced by the pleasing baritone voice and moving gospel hymns of his choir director, Ira David Sankey.
   Moody had no formal theological education; he felt that sectarian doctrines were a divisive force among Christians.  Having little use for higher criticism of the Bible, the social gospel movement, and the theory of evolution, Moody preached “the old-fashioned gospel,” the literal Bible, and the premillennial Second Coming of Christ.  Although Moody did not like the new learning of the age, some of his best friends were men of such reputation, included among these were George Adam Smith, an Old Testament Bible critic; Henry Drummond, a writer of new theology; and Washington Gladden, an early advocate of the social gospel.  Although Moody was a theological conservative, he was not a man of narrow attitudes; he developed close friendships with those of differing theological positions rather than viewing them as heretics.
   Moody had the organizing ability and the financial skill of a Cyrus McCormick, George Armour, or a John Wanamaker.  He has sometimes been considered the religious counterpart of the capitalist of the Gilded Age.6  Bruce Evensen entitled his book on Moody God’s Man for the Gilded Age.7  With people flowing into industrial centers to work, Moody developed a fully systematized urban revivalism.  Historically, the revival in the United States had been a rural phenomenon.  Moody’s major contribution to American church life was the shaping and systematizing of a new revivalism to galvanize into action the religious forces of cities with a million or more inhabitants.8 His abilities, skills, and inexhaustible energy were also used in fund-raising for the Y.M.C.A.  He also raised money for the relief of suffering following the War Between the States and the Chicago fire.  He founded the Northfield Schools, which are now the largest private secondary school system in the United States.9 He also founded the Moody Bible Institute and the Moody Press.  He gave much of the initial guiding impetus to the Student Volunteer Movement which has sent no less than 10,000 missionaries overseas.  One of those influenced by the Student Volunteer Movement was John R. Mott, who was head of the World Y.M.C.A. Movement and in 1946 was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.10
   In a sense Dwight Lyman Moody was a great American original.  Lyman Abbott struck a true note in regard to Moody when he wrote, “No man can understand Mr. Moody who does not appreciatively understand the meaning of enthusiasm.”11 Moody’s personal estimate of himself was put in these words, “Every man has his own gifts.  Some start things, others can organize and carry them on.  My gift is to get things in motion.”12
   Moody died in East Northfield on December 22, 1899, and laid to rest on December 26, 1899.  At his death he was considered the most famous and influential evangelist in the world.

CHAPTER II

The Age of 1860 - 1900

   The Age of 1860-1900   After the Civil War the United States experienced industrial expansion on a large scale.  The sheer magnitude of the growth caused massive social and economic dislocation in American society.  The new social ills called for the attention of the concerned.
   Industrialization, immigration, and urbanization had a profound impact upon post-Civil War America.  With the change came socioeconomic problems.

Industrialization

   The linchpin to his forty-year span (1860-1900) of change for good and ill was industrialization on a massive scale.  This industrial revolution radically altered American life.  “Revolution” was not too strong a word to describe the changes in transportation (steam engine, combustion engine, electric engine), communication (telegraph, telephone, transatlantic able, wireless, typewriter, linotype, presses), agriculture (binders, improved harvesters, threshers, cutters), and domestic life (electric light, sewing machine, phonograph).
   However, the greatest impact of the industrial revolution was in the labor market itself, where thousands of propertyless men traded only their skills and their sweat.  Industry’s development led to an accumulation of enormous wealth on the one hand and an aggregation of a vast laboring force on the other.  In the small-farm, independent-artisan days of the early republic, there was little potential for a massive struggle between labor and capital; however, between the Civil War and World War I the specter of class war came into view.  The issues of unionization, wage scales, working hours, working conditions, trusts, private property, single tax, tariff, free competition, and free silver put debtor against creditor, labor against capital, and citizen against citizen.  Throughout the Gilded Age strikes, lockouts, and riots plunged the nation into industrial war.  Since the employer was usually a native and the employee often an immigrant in the large industrial areas, the alarming separation of the American people into two camps rested on ethnic and religious differences as well as on economics.  With the working class accused of pushing toward socialism and with business charged with retreating back to feudalism, democracy itself was in grave danger.

Immigration

   As the American economy expanded, a labor force was needed to develop the nation’s resources and to fill the jobs.  Native Americans left the rural areas, especially in the Middle West, to join the labor force in the industrial cities.  As capital sought renewed supplies of cheap labor and sought to fill the jobs avoided by the native American, industrial leaders cooperated with steamship companies in scouring Europe for prospective immigrant laborers.  Between 1860 and 1920 close to 28,500,000 foreigners came to the American shore to enter the labor force permanently or temporarily, a number almost equal to the total population of the country in 1850.  This incoming tide of labor as it rose and fell related quite closely with the periods of prosperity and depression.1
   The largest groups of immigrants were from Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, Italy, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and Southeastern Europe.  In the industrial areas the poorer elements among these groups congregated in run-down slum-like districts.  The immigrants were another sign of the change that was upon the United States.  The problems of illiteracy, low economic standards, and overcrowding came with them.  Native Americans were slow to accept the immigrants and their strange backgrounds.2  Dwight L. Moody, somewhat representative of native American attitudes, commented in one of his letters home from Chicago in 1850 about the “wicked city” where stores were kept open upon the Sabbath.3  The Germans on the North Side of Chicago kept their beer gardens open on Sunday.4

Urbanization

   With native Americans and European immigrants supplying industry’s need for laborers, the nation’s urban population more than doubled from 1860-1900.  This phenomenon created big city problems inland as well as in coastal centers.  By 1900 Chicago was the nation’s second largest city, with rapid growth notable in Birmingham, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Omaha, Kansas City, Wichita, Denver, and Tacoma.5
   The most glaring problem of the city was the atrocious housing.  Cheerless slums bred disease, encouraged vice, and destroyed human hope.  In 1852 half the children of Chicago died before reaching five years of age, and the following year the Department of Health reported that deaths in the tenement wards outnumbered those in the residence wards almost three to one.6  Drunkenness, prostitution, and capital crime greatly increased as one crossed the discernible line of demarcation between respectable housing and the slums.7  Garbage collected in some New York streets until they became almost impassable.  In 1866 no less that 1,500 loads of garbage were removed from one ward in a few days, leaving some streets still ridged two feet high with the deposits.  City sewers emptied under the piers of the Hudson and East Rivers.  Hogs freely roamed large areas of Philadelphia and many people drank water from the polluted Delaware River into which the sewers threw 13,000,000 gallons of waste daily.  Epidemics ravaged the cities with typhus, typhoid, cholera, small pox, and scarlet fever.8  Men and women slept two or three in a bunk or on the floor for five cents a night in flophouses, or they could squat in sheltered hallways for three cents.9  Prostitution in tenement neighborhoods was “omnipresent” and “unabashedly open” in a city like New York that had 775 houses for such sexual evils.10
   Urban problems were difficult to solve at the local level because city governments were often part of the corruption.  Political machines, fraudulent voting, and demagoguery did little to encourage moral crusades at the local level.
   Industrialization, immigration, and urbanization–all three– heightened the ills and multiplied the symptoms of late nineteenth-century American society.  With growing, massive problems the nation was in need of a cure.
   Some callousness and some apathy, immediately after the War Between the States, characterized the attitude of the churches.  However, it was not possible for religion to remain indifferent to the ills of the nation for long.  As the social distresses persisted, leaders probed for cures.  Convictions about the perfectability of men and the benevolence of God reinforced America’s enduring optimism that free men could create the finest society.  If one still believed in the possibility of a utopia, he put his faith in America.   Rather than fleeing to the mountains or the empty plains to fashion his ideal society, he stayed with the thronging humanity of the cities to work and pray for a better order.

Protestantism’s Response to the Crises

   Was Christianity relevant to the economic, the social, and the political crises?  Could physicians cure sickness of class, race, and slum?  Was there any balm in Gilead?  Protestantism offered to American society two contrasting remedies: one for the individual and a second for the social structures themselves.

Change the Hearts of Men

   From the first signs of social corruption in colonial New England through the fluctuating fortunes of revolution, expansion, civil strife, immigration, and industrialization, Protestant religionists repeatedly urged one cure: change the hearts of men.  Then and only then, they argued can one change the health of society.   As one cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, it was reasoned, so one cannot lift or redeem a society whose members wallow in stubborn sin.  The change-of-heart formula bore the respectability of age and the glory of repeated triumph.  With little inclination to abandon it after the Civil War, religious leaders, nevertheless, recognized the necessity for new means and new measures to reach the individual.  Along with the old techniques, therefore, came experimental approaches to problems posed by factory and town.  Outstanding examples of new approaches were the temperance movement, the Sunday School movement, and the Young Men’s Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.).
   In an earlier day George Whitefield, Timothy Dwight, Charles Finney, and others had “unified society, resisted infidelity, and extended Christianity” through revivalism.11 Was the revival obsolete after the Civil War?  As a means of reaching great masses of people, Dwight L. Moody provided the most resounding negative to the question.
   Moody along with the persuasive Phillips Brooks, rector of Boston’s Trinity Church, and with Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, as well as others saw the business of religion to change the hearts of men, not to upset the political, social, and economic order.  Patience, prayer, Bible reading, witnessing, and attending worship services were constituted as the route to a better world.
   Protestantism’s change-of-heart formula was directed at the laboring classes, especially the immigrants.  This line of thinking was amply demonstrated in an article, “Our Unevangelized Masses,” which was printed in a Methodist magazine, The Christian Advocate , in August, 1875, a few days after Moody returned from revivalistic success in Great Britain.  The unevangelized masses, stated the article, live
“chiefly in our large cities . . .   They are mostly, not wholly, foreigners, or the children of foreigners . . .  Large proportions of them are Romanists, having no higher conception of real Christianity than millions of pagans who have never heard of its existence.  Many are skeptics . . .  Multitudes are indifferentists . . .  All these classes make up a corrupt and corrupting mass of humanity. . .   These lost multitudes [are] . . . making mightier and mightier those bad forces which are corrupting public morals, and leading, with unerring certainty, even to the ultimate overthrow of our political institutions.”12  The immigrants who provided the common working force for the new industrial America came to represent all the “unsaved masses.”  The laboring man was charged with spending more time in the saloons and union association than in churches.  Protestantism said, “Change your hearts.”  Divine favor will come if one practices thrift, is industrious, is sober, and faithfully attends church services.  The formula was in perfect accord with the economic and social standards of an acquisitive industrial society.  Thus, much of Protestantism defended the position of the business community.  As a result, labor’s heart hardened against what looked like at best the indifference of religion, at worst its collusion with a systematic exploitation.

The Birth of the Social Gospel

   As America’s social disorders increased, many became convinced that the basic illness was public in nature rather than private.  Men like Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, Walter Rauschenbusch, and George D. Herron, disturbed with the nation’s growing social and economic inequalities, anticipated reconstructing society as a whole on the basis of Christian ideals.  Believing in the perfectability of man, they worked to make the Kingdom of God a present reality.  They sought to reform social institutions as well as individuals.  To them sin pervaded society and was a part of the environment as well as being engraved on men’s hearts.  During the nineteenth century sociology, as a field of study, developed and drew attention to the effects of environment on the moral, intellectual, and spiritual life of man.  Convinced that man motivated by religion could make changes in his environment could alter, deform, or degrade a man–even a religious person.  The application of newly discovered sociological and economic principles to redeem American society came to be known in Protestant circles as the “social gospel.”10   At this time leaders from every religious tradition explored ways to perfect the social order.