Mighty Work

"The Church is curing a few headaches, reducing several fevers, and healing some lameness; it is serving coffee and sandwiches to the poor and suffering; but it is doing no mighty work. . . . Thinking of God as a glorified Rotarian will never create a disturbance in the human conscience. Until a man has come to an evangelic experience of the conviction of sin, all other doctrines are tinkling brass and sounding cymbals."

Thus last week did Rev. Dr. Charles Jefferson, 75, high-minded honorary minister of Manhattan's Broadway Tabernacle, address the 56th annual General Conference for Christian Workers at East Northfield, Mass. To his 4,000 listeners in the largest of the gatherings of ministers, students and missionaries which every summer brings to East Northfield, Dr. Jefferson's words almost seemed designated ko echo a Northfieldite who did do mighty work: Dwight Lyman Moody, doughty founder of the General Conference.

Next February brings the 100th anniversary of Moody's birth. With the determination of churchmen to savor such an occasion to the fullest, the Moody centenary was launched last week with a mass meeting chairmanned by Dr. John McDowell, onetime moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., onetime pupil at Northfield's Mount Hermon School for Boys which Dwight Moody founded. Among men who will help Dr. McDowell in arranging Moody celebrations are Dr. John R. Mott and Dr. Robert Elliott Speer, prime exponents of the evangelism for which East Northfield stands today; Sir John Edward Kynaston Studd, who as a Cambridge student was converted by Evangelist Moody; Sir Wilfred Grenfell, who was inspired to work as a medical missionary in Labrador by the U. S. man of God; Dwight Moody's only surviving son, Paul Dwight, now 57, forceful president of Middlebury (Vt.) College, successor to his late brother, William Revell Moody, as director of the East Northfield conferences.

Farm-born Dwight Lyman Moody was a shoe clerk in Boston when, at 19, he was brought to Christ by his Congregational Sunday School teacher. Year later he was a $5,000-a-year shoe salesman in Chicago. There he began an extraordinary program of prayer-meetings, social work, personal evangelism, recreation, philanthropy. Short, stout, full-bearded, he became known to the Chicago Press as "Crazy Moody." He liked to stop pedestrians, inquire "Are you a Christian?" Declining for conscience's sake to fight in the Civil War, he nevertheless followed the Union armies saving souls. Critics said he revived dying men with brandy to get them to surrender to Christ and Dwight L. Moody before they perished.

In 1870 Moody met a hymn-singing Collector of Internal Revenue named Ira D. Sankey. "Where are you from?" exploded Moody. "What is your business? You will have to give that up. I have been looking for you for the past eight years." Though they actually wrote few hymns, Moody & Sankey became as famed as Gilbert & Sullivan through promoting such collections as Gospel Hymns & Sacred Songs. At one time their hymns earned $35,000 royalties in a few months. In 1873-75 the evangelists toured the British Isles, spoke and sang before 2,500,000 people.

In the U. S., Moody & Sankey made prodigious onslaughts upon the unregenerate, organized services in big cities with as many as 500 ushers, 1,000 choirsingers. In Philadelphia, they attracted 900,000 people in nine weeks. Said Moody: "It is the greatest pleasure of living to win souls to Christ, and it is a pleasure the angels can't enjoy." But toward the end of his career this evangelist, who was no great speaker, no great theologian, discovered that most of the people who went to hear him were already church members. On Manhattan's East Side he experimented with an enfeebled Presbyterian church, but with all his talent for vigorous organization he could not fill it. To build from the ground up he established the East Northfield schools and conferences, the Moody Bible Institute which still flourishes in Chicago, keeps a radio soul-saving service going all day long. Though the British and U. S. Press often accused Moody & Sankey of personally profiting by their work, most of the hymn royalties went into Moody's institutions. When he died of heart disease in 1899 his estate was worth $500. Sankey, whose voice had already grown old and thin, lingered nine years longer.

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