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Sunday, March 3, 2013

CHAPTER IV -- THE SOCIAL VIEWS OF DWIGHT L. MOODY


CHAPTER IV

Dwight L. Moody’s View of the Workingman and Big Business


   This chapter explores Dwight L. Moody’s views toward labor and big business.

Moody’s Views toward Labor

   Dwight L. Moody was aware of the grave domestic problems of his day, particularly the plight of the lower classes in Great Britain and America.  Early in his evangelistic work Moody had become acquainted with the failure of the church to reach the “bleeding” masses.1  Biographer Richard K. Curtis has written of Moody’s insights into the masses: “If he knew little of the study of alcoholism, he knew plenty about drunkenness.  If he knew little of labor relations, he knew the poverty, disease, and the filth of jobless families.  If he knew little of sermon construction and rhetoric, he could talk religion in the idiom of the street.  If he knew little of liturgy and ecclesiastics, he knew coldness when he saw it, and formalism, and stiff-necked professionalism.  And, after all, the masses also knew little of alcoholism, of labor relations, of homiletics and ecclesiastics, and further, they were little interested.  But what they were interested in were plain words, simple assurance, and bite-size certainties.  If these could be served up with the spice of catch music and garnished with homey, humorous anecdote, they were found to become well nigh irresistible.”2  
   Moody’s evangelistic target became the urban metropolis of the 1870's where lived the seething masses.  As a result, he adapted revivalism to modern conditions with great ability and foresight with the intention of reaching the great population centers.  “Water runs down hill,” Moody declared at the outset of his evangelistic career, “and the highest hills are the great cities.  If we can stir them, we shall stir the whole nation.”3

   Laborers as Individuals

   Although Moody’s target was the masses, he sought to rescue them as individuals from the desperation of poverty with the cure of the gospel.  Moody also sought to make the masses into good Americans.
   Moody viewed men of labor as individuals rather than as members of a class.  This attitude was consistent with his basic religious philosophy.  Although Moody sensed the fundamental domestic issues of the day as they related to the working classes, he believed that society could only be changed by the moral and spiritual regeneration of individuals and that all political, social, and economic reform must be an appendage of revivals.  Moody once said to Henry Ward Beecher, “There is no use attempting to make a deep and lasting effect on masses of people, but every effort should be put forth on the individual.”4  Thus Moody approached the workingman as a person in need of salvation.
   Because of Moody’s individualism he tended to view labor relations in face-to-face terms.  Thus, he advised the workingman:  “Work faithfully for three dollars a week, it won’t be long before you have six dollars and then you will get ten dollars, and then twelve dollars a week.  You want to get these employers always under and obligation to you.  You must be such true men and be so helpful to your employers that they cannot get along without you and then you will work up and your employer will increase your wages.  If a man works in the interest of his employer, he will be sure to keep him and treat him well  . . .” 5
   Moody had no use for labor unions and their strikes.6 He had little to offer the working class in the way of concrete and realistic proposals.  As the gulf between big business and labor grew in the industrial society of Moody’s later years, his words of advice to labor became increasingly unrealistic.  His thoughts seemed particularly irrelevant during periods of depression.  In the difficult years of the mid-nineties the evangelists had nothing more to offer the depressed laborers that advice to take advantage of vaguely conceived acts of good will on the part of employers.7  In this spirit he requested his middle-class audience to “go and act the Good Samaritan. . . .  Send your carriages out and give poor people a drive in the park once in awhile and they’ll call you an angel, I’ll warrant.”8
   In his later sermons Moody enjoined employers to be faithful to their employees.  “We treat our servants just about as we treat our sewing machines.” He said in 1894.  “If they do their work well, all right, but if they don’t, we kick them out.”  He called A. T. Stewart, the owner of a New York department store, “supremely selfish” because “one of his clerks got sick and couldn’t come to the store for two or three or ten weeks; his wages cut right off” because Steward felt “he wasn’t responsible for aiding the clerk.”9
   Moody saw labor relations in terms of individuals relating to individuals rather than management relating with labor.  Although Moody in his later years saw the responsibility of individual businessmen toward labor, he blamed labor for most of its problems with poverty.

   Reasons for Poverty

   In New York City in1876 where 50,000 men were out of work because of the depression.  Moody commented:  “I know there is great misery and suffering in this great city; but what is the cause of most of it?  Why, the sufferers have become lost from the Shepherd’s care.  When they are close to Him, under his protection, they are always provided for.”10  According to Moody, a man who lost his job should consider it as a judgment of God for his sins.  “If you had a son who wouldn’t obey you you would not expect him to prosper, and wouldn’t be anxious that he should, because prosperity in wickedness would be an injury to him.”11  Moody was convinced that for the most part poverty was the result of personal sin.  “I believe today one reason why so many men’s ways are hedged up and they do not prosper is because they have dishonored their parents” or disobeyed some other commandment.12  Sometimes, Moody believed, poverty was simply the result of not being a converted Christian.  He believed this truth about himself.  He often commented:  “The whole of my early life was one long struggle with poverty; but I have not doubt it was God’s way of bringing me to himself.  And since I began to seek first the kingdom of God, I have never wanted for anything.13  
   Moody saw the prevailing sins of the poor workers to be the immorality of laziness, a lack of thrift, and the consumption of liquor and tobacco.  As far as he was concerned, these sins inevitably led to poverty.  Moody understood laziness and idleness to be heinous sins.  At a meeting in Boston in 1877 Moody told a group of converted drunkards who were out of work:  “Get something to do.  If it is for fifteen hours a day, all the better, for while you are at work Satan does not have so much chance to tempt you.  If you cannot earn more than a dollar a week, earn that.  That is better than nothing and you can pray to God for more.”14  Of course, these ancient verities of Puritanism were not much comfort to men out of jobs, but industrialists who had to cut wages during this period of great economic difficulty welcomed Moody’s comments as a powerful support for their actions, whether he consciously intended to support them or not.
   While Moody was in Boston, 48,000 persons were applying for poor relief.  Rather than remain idle and fall into sin, he suggested that if they could not get work in the city, they should go out into the country.  “It is not degrading to go out and hoe and shovel in the field,” he told those who were jobless.  “It is noble, I think.”15  However, Moody failed to explain how the farmers of New England were to absorb that vast army of unemployed.
   Moody also believed that poverty was caused by a lack of thrift.  He felt that the poor were poor because of spending their money in foolish ways.  He saw no point in giving the money to the poor unless they were willing to be responsible with it.  He once warned an audience that one must be careful in giving money to aid the poverty stricken, for too often “the money would go into their pockets to get whiskey with.”16
   The wickedness of the jobless and the poverty stricken was demonstrated by the continued sales of liquor and tobacco even during times of depression.  In one of his sermons Moody said: “I do not believe we would have these hard times if it had not been for sin and iniquity.  Look at the money that is drank up!  The money that is spent for tobacco!  That is ruining men–ruining their constitutions.  We live in a land flowing with milk and honey.  God has blessed this nation; yet men complain of hard times.”17  Moody believed that the rags of poverty were the emblems of the drunkard’s child.  He reasoned that since converted men never drank, ragged children were ipso facto being raised by sinners.18
   Moody could not see any reason for poverty in America that eagerness to work could not overcome.  He had seen what his own mother had done with nine children and no visible support.  Furthermore his own boundless energy made indolence all the more unsupportable.
   Moody contended that economic hardship could be a fine discipline.  He commented in a series of meetings in New York City, “It is a good thing that people should suffer.”19  This step in his reasoning appeared to be brutal.  However, in his day-by-day actions Moody never went to such extremes as the preceding statement might suggest.  His deep concern for individuals which grew out of his Christian faith prevented such extremities from happening.  Nevertheless, his beliefs did possess a callousness if pressed to their logical conclusions.  It is most likely that Moody had never thought through all the implications of his point of view.  If he had, probably he would not have made such harsh statements as quoted above, or perhaps he would have changed his deeds to align more closely with these conclusions.  Even in the nineties, when his opinions seemed particularly naive, if his words are read in context they still reveal a continuing concern for the laboring man (although only as an individual) and a desire to help him in his difficulties.20
   During the nineties Moody attacked the rich for their callousness toward the poor.  Unlike his attitude in the eighties he began to place some of the blame for the discontent and poverty of the workingman on the shoulders of the financiers and the great captains of industry.  In a meeting in New York City he declared,  “We have altogether too much wealth.  We have too much poverty, too.  Why don’t some of the people who have made their fortunes stop, and go out into the highways and byways and help the poor fellows who are famishing there?  That’s my idea of socialism, and it’s founded on the teachings of Christ Himself.”21

   The Cure for Laborer's Problems

   In the main, however, Moody contended that poverty was caused by personal sin.  Therefore, a laborer’s only rescue from deprivation was Christian conversion.  He often said: “A heart that is made right with God and man seldom constitutes a social problem and by seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, nine-tenths of social betterment is effected by the convert himself and the one-tenth to Christian sympathy.”22
   For Moody salvation could work wonders.  In his 1876 New York City campaign he stated, “I seldom meet a drunkard who does not long to get rid of his vice, his appetite for strong drink.  And I always rejoice, for I know they can be saved if they will.  Their appetite is the work of the devil, who makes them believe that there is no hope for them.  But oh, my friends, God has got power to destroy the work of the devil, and kill this appetite for strong drink.  He has got the power to snap the fetters of every vice that degenerates our nature.  All we have to do is to trust in Him, pray for strength, and rely upon His saving power.23
   It was Moody’s belief that Christian conversion would make lazy, poor men into energetic and hard-working persons who become prosperous.  At his revival meetings Moody would look about at the wealthy men who sat on the platform with him, the William E. Dodges, Cyrus McCormick, and John Wanamakers, and note that they were all devout church members, all “born again” Christians.  He would point out that few if any of the poor in the slums of Chicago, London, or New York attended church services.  Many of his wealthy supporters had once been poor boys, but few of the nonchurchgoing slum dwellers demonstrated any signs of getting rich.  Therefore, the conclusion seemed self-evident.24 “It is a wonderful fact that men and women saved by the blood of Jesus rarely remained subjects of charity, but rise at once to comfort and respectability.”25 Moody radiated optimism when he thought about the effect of true conversion upon a poor man, “I don’t see how a man can follow Christ and not be successful,”26 and “I never saw the man who put Christ first in his life that wasn’t successful.”27
   If someone should point to a rich man who was not converted, Moody would say that man was first of all a fool, second he was probably suffering or would shortly suffer from some secret sorrow or misfortune, and third, he was damned, like Dives, to spend eternity in hell.28  He was hard put to explain the unsaved man’s wealth with his simplistic Puritan ethic.
   If a man claimed to be a Christian convert but still had not risen to comfort and prosperity, Moody would say that he probably had not been truly converted.  “There are a great many professing Christians who never get on intimate terms with God, and so they never amount to much.”29
   If someone would show Moody a man who had undoubtedly been converted and was intimate with God but was nonetheless still poor, Moody would quote the biblical text, “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”30 Moody sensed no inconsistency in telling those who were truly converted but bound to live in hardship and poverty that “God gives us a little adversity here, a little prosperity there and works all for our good” although “we are not able to read the problem now or to see just why we are afflicted.”31
   Since he believed poverty could in most cases be cured by conversion, Moody declared that it was the highest duty of a Christian to “visit the homes of the poor and the wicked and tell them how the Son of God came into the world to seek the fallen and those who were lost.”32  Whenever he was asked what type of work young converts should do for the church, he suggested that they “visit the sick or go around and distribute tracts and invite people to come to church.”33  He encouraged young ladies of leisure to visit the homes of the masses and preach the gospel and sing hymns for them.34

   Evangelization as Necessary to Americanization

   Reaching the masses was important to both Moody and his supporters.  Moody feared labor activity and saw conversion as a way of making good Americans out of the foreign-born element of the masses.  Moody and his supporters wished to help the working man rise to respectability and prosperity, but both were insistent that the worker do so by way of the Protestant ethic.  If the poor workingman followed the advice of Moody’s sermons and became pious, industrious, thrifty, sober, and honest, he would automatically better his condition.  But if he chose to use the weapons of strikes, boycotts and union activities to take by compulsion what he could not gain by merit, he was a criminal.  In the wake of the Paris Commune, the Haymarket Riot, the increasing number and violence of strikes, the rise of the Knights of Labor and the Communist International, Moody wrote to some of the leading businessmen of Chicago, “there can be no better investment for the capitalists of Chicago than to put the saving salt of the Gospel into these dark homes and desperate centers from which come forth the criminals” and those who increasingly support “the desecration of the Sabbath.”35 Since a high percentage of the unskilled workingmen were foreign-born with alien ideas and were either Roman Catholics, Jews, or nonchurch-goers, it seemed logical for Moody and his businessmen supporters to conclude that Americanization and evangelization were synonymous.36

Moody’s Views of Big Business

   In general Moody’s views in regard to big business were favorable.  However, in his later years he grew critical of some of the practices of big business.  There are many reasons for Moody’s inability to criticize in an ultimate sense the values of the ruthlessly acquisitive society that characterized America in his adult years.

   Moody's Favorable Attitude toward Big Business

   Like many of his contemporary clergyman, Moody supported the values of the business community.  He was largely responsible for the union between the evangelical mind and the business mind which was to characterize subsequent popular revivalists.37 Moody’s religious individualism blended perfectly with the rugged individualism of the businessmen of the era.  Although Moody preached his gospel of salvation to both men of labor and men of business, he shared the social and economic views of the success mythology of big business leaders.  His revivals and fund-raising efforts received the active support of business leaders.  The major post-Civil War titans belonged to churches that articulated an orthodox view of Christianity.  Two close observers of the New York City business community testified that the most prominent merchants and financiers could usually be found on Sunday mornings in the churches interpreting the Scriptures.  Making money was important but saving souls seemed to go along with it hand in hand.38  Moody and big business leaders shared a common Christian faith and common social and economic views.
   It is not surprising that Moody’s political views invariably resembled those of the Republican businessmen who supported him.  Although Moody publicly professed a lack of concern for politics, in private he was a staunch Republican.  When William Jennings Bryan, the silver movement, and the Populists offered a serious threat to the status quo in 1896, Moody actively worked for William McKinley’s election.  At least once during that campaign Moody broke his silence on political issues to say to an audience in New York City that he didn’t believe a thing he [Bryan] said,”39  
   In his private correspondence Moody was even less guarded in his comments.  Three weeks before the election Moody had become so fearful of the outcome that he told a friend that he had counseled the leader of a group from England visiting him that “if the country goes for silver he had better take his Boys Home.”40
   During most of Moody’s career he looked with favor upon the wealthy businessmen of America.  He saw them as men of great character who had overcome poverty.  However, in Moody’s latter years one significant shift in his views did seem to occur.  Whereas in the eighties he had shown great concern over the radicalism of the workingman and attributed much of this agitation to the influx of immigrants from Europe who carried to the United States the red flag and the revolutionary zeal of the Paris Commune, in the nineties he added a new note to his fear of labor unrest.  This fear was in a growing dislike of the extremely wealthy men who controlled the giant corporations.  Moody’s feelings were partly the result of his disgust at the mere size of the capital accumulations of these captains of industry.  D. L. Moody had never opposed a man who had become reasonably well-to-do.  But these tycoons of the nineties, the progenitors of finance capitalism, he judged to be insatiable in their desire for money.  Once during his later years the evangelist recalled that in the earlier days “when a man got his million he had enough.  But now, two, three, or five hundred millions don’t satisfy.”41 
   Moody also feared the owners of the “trusts” because they threatened his position (or the position of men like him) in society.  Shortly before his death the revivalist expressed such fears openly to a reporter in Kansas City.  No longer, it appeared, did “a young man have the chances he used to have.”  The “trusts” had changed a man’s ability to rise from rags to riches.  “They take away his chances of getting along.  What can a poor young man do nowadays, unless he goes to work for someone else who is wealthy? . . .  Trusts, corporations, . . . are bad for the young man.”42  Loss of independence, the end of rugged individualism and the unfettered struggle for success, all this meant a negation of the success mythology in which Moody had long believed.  His way of life was threatened, and the directors of the giant corporations seemed to be one of the major sources of those unsettling conditions.”43
   If historian Richard Hofstadter is correct, Moody’s feelings were parallel to many middle-class Americans at the turn of the century.  Beset by fear of discontent among the lower classes, they also had to worry about the development of a powerful plutocracy at the other end of the social  scale.  The traditional status of Moody and many of his fellow countrymen as leaders and bearers of the central values of society appeared to be undermined.  Their response was to protest vigorously and turn to political agitation and reform in an attempt to change these conditions.44  Whether the evangelist would have become a progressive if he had lived is not subject to debate here; however, he did develop attitudes in the late nineties that were similar to those of later adherents of the progressive movement.

   Moody's Criticism of Big Business

   The foregoing material does not imply that Moody became a great advocate of reform measures in his final years.  He attacked only the most wealthy and ruthless businessmen.  However, he still viewed the majority of businessmen with approval and affection.  Earlier in his career Moody had often attacked business leaders for unscrupulous practices and for the frequent evidence of their all-consuming pursuit of the great god Mammon.  Yet most of his criticisms were basically superficial.  Moody’s condemnation was reserved only for businessmen who lost sight of the true end in life, the salvation of one’s soul, in their pursuit of wealth.”45
   Therefore, Dwight L. Moody consistently judged the actions of businessmen individually and was ready to criticize if individuals in the business community did not measure up to his standards of right and wrong.  With the exception of the vague stirring of concern that animated him in the nineties,  Moody never questioned in an ultimate sense the values of the ruthlessly acquisitive society that characterized the United States in his adult years.  In this regard Moody was no different from the great majority of his fellow citizens during the so-called Gilded Age who had placed their faith in the gospel of morality and prosperity.46

   Reasons for Moody's Inability to Criticize

   Moody found it difficult to criticize the values of business leaders because both the individualistic outlook of pietistic revivalism and the “gospel of wealth” were rooted in traditional orthodoxy.  The success mythology of the post-Appomattox years was grounded in the old Puritan code of worldly asceticism.  Revivalism also had its roots in America’s Puritan past.  Both were based upon a philosophy of individualism.  Ralph Henry Gabriel has noted that “the persistent American philosophy of individualism never had greater intellectual support than in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.”47  In the evangelist Dwight L. Moody there is an amalgamation of the individualism of pietistic revivalism and the social outlook of industrial capitalism.  As a result of this union, Moody was not in a very good position to be critical of business values.
   Another reason for Moody’s inability to make any effective criticism of the business community was his fund-raising activities.  Moody was capable of reaping sizeable monetary gifts from the captains of industry.  Even if he had wanted to do so, Moody would have thought twice before making a sustained attack upon those who made possible his work as an evangelist and a fund raiser for worthwhile causes.  One of his most perceptive followers saw clearly the threat that close association with the wealthy posed to his work.  This friend wrote:  “If I were asked as to the direction in which his [Moody’s] greatest danger lay, I should say that it would come from his ambition to lead and influence Rich Men and that this might have a tendency to lead him to compromise his convictions–unless much of the grace of God is given him. . . . How much he needs our prayers that he may be kept firm and in the John the Baptist spirit!!”48
   Dwight L. Moody’s success in his own endeavors also blurred his critical faculties.  As is sometimes true of those who have achieved position in their profession, Moody regarded with veiled admiration almost any man who had reached the top.  Moody’s youngest son, Paul, has written about the time when his father, as a lobbyist of sorts advocating the closing of theaters on Sunday, once spoke to Richard Croker, the notorious leader of Tammany Hall.  His son reflected, “I have often wondered since whether it was really Father’s interest in the defeat of this bill . . . as much as it was to find a pretext for meeting the great Tammany chieftain which prompted him [in his action].”49  On such occasions Moody largely ignored the ethical conduct of the individual.  Rather he judged a man more on his possession of mere technical competence and on the fact that out of the struggle of life that person had come out on top.  Most likely this same attitude crept into his relationships with the many successful businessmen who became his friends and supporters.50
   The peculiar nature of the evangelist’s theological concerns also hindered him in critically analyzing the economic and social conditions of his time.  His task as a revivalist inevitably forced him to simplify his thoughts so that even the least educated members of his audience could understand and respond.  What was true of theological formulations also applied to other issues.  Moody tended to oversimplify and to personalize social and economic issues that were in reality exceedingly complex.
   For example Moody’s preoccupation with salvation caused him to fall into such errors.  For him unbelief was a primary cause of economic difficulties and social dislocation.  Men were in need, according to Moody, because they were living in rebellion to God.  He contended that there would not be a drunkard or a prostitute walking the streets, if it were not for unbelief.51
   Moody’s perfectionism also played an important role.  If one were truly “saved,” he experienced immediate release from daily troubles.  Thus Moody made the answer to the problems of industrialization extremely simple–believe in God and these problems will soon disappear.52
   As a corollary to his perfectionism, the evangelist insisted that Christians should “be separate from the world.”  “Separation” was a way that the believer might deal with current issues.  It might mean, as it had to restrict followers of Martin Luther and John Calvin, that by using biblical norms which seemed to transcend or stand above any particular historical era, Christians could develop criteria by which they could effectively examine and criticize their culture.  However, Moody defined “separation” in a narrow, legalistic sense by attacking drinking, dancing, card-playing, and theater going–activities long opposed by evangelical Protestant groups.  This limited concept of “otherworldliness” was not capable of coming to grips with the major problems of late nineteenth-century America.53
   The evangelist also advocated another form of withdrawal which removed Christians from any effective criticism of the far reaching implications of industrialization.  For Moody the Christian preacher’s only obligation was to preach the gospel and save souls.  For Moody, only experts should manage politics or operate the economic system.  Whenever Moody did mention publicly the crucial issues facing society, they were used as an additional emphasis in driving home some basic point in his sermon.  In the seventies, then, he could easily dismiss politics by saying, “Now, my friends, we will not bring up this question of parties.  I have nothing to do with that, I only use it as an illustration.”54 In 1897 when Moody gave counsel to ministers, he was even more explicit.  In regard to domestic and foreign affairs the evangelist said, “Don’t have anything to say about capital and labor.  You don’t know anything about it. . . .  What right have you to criticize President Cleveland [about Cuba].  You had better preach the gospel and let him deal with questions of state about which you know nothing.”55
   Since Moody lacked the ability to examine and discuss critically in public the major historical developments of his time, he generally adopted the attitudes of the middle-class groups that flocked to his revival meetings and willingly donated to his philanthropies.  Moody embodied much of what his middle-class audiences were or aspired to be.  A reporter for The Nation noted during Moody’s 1876 campaign in New York City that thousands listened to the revivalist because he was one whom they “instinctively feel is only different from themselves by the religion which he has ‘got.’”56  Even that quality Moody insisted was theirs for the asking.
   Dwight L. Moody had definite opinions about reform, charity, and the social gospel.  Moody’s premillennial views in regard to the Second Coming of Christ greatly colored his views concerning social change. 

Moody’s Views of Social Reform

   Although the evangelist was aware of the grave domestic problems of the day, especially the conditions of the lower classes, Moody chose “the indirect way” to alleviate conditions.  Moody believed that society could only be reformed by the moral and spiritual regeneration of individuals and that all political, social, and economic reforms must be an appendage of revivals.  Moody’s oldest son, William R. Moody, has said in regard to his father, “He insisted that the most efficacious means of reformation was through the individual.”57 Shortly before leaving for one of his revival campaigns of the seventies, Moody stated to an audience in Northfield, Massachusetts, “We hear every few years the cry of ‘Reform !’ ‘Reform!’ but man, away from God, is not to be trusted, and there is no reform until God has been found.”58 Moody believed that until Christ affected the hearts of men there was no hope for reform.   In 1887 he said, “The nation is now crying ‘reform.’  I don’t know how long they are going to continue that cry; they have kept it up ever since I remember; but there will be no true reform until Christ gets into our politics.  Men are all naturally bad, and cannot reform until the Reformer gets into their hearts.”59
   Moody’s solution to the domestic problems was an individualistic gospel.  He spent his career developing methodological and operational bases for reaching individuals in a mass society.  He had an old-fashioned solution for new problems.  His contribution to religion was as an innovator in finding ways to reach the masses.  Thus, he helped the revivalistic solution to men’s problems to survive in an urban, mass society.

   Moody’s Views on Charity

   Throughout his lifetime Moody raised thousands of dollars for charitable causes.  In his work with the poor in Chicago he often gave coal, food, and clothing to the needy.  He rescued erring sons of his church members from the hands of the law and found jobs for deserving young men.  He founded the Northfield Schools for poor, deserving children.  He raised great sums for such worthy causes as the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Young Women’s Christian Association, temperance, the orphans of England, city missions, and the inmates of prisons.
   Although Moody believed in charitable work, his charity was always secondary to his soul winning.  Historian Bernard A. Weinberger has written in regard to Moody’s attitude, “Charitable work was not an end in itself, but one more means of reaching men to prepare them, one at a time, for the final judgment.”60 During the Civil War Moody worked as a first aid delegate for the United States Christian Commission.  His justification for the care of the wounded was evangelistic rather than humanitarian.  Once on board a steamer from Cairo, Illinois, a discussion arose as to the most efficient way of handling the wounded.  “Mr. Moody, full of the idea of saving souls, urged that the very first business in every case was to find out whether the sick or dying man were a child of God, if so, then it was not necessary to spend much time on him–he being safe enough already.  If not, he was to be pointed at once to the Savior.”61  
   The essence of Moody’s attitude toward charity in relation to evangelism is contained in the following comments from one of his sermon delivered in 1876.  “When I was at work in the City Relief Society, before the [Chicago] fire, I used to go to a poor sinner with the Bible in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other.  Dr. Chalmers used to forbid his missionaries giving away money or supplies.  He said those things ought to come by other hands, and I thought he was all wrong.  My idea was that I could open a poor man’s heart by giving him a load of wood or a ton of coal when the winter was coming on, but I soon found that he wasn’t any more interested in the Gospel on that account.  Instead of thinking how he could come to Christ, he was thinking how long it would be before he got another load of wood.  If I had the Bible in one hand and a loaf in the other, the people always looked first at the loaf, and that was just contrary to the order laid down in the Gospel.”62
   In many respects Moody’s philosophy of charity was like Andrew Carnegie’s gospel of wealth.63  Moody came to believe that charity by itself was debilitating to character and that those who received it without being willing give something in return were people who usually turned to bad ends.  Unless the poverty stricken were willing to help themselves, the Christian had no obligation to contribute to their support.  To Moody poverty was a badge of failure for those who did not rise above it.  He viewed poverty in terms of the individual rather than the masses.  For the individual it was a transient state; poverty could be overcome by initiative, industry, and ability.  Therefore, for those who remained in poverty, their condition loudly proclaimed that these individuals were defective in capacity or morals or both.  No amount of charity could change that.  “There is a good deal that we think is charity,” Moody said, “that is really doing a great deal of mischief” because it encouraged people to expect doles instead of working for a living.64

   How Moody Viewed the Social Gospel

   Moody’s approach to social reform was through changing the hearts of men.  During his lifetime some of his most respected friends such as Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott became convinced that man motivated by religion could alter his environment.  Such men were founders of the “social gospel” movement.
   Moody failed to change with Gladden and Abbott.  He did not see how one could sanctify the social order apart from individual conversions.  He often declared that the heart of the individual had to be changed before a change in his environment could take place.65  One of Moody’s favorite aphorisms was, “Whitewashing the pump won’t make the water pure.”66
   The social gospel also differed with Moody’s theology.  The doctrine of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man was certainly contrary to Moody’s theology.  “I want to say very emphatically that I have no sympathy with the doctrine of universal brotherhood and universal fatherhood. . . . Show me a man that will lie and steal and get drunk and ruin a woman–do you tell me that he is my brother?  Not a bit of it.  He must be born again into the household of faith before he becomes my brother in Christ.”67

   Moody's Social Pessimism

   Moody was a social pessimist in that he held to a premillennial view of the Second Coming of Christ.  In this respect Moody parted company with the previous generation of revivalists who turned to the belief that their mission was to prepare the world for Christ’s coming by reducing it to the lordship of his gospel.  Social reforms fit into their evangelistic and millennial schemes.  These evangelists played a key role in the widespread attack upon slavery, poverty, and greed.  According to historian Timothy L. Smith, “They thus helped prepare the way both in theory and in practice for what later became known as the social gospel.”68
   However, as a premillennialist Moody lacked this buoyant hope of a former generation of revivalists that the millennium was just around the corner and that a little more effort on revivalism and moral reform would usher it in.  Moody contended that until Christ returned none of the basic problems of the world could be solved.  In his sermon on the imminent Second Coming, Moody discouraged those efforts toward reform which were the distinguishing mark of the social gospel movement after 1890.  Moody was optimistic about the destiny of all true Christians and even about the destiny of the United States, but he was not at all confident about the future of the world and the human race.  “Talk about men improving so very fast,” he snorted, “I would like to see them.”69 It would seem that the evangelist purposely adopted a pessimistic attitude in order to spite the advocates of theistic evolution and social Darwinism.  “I look on this world as a wrecked vessel,” he said, “God has given me a life-boat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”70     
   Moody not only parted company with the optimism of past revivalists and the social Darwinians with his premillennial views, but he also parted company with many of the ministers who sat on his platform and nodded agreement with his Poor Richard parables and his Horatio Alger anecdotes.  In future days this doctrine of premillennial ism was to become one of the test points between modernists and fundamentals.  According to historian William G. McLaughlin, Jr., premillennialism’s “popularity among post-Civil War evangelists was the result of an increasingly pessimistic view of life on the part of those intellectually unsophisticated and socially insecure individuals who made up the hard core of urban revival audiences.  The growing complexity of modern life and the breakdown of traditional beliefs and values made these people far less certain about the progressive improvement of American society than their parents and grandparents had been.  To these fearful and perplexed folk, the miraculous cataclysm of the Second Coming offered a far more reassuring hope that the impious and confusing doctrines of Herbert Spencer and the theistic evolutionists.”71
   Most likely Moody adopted premillennialism quite uncritically in the 1870's along with many other interpretations of the Bible which he learned from the Plymouth Brethren in England.  Because they were a pietistic sect of the disinherited, the Brethren found social consolation in the doctrine of Christ’s speedy return.  Moody utilized premillennialism as a convenient handle against the theological liberals who challenged either his revivalism or his social views.  When confronted with the postmillennial argument, he would stubbornly ask: “Where do you get it?  I can’t find it.  The word of God nowhere tells me to watch and wait for the coming of the millennium, but for the coming of the Lord.  I don’t find any place where God says the world is to grow better and better, and that Christ is to have a spiritual reign on earth of a thousand years.  I find that the earth is to grow worse and worse and that at length there is going to be a separation [of the saved from the unsaved at Christ’s return].”72 On that day the liberals and the worldly would get their correction and the saved remnant their crowns of glory.
   Moody found “certain wealthy and fashionable churches” where “this doctrine is not preached or believed.”73  Business leaders did not like the idea of losing their stocks and bonds.  Persons whose status in society had risen with their incomes could not perceive the virtue of believing that the world was getting worse and worse.  It did not make much sense to those wealthy British and American businessmen who had steadily worked their way up the ladder of success for Moody to insist that mankind was a failure.  Nor was it very consistent with Moody’s view of America as that “blessed nation” “flowing with milk and honey” in which anyone could rise to the top.  Of course, the evangelist meant “failure” in terms of sin and not in terms of social position, scientific discovery, or material profits.  However, to doubt progress in any form in the nineteenth century was to run counter to the democratic faith of America.  Moody’s prosperous evangelical supporters may have paid lip service to this doctrine, but it was among the unsuccessful that it received its most enthusiastic response.74

The Inflexibility of Moody's Views

   Moody’s answer to economic and social difficulties remained largely unchanged throughout his life.  His solution continued to be the conversion of the individual coupled with Christian charity.  Moody in his early career could not grasp the roots of poverty as could few at that time.  His views reflected his rural background and the dominating economic outlook of his age–rugged individualism.  Although he spent the greater portion of his adult years in the cities of Europe and the United States, at heart the great urban evangelist remained a simple farm boy.  Throughout his life Moody viewed the social and economic scene from the uncomplicated and already rather primitive vantage point of a pre-Civil War native of the Connecticut River Valley.75 Moody believed that there was no reason for poverty that eagerness to work could not overcome, for he had seen what his own mother with her habits of thrift and economy had done with nine children and no visible support.  As a result, Moody had great admiration for the captains of industry.  When Moody’s liberal friends saw that conversion and charity were not adequate to change society, they suggested public reform and economic reorganization.76  However, Moody had a streak of anti-intellectualism that blinded him to the issues confronting the church and society in the industrial age.  Thus he stuck to the views that he had learned early in life.  Eight months before he died Moody stated his lifelong position: “For forty years I have heard in every city, along toward election time, the cry, ‘Reform!  Reform!’  But things go on in about the same old way.  You can’t reform government without men who have been themselves reformed, and that reformation must be a regeneration through the power of the Holy Ghost. . . .  Human nature has not changed in the last 1900 years.  Preach a different gospel from that which was successful in the apostolic days?  Oh, bosh!”77 This statement indicates the essence of Moody’s attitude toward social and economic issues throughout his life.

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