CHAPTER VI
The Revival Campaigns in Great Britain
In Great Britain
Moody’s ministry in the British Isles embraced five trips.1 The most well-known are the extended campaigns of 1873-1875 and 1881-1884. His campaigns were held in the cities of Scotland, Ireland, and England.
Moody’s Purpose
During these campaigns it was Moody’s purpose to reach the masses. He failed, but he inspired other individuals and created institutions to carry the gospel to the working masses.
At the time D. L. Moody came to Great Britain the churches were torn by theological and ecclesiastical differences. They were being challenged by increasing secularism, evolution, and higher criticism.2 Most important, the churches were also seeking means to reach the largely unchurched working-class people of the cities. “How to reach the masses” was a favorite theme for discussion among churchmen.3 One contemporary commented, “Whoever will solve that problem will earn the unspeakable gratitude of all who sigh for the conversion of the nations to Christ.”4 Because of his experience among the masses in Chicago, Moody seemed to be the answer to British prayers. He brought a message and program of action which would sublimate antagonisms between the warring factions. Since Moody’s primary interest was in saving the unchurched masses, he was able to unite the evangelicals of all denominations in a common cause–reaching the working class.5
The British concern for the working masses was based on at least two reasons. Besides being aware that the poor were not in their elegant churches, churchmen were deeply troubled as to the nature of poverty and what could be done. One of Moody’s workers, Robert Paton, wrote to another Moody worker, Mrs. Jane MacKinnon, “The meetings are getting on grandly at Stepney, but oh, the poverty of the place. I went into a house on Sunday, but almost twenty yards from Mr. Moody’s room. In the first room I went into, about ten feet square, I found a husband, wife and five children–one of them a dear little babe dying, its face haunts me now. Other rooms were similarly filled, in all, twenty souls slept in this wretched hovel. So we are in the midst of awful poverty. May the good Lord Himself teach us what to do.”6 Many middle-class Scots felt a great need to preach the gospel to the working masses in order to save them from eternal damnation. It was obvious to them that the workers were poor because they were great sinners.7 However, some saw the problems differently. One Scottish cleric charged that the workers’ poverty was due to the sinful nature of the well-to-do in an acquisitive industrial society. He wrote, “Oh, what a satire upon our wealth and pride, our civilization and Christianity, is the neighborhood of all this poverty and suffering, this ignorance and vice! Conceal it as we may, this heap of sin and misery is the dunghill of our wealth and commerce. This hideous creature is the illegitimate offspring of modern society. . . . Do not tell me they suffer because of sin. If they suffer more than you, it is only because they sin less cunningly that you and in circumstances of greater disadvantage. . . . There is a monster down in the cellar of our city-life which, grown to maturity, will level your palaces with the ground, and scatter your wealth and prosperity to the winds of heaven.”8
The British were not only troubled by the poverty of the working class but were also greatly exercised over the potential for radicalism and anarchism among the masses. The Reform Act of 1867, which nearly doubled the electorate of England by including the working class, increased fear of radicalism in the body politic.9 Many of Moody’s supporters viewed evangelism as one means of insuring general stability among the newly enfranchised. They agreed with the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who believed that Moody came “at the time when the masses are lying in indifference and are nevertheless impressible.”10 The assumption, of course, was that Moody would impress the masses with the views that would preserve the Earl’s ideal of a “Conservative Democracy.”11 Shaftesbury was a vigorous opponent of the Reform Act of 1867; he felt that if the masses were given the privilege of voting they would “misuse it.”12 He did not think that the working class was ready to be entrusted with the vote. Although Shaftesbury had been the father of all nineteenth-century factory legislation in behalf of labor, he did so from a sense of noblesse oblige and Christian charity and not from a spirit of comradeship or a readiness to cooperate in movements for working-class self-help. Although his humanitarian causes had contributed almost unwittingly to the new spirit of mass-organization and democratic politics. Shaftesbury intensely distrusted the development. He contended that reform ought to be paternalistically managed from the top down and introduced gradually under the leadership of the upper classes.13 He emphasized duties, not rights, in his thought. If the workingman was thrifty, honest, and industrious, then and only then could he be rewarded with the elective franchise as a “trust.”14 Shaftesbury and those who thought like him believed that Moody’s form of urban evangelism would help to maintain a stable order. Thus the Earl regarded the arrival of Moody as that of “the right man at the right hour,”15 and he wrote in his diary after attending a meeting at the Agricultural Hall in London, “Moody will do more in an hour than Canon Lidden in a century.”16 Thus Moody’s call to evangelize the masses provided a rallying point for the religious unity so much desired in the church’s struggle with internal and external foes.
Moody’s Achievement and Failure
Since Moody considered evangelistic work among the working masses so important, an appraisement of the results of his mission to Great Britain can properly include consideration of the effect of his revivals on this class of people. In 1892 Karl Marx’s collaborator, Friederich Engels implied that Moody’s revivalism had been useful in the evangelization of the working class. Accosting the British for bringing in the likes of Moody and Sankey and not facing the inevitabilities of history, he wrote, “Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower orders; not content with his own native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother Jonathan, the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like. . . .”17
Although judgment varied on Moody’s success, the final conclusion would have to be that Moody and the British churches failed in making any great impact upon the laboring class. By the close of the 1875 London campaign, The Times reported that Moody had actually reached the lower classes in London.18 Although the lower classes were reached, no observer doubted that the great majority of Moody’s listeners were from the comfortable middle classes. Many of these people were already church members. A reporter for the Spectator commented that the revivalist was not attracting” the kind of people among whom they might do the most good or better, and probably more discriminating.”19 The Pall Mall Gazette added that “the majority attending the meetings are of the middle class,” though “some not altogether unwholesome effect,” may be produced among “a very low class.”20 Even Moody’s inveterate champion among the Nonconformist publications, The Christian, reluctantly concluded at one point that the meetings had “left the ‘lapsed masses’ comparatively untouched.”21 In a meeting of ministers held in London several months after the close of the revival, one Moody supporter openly admitted that “the masses were left today just where they were before the evangelists first crossed the Atlantic.”22
It was at Newcastle, a city in the north of England, that Moody rose from obscurity to fame. What happened to him in reaching the masses at Newcastle was to plague him the rest of his revivalistic career. During the progress of the revival Moody became quite concerned with the fact that the meetings were being attended by the well-churched middle classes to the exclusion of others. Because of this problem he began to divide his congregations into classes and gave tickets to the different meetings which were held for them.23 Although the tickets helped in reaching the lower classes in Newcastle as well as in other British cities, one of Moody’s early biographers concluded that “the great majority of those who professed to have been converted were those who had known the Scriptures from infancy, and had been regular attendants of the house of God.”24
When the ticket system failed to do the job, Moody then turned to locating some of his meetings in the places where the working classes lived. Among his most sensational and highly publicized meetings were three which he conducted in the Edinburgh Corn Exchange near the Grassmarket slum district for the “purpose of bringing the Gospel to the poor.”25 On December 28, 1873, a meeting was held for men only. The admission was by ticket. According to Horatius Bonar, a Moody supporter in Edinburgh, “Six hundred of the Grassmarket men streamed up from the Corn Exchange and into the Assembly Hall and falling on their knees gave themselves to God.”26 Bonar, of course, assumed that the six hundred men were from the ranks of the poor. However, another minister who had assisted at these meetings took issue with Bonar’s claim. “What a pity that Christians should exaggerate like that and give the enemy cause to ask incredulously, Where were your 600 Corn Exchange converts when the converts’ farewell meeting was held? . . . A similar band of men, 400 strong, came up from the Corn Exchange on a subsequent Sunday evening, and filled the body of the Assembly Hall, and to an outsider and onlooker they would have appeared to be 400 Anxious inquirers, but on being tested at the close (as was done) they were found to be mostly Christian men–many of them helpers in the work; and it turned out that there was not a score of anxious souls among them.”27 As far as this observer was concerned, Bonar’s statement was “preposterous.”28 The six hundred men whom Bonar had seen were merely the Christian workers who had gone down to the slums to see Moody reach the poor and then marched back again to assert anew their dedication to the faith.29
Another attempt to reach the working masses by special location was in the East End of London in Bow Road Hall. During the second week attendance at the hall fell off considerably, it began to be a matter of no little anxiety to Moody whether the meetings there would ultimately succeed. From observing that he was failing to attract the poor and “wicked” into his meetings, Moody took to curious means of advertising his services. He had men promenading the streets with two huge boards suspended from their shoulder, the one before and the other behind, bearing the striking words, “Moody and Sankey at Bow Road Hall tonight!” in letters large enough to be read at the distance of a hundred yards. He also had bellmen, ringing with all their might one minutes and shouting with all their might the next, in giving notices of the revival meetings. As the meetings went along, attendance improved. However, Moody thought his crowds looked to amiable and too well dressed.30 Sometimes he would say to the crowd, “I see too many Christian people here. I know you. A great many of you were at my meetings in Islington. You are converted already. Now, I want you to get and go out, and leave room for hundreds of those sinners who are waiting outside for a chance to come in and hear the gospel.”31 According to William H. Daniels, “Under such an invitation large numbers of believers would actually leave the places which they had occupied, perhaps for an hour before the meeting began; and go out into the tent, or to some overflow meeting in the street, in order to make room for those who needed the Gospel more from having heard it less.”32 Apparently those waiting outside were pretty much like those sitting inside. The Reverend Charles Edginton, rector of the Anglican Parish in which Bow Road Hall was located, wrote to the London Times that whenever he was at the meetings he “saw but very few of the working class.” He doubted whether Moody had any impact at all upon “the masses” and described those attending as “ordinary church and chapel goers, clergymen, dissenting ministers, and visitors from the country who were attracted by novelty” of the meetings.33
Church members coming out of the London meetings were few. This fact is illustrated by a letter from the Reverend A. G. Gowan, pastor of the East End Tabernacle of London, written three months after Moody had concluded in London meetings. “Up to the present time we have received into fellowship thirty-six who attribute their conversion to the services of the Bow Road Hall. About one half of these were not in the habit of attending any place of worship regularly prior to the opening of the Hall. Viewed in one light it were worth while to put up the Hall if only for them, but I cannot refrain from saying that thus far the results have greatly disappointed me.”34 Newman Hall, one of the most prominent members of the dissenting clergy in London and a staunch supporter of Moody, expressed his disappointment in regard to the 1875 meeting in 1881. “I hailed that visit, took part in it, assisted in the ‘inquiry room’ and occasionally preached in connection with it. Some of the services were held very near “Surrey Chapel”; yet out of a membership of one thousand three hundred we have not three who were the fruits of that mission.”35
The Reverend John MacPherson at the end of Moody’s stay wrote a record of the evangelist’s work, admitting that Moody failed in reaching the masses. However, MacPherson sought to justify the failure by showing that Moody revived the church members who would in turn reach the masses.36
Although Moody failed to reach the masses in large numbers, he did reach some of them. His great appeal was to the church-going middle class; he had hoped it would be the working class. In his early account of Moody, the Reverend E. J. Goodspeed tells about his counseling with a workingman in the inquiry room at the Edinburgh meeting.37 He also tells about men in their workshops in Birmingham singing Sankey’s songs.38 Goodspeed makes the following observation about the inquiry room in Liverpool, “It is interesting and refreshing to notice how all grades of society and all ages are represented among the anxious who throng the inquiry-room at the close of Mr. Moody’s addresses. From the richly-dress lady to the poor waif of the street, with scarce enough of clothing to cover his nakedness; from the boy and girl of eight or ten years to the horny-handed, gray-headed workingman, with all the intervening stages of life. . . .”39 Another observation made at Liverpool by Goodspeed demonstrates a limited success with the working class, “Then there were many workingmen who had plunged into the depths of intemperance, and whose insulted and injured wives, after being driven from their homes, had been compelled to support themselves and their children for years together. These wives . . . had sent letters to their husbands, extending their forgiveness, and imploring them to come to Victoria Hall and seek forgiveness of the Savior. Some of them had come and found that forgiveness, and gone back to lighten their home again with a new luster and joy.”40
Daniels records that in Birmingham artisans in the industries crowded to the meetings in large numbers. One workingman was heard to say, “A dozen men were hit in our shop; and when Mr. Moody held his last all-day meeting for converts, and the foreman would not let us off, a good many of us laid down our tools, and started for the meeting. We were bound to have one last day with Moody and Sankey.”41 In London Daniels records that the large groups which supported Moody were the respectable people, but many slum dwellers were reached.42
From Moody’s London campaign of 1883-1884 interesting evidence comes of Moody’s reaching the working class, although it reveals difficulty in follow-up work. At Wandsworth in London 2,000 were scattered widely around the district and beyond, but it was discovered that “the large proportion of the converts are from the working class, and that they are attending services in mission halls where they feel more at home than in the churches.”43 Apparently, like Moody’s disciples at the North Market Mission, some of these people were not comfortable in middle-class churches.
Another isolated event of Moody’s success took place in London in 1884. At that time the London workingman was much exposed to “free-thinkers.” In East London in the center of the dense working population of that quarter where the land had given way to acres of factories and cheerless streets of workers’ dwellings, Moody waded into the thick of militant atheism. At that time Charles Bradlaugh, the champion of atheism, was at his zenith. Moody directly encountered a group of atheists on Thursday, January 31. He had received a letter from the president of a club of local atheists daring him to preach a sermon to atheists. The incident which resulted has been exaggerated by biographers of Moody. The legend they recorded described an entire hall of atheists, five hundred of whom experienced instant conversion to the Christian faith. This legend is still produced in biographies of Moody.44 The same scene reported by Moody four days later at a luncheon with George Williams of the Y.M.C.A., Professor Alexander Simpson, Robert Paton, and D. W. Whittle, who recorded it that same evening in his diary, is less sensational.
The night of the famous sermon the front seats were reserved for the atheists. Moody’s sermon focused on the emptiness of the atheists’ hope. He spoke of the mockery of family love if the members do not have immortality. One deathbed scene after another was designed to hold audience attention. Many of them remained throughout the service. To those who stayed to the after-meeting Moody sought to explain four words.
“Receive Him, believe Him, trust Him, take Him. Who will take Him?” he cried. “Who will say ‘I will?’”
Several responded from the general audience. One atheist shouted, “I won’t.”
“Moody, with compassion almost to tears, declared, “It’s ‘I will” or “I won’t for every man in this hall tonight.” The evangelist then spoke of the Prodigal Son’s decision, “I will arise and go to my father . . .” Moody continued, “The battle is on the will, men, and only there. When the young man said ‘I will” the battle was won, for he had yielded his will, and on that point all hangs tonight. Men, you have your champion there who said ‘I won’t!’ I want every man who believes that man is right to rise and say, ‘I won’t take him.’
When no one moved, Moody continued, “Thank God! No man says, ‘I won’t.’ Now who’ll say ‘I will,’ who will take Christ as Savior, who will take Him?”
There was a long pause. Moody described what happened when one of the atheists “called out ‘I will take Him!’ It was a bombshell in their midst. Some were violent in anger as the meeting closed. But the backbone of atheism in the club received a terrible twist. I met the man who decided to Christ and found him an intelligent mechanic, and fully turned to God.”45
Later Moody accepted an invitation to family tea by the president of the atheists’ club. During the conversation Moody said, “If I lived in Stratford I should not try by argument to win you over, but I would try by kindness to win your affection and make your respect me.” The president said in response, “You have done that already.”46 Most likely Moody would have wished for many more such encounters with working people in Great Britain.
Moody’s most famous convert from the working class was J. Keir Hardie. Hardie grew up in Scotland in a poor home. The hardships caused his father, David Hardie, to become a cantankerous freethinker who read Tom Paine and Charles Bradlaugh and caused his mother, Mary, to reject formal religion,47 even though, she was a deeply religious woman.48 According to Donald Carswell, when Keir “was seventeen the Moody and Sankey Mission arrived, evoking an outburst of religious enthusiasm in the West of Scotland, especially among young men, that endured at fever heat for several years. In due course Keir Hardie succumbed to the general influence and became ‘converted’”.49 Joining the Evangelical Union, a small dissenting sect in Scotland that had a very simple organized expression of Christianity,50 Hardie lived and died a devout Christian.51 Although Moody’s revivalism had won Hardie to simple evangelical faith, even to the point of being an active Good Templar member (a temperance organization), Hardie rejected the views of labor and capital associated with Moody and his supporters. At the time of Hardie’s conversion he was a coal miner. He was to become founder of the Independent Labor Party and an ardent advocate of socialism. Being a product of the age of industry Hardie applied the Christian faith in a manner different from Moody and his British associates. He took the doctrine of free salvation and attacked the bastions of privilege. His 1897 Christian message in the Labor Leader illustrates this point, “I am afraid my heart is bitter tonight, and so the thoughts and feelings that pertain to Christmas are far from me. But when I think of the thousand of white-livered poltroons who will take the Christ’s name in vain, and yet not see His image being crucified in every hungry child, I cannot think of peace. I have known as a child what hunger means, and the scars of those days are with me still and rankle in my heart, and unfit me in many ways for the work to be done. A holocaust of every Church building in Christendom tonight would be as an act of sweet savor in the sight of Him whose name is supposed to be worshiped within their walls. If the spiritually-proud and pride-blinded professors of Christianity could only be made to feel and see that the Christ is here present with us, and that they are laying on the stripes and binding the brow afresh with thorns, and making Him shed tears of blood in a million homes, surely the world would be made more fit for His Kingdom. We have no right to a merry Christmas which so many of our fellows cannot share.”52
It is true that many of the leaders of the British labor movement grew up in pious evangelical homes where they may have sung Sankey’s hymns as children, but it would be very difficult to show that they were in any way influenced by Moody’s social message in their work for the British Labour Party.53
Isolated events of reaching the laboring class can be documented, but Moody’s chief goal of reaching the masses in great number and making the nation safe from political radicalism must in the final analysis be declared unsuccessful.
Although Moody failed to reach the workingman through his revival campaigns in the British Isles, he did inspire others to enter the Christian pursuit for the workingman and created institutions to carry the gospel and charity to the poor. Moody was virtually the founder of the Church Parochial Mission Society. He influenced William Hay Aitken to leave Christ Church in Liverpool to become a full-time missioner.54 Moody used his influence in the House of Commons and among the wealthy to get Aitken’s work underway.55 According to British historian L. E. Elliott-Binns, “The new movement was abundantly successful and seemed admirably fitted to meet the special needs of the age.”56
Through Moody a merchant, Wilson Carlile, was “won to Christ and His cause.”57 Carlile saw the need for the Church of England to possess an organization run on the lines of the Salvation Army though avoiding its excesses. The formation of the Church Army 1882 was due to Carlile as an Anglican minister and through church channels. Elliott-Binns writes in regard to the Army’s work these words. “The great success which has attended this effort, both in evangelistic, pastoral, and social work, is a testimony to the foresight and devotion of its founder and to the ability of the Church to make use, though perhaps not on a sufficiently adequate scale, of unusual means of carrying on its mission, to employ working men and women to carry gospel to people of their own class.”58
Two other men whom Moody influenced for the working class were John Campbell White and John Coville. White (later to become Lord Overtoun), a thirty-year-old chemical manufacturer,59 and Coville, a young ironmaster, asked Moody how they could use their growing fortunes. Moody, realizing the plight of the poor and the difficulty he was having in reaching them, turned the eyes of White, Coville, and their like to consider the cry of Glasgow’s poor.60
In 1898 Sir George Adam Smith declared that Moody’s revivals had been a great force for civic righteousness in Glasgow.61 This was particularly true in regard to movements and institutions that arose in behalf of the poor working class. In 1876 the United Evangelistic Committee that had been formed for Moody’s Glasgow mission became the Glasgow United Evangelistic Association. At that time the Association began a career in Evangelism and philanthropy–Poor Children’s Day Refuges, Gospel Temperance, Fresh Air Fortnights, the Cripple Girls’ League, the Glasgow Christian Institute, Homes for Destitute Children, Sunday morning Free Breakfasts, and Poor Children’s Sabbath Dinner.62 The work still continues along these same lines of witness and social work to this day.63
In 1874 Moody made an appeal for the orphans of Glasgow. Many of these children were victims of industrial blight. Moody’s plea brought in three thousand pounds to get the work of William Quarrier’s Orphan Homes of Scotland underway. In 1930, Moody’s son, William, wrote in regard to the progress of this orphanage, “After half a century it is impressive to note the magnitude to which this work has grown. Over two thousand needy children are given a home, and special departments are assigned to the care of consumptive and epileptic patients. The plant involves in buildings and equipment three hundred and fifty thousand pounds and the work is maintained at a daily cost of one hundred pounds.”64
The Sunday morning Free Breakfast that was conducted by the Glasgow United Evangelistic Association spread to other Scottish cities such as Edinburgh and Dundee. A heterogeneous crowd would gather in large buildings in these cities, such as Tent Hall in Glasgow, and he served hot tea and rolls for breakfast. After breakfast those gathered would participate in hymn singing and a hear a brief gospel message. One observer commented on what kind of people he saw at such a Sunday morning gathering, “But such a company!–hundreds of human beings, both the ‘humanity’ and the ‘the being’ in many instances barely visible! Utter wrecks many of them are, mere fragments of body and soul,–old, haggard, lean, skeleton-looking men and women, life in some cases apparently not worth a week’s purchase. Some of them are clean and decent-looking, a little self-respect having miraculously survived the storms of a lifetime. Others are blotched and scarred, having fought a hundred fights with God and man, bearing the marks of every passion and every vice, smitten almost past hope with the most loathsome leprosies of sin, familiar with slums and jails, and having obviously newly crawled out of the ooze of debasement far below the level of ordinary wickedness. Many evidently well acquainted with sorrow, with nakedness, with hunger, and a perpetual struggle for existence, in which the odds are plainly on the side of misfortune and misery and death. There are young men and women who have made shipwreck of soul and body ere the voyage is well begun.”
He continued by describing many individuals in detail. An example of one such life description was as follows: “Here is a purple-faced jail-bird, a strongly built man with little brain, less heart, and scarce a soul, a conscienceless character, having no fear of God or man, whose visage tells his story in large bold type–the huge jaw, the villainous, leering eye, murder in every feature, with blood enough in him and heat enough in that blood, to put a whole village of decent people mad, if the scoundrelism of that man were parcelled out among them. His face is washed for the occasion, and his hair is done in the manner of his class.”65 Throughout the years many lives have been aided with food and religion through the Sunday morning Free Breakfasts.66
Moody was responsible through his direct influence for many mission halls throughout the British Isles.67 One was the Carruber’s Close Mission in Edinburgh. In a report for 1898-1899 the Mission stated that mainly through Moody’s efforts the sum of eleven thousand pounds was raised for a site on High Street. “The present commodious building was erected upon it, and opened for use by Mr. Moody himself on March 4, 1884.”68 In London Moody launched the project of a Gospel Hall in a working-class area; “it continues in service eighty years later.”69
An example of Moody’s ability to see a situation and inspire action comes in the way the British Workman Company Limited was formed. On one occasion Moody had convened a great conference in Liverpool. The rest of the story is told by Henry L. Drummond. “One of the speakers, the Rev. Charles Garrett, in a powerful speech, expressed his conviction that the chief want of the masses in Liverpool was the institution of cheap houses of refreshment to counteract the saloons. When he had finished, Mr. Moody called upon him to speak ten minutes more. The ten minutes might almost be said to have been a crisis in the social history of Liverpool.” During the ten minutes Moody engaged in whispered conversation with various gentlemen on the platform. The speaker had no sooner finished than Moody “sprung to his feet and announced that a company had been formed to carry out the objects Mr. Garret had advocated; that various gentlemen, who he named . . . , had each taken one thousand shares of five dollars each and that the subscription list would be open till the end of the meeting. The capital was gathered almost before the adjournment, and a company floated under the name of the ‘British Workman Company, Limited,’ which has not only worked a small revolution in Liverpool, but–what was not contemplated or wished for, except as an index of healthy business–paid a handsome dividend to the shareholders.”
The hastily formed company was not doomed to failure. Drummond continues, “For twenty years this company has gone on increasing; its ramifications are in every quarter of the city; it has returned ten per cent, throughout the whole period, except for one (strike) year, when it returned seven; and, above all, it has been copied by cities and towns innumerable all over Great Britain.”70
Although Moody’s revivals failed in reaching the working masses, the enthusiasm created by the meetings did claim others for the task and opened up British pocketbooks for institutional work among the masses.
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