19. The Crossroad
19
THE CROSSROAD
Dwight loved the Chicago church. After all, he had poured himself into building it, soliciting funds for its maintenance, and then preaching in it for years. He referred to the church as his “first love.” He shared with Farwell that he would seldom “get on my knees in private but I think and pray for the dear church in Chicago.” When one of the deacons had visited him in Philadelphia, he’d spent two hours going over the church membership roll and asking in detail how each person was doing.
The new church building stood on the Chicago Avenue site he had secured before leaving for Europe. Although the church was still in debt, when he returned he made a few successful calls for funds and cleared the indebtedness. Thus on June 1, 1876, despite a pouring rain, the church was opened and Dwight preached. The church was formally dedicated on July 16.
Dwight thought it strange to be back in Chicago—it had changed so much in the three years he had been gone. The surroundings he had known and loved were altered beyond recognition by rebuilding, yet were still smoky from the fire. The stockyard stench traveled everywhere, blanketing much of Chicago with its own peculiar aroma. But the crowds of people and the multitudes of ragged, dirty children remained the same. Dwight longed to reach out to them again in Christ’s love. He sensed, too, that not only had Chicago changed, but he had changed.
DWIGHT SENSED THAT NOT ONLY HAD CHICAGO CHANGED, BUT HE HAD CHANGED.
On the spur of the moment he decided to accept the Chicago campaign invitation first, then the one in Boston. He even allowed himself to get back somewhat into the solicitation of funds to erect a temporary tabernacle. Farwell said no one would give to it, but then changed his mind when he realized the building could be salvaged later as a permanent building.
Prior to starting in Chicago, Dwight and his family returned to Northfield for a couple of summer months. They could enjoy their very own home, which delighted the whole family. Emma had much to do in Northfield, for, as she wrote Jane Mackinnon in Scotland on September 11, “We are in our own home, and though in a most delightful spot with such beautiful scenery, it is a place where it is very difficult to get servants, and I have had to act in all sorts of capacities. We have had company every day since we came into our house, and it has been a pleasure to my husband and myself, but I found my husband’s urgent letters took most of my spare time.”
An ugly rumor in the British papers saying Moody and Sankey had quarreled over money in New York slightly spoiled this time of leisure. As Emma assured Jane: “The whole thing is a wicked fabrication. Mr. Sankey and Mr. Moody have never quarreled about anything. I have not seen anything from the newspapers trouble Mr. Moody as this has done.”
Reveling in being with Sam, Dwight drove around Northfield with him and listened to his wonderful plans for Northfield. His plans included the spiritual and temporal welfare of the community. And Dwight’s excitement concerning all the possibilities for his hometown knew no bounds.
DWIGHT’S EXCITEMENT CONCERNING ALL THE POSSIBILITIES FOR HIS HOMETOWN KNEW NO BOUNDS.
Before long, the family returned to Chicago, arriving there on September 30. This time they stayed with Emma’s sister and her husband, the Holdens.
Six thousand Sunday school teachers, five hundred singers, and a hundred ministers filled the tabernacle at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. Following hymns, prayer, scripture reading, and Sankey’s solos, Dwight began to preach the sermon “Rolling Away the Stone.”
Whittle thought his talk was “as earnest, plain, simple, and practical and as absent from all self-consciousness as if delivered to his own Sunday school teachers. You are interested and inspired, and think he has just begun when he stops as abruptly as he began, offers prayer, pronounces the benediction and the meeting is over.”
It seemed this campaign would proceed like any other. The first Sunday afternoon service was packed out, and with each subsequent service, thousands were turned away. Forgetting the “Crazy Moody” of old, Chicago now raved over its own world-renowned evangelist.
The Chicago Omnibus Company arranged for extra buses, timing each bus so it could connect with the tram cars. A theology professor who witnessed the crowds expressed puzzlement over Dwight’s campaign: “It is perfectly astounding to me that a man with so little training should have come to understand the public so well. He cannot read the Greek Testament; indeed he has difficulty with parts of it in the English version, but he excels as any man I have ever heard in making his hearers see the point of a text of scripture.”
Whittle had dinner with Dwight on Thursday during the first week. He found Dwight unusually solemn and concerned with God trying him. He said he could pray “ ‘O God, search me,’ but when it comes to asking God to ‘try me’ it’s a solemn thing. I don’t know as I could stand trying. Am I ready to be laid aside from my work, to be tried? Am I ready to meet affliction?”
The next day, Friday, October 6, Whittle again dined with Dwight and found him still obsessed with the thought of God “trying him.” Later that evening, Dwight had invited the officers of the Chicago Avenue Church to have tea with him at Brevoort House before the meeting. Whittle came in late, bringing a stack of Dwight’s letters and one telegram being held for him at the YMCA. He handed the stack to Dwight, who began opening the telegram. “While sitting at the table he read it and gave a cry of pain, stood upon his feet, and said, ‘Sam is dead.’ And sat down with his head buried in his hands to cry,” Whittle recalled. “In a few minutes he said, ‘Whittle, you will have to take the meeting tonight. I cannot be with you longer,’ and went out.”
When Whittle reached the tabernacle later in the evening, he found Dwight talking with the ministers. He was going east to bury his brother, and the committee unanimously asked Whittle to take over the meetings.
As Dwight journeyed on the train and wept from sorrow, his thoughts revolved around his family. “Oh, how deep the sorrow! The dear boy was gone for ever.” Samuel, for whom he had prayed twenty years, who at the last “took a stand for Christ, and went to work, zealous work,” was gone. As the train rumbled through Indiana into Ohio, Dwight wept and wept again until heaven’s voice “at last made itself heard to my heart: ‘Thy brother shall rise again.’ The cloud was lifted, and for about 500 miles on my way to my home that verse rang in my ears.”
Samuel’s death gave Dwight a desire to do all that Samuel had longed to do for Northfield. But Dwight was needed in Chicago. He loved both places. He wrote to the pastor of Chicago Avenue, W. J. Erdman, “I do hope you will hold the people to the thought of love. I am sure that is where the churches have all gone astray. We must have it above all things.”
The Chicago campaign forged ahead from 1876 into 1877. For a Presbyterian minister who took part, it was a turning point: “That wonderful revival. That tremendous audience, and its voice in song like the voice of the ocean. The mighty faith and courage of the undertaking. Think what it required to prepare for an audience of ten thousand people, and what failure, in the presence of such vast preparation, would mean!”
As the campaign reached its closing weeks, Dwight still faced a dilemma: Where should he put down roots? Another question also nagged at his soul: Would he burn out in a few more years?
During the course of the campaign Dwight had faced a number of tragedies: the death of his brother, Sam, and a dangerous attack of scarlet fever for twelve-year-old Emma. Also, although she did not tell Dwight, his wife, Emma, was told by her doctor that her heart was diseased and in critical condition.
Another blow to Dwight came with the sudden death of Philip Bliss, who Dwight said was like his hymns, “full of faith and cheer—in all the years I have known and worked with him I have never seen him cast down.” Bliss was riding on the Pacific Express near Ashtabula, Ohio, when an iron bridge gave way in a snowstorm, and the train plunged seventy feet down to a frozen creek and caught fire. Over a hundred people died, but amazingly, Bliss crawled from the wreckage, then went back to free his wife. But not a remnant of either of them could ever be identified. These sorrows made Dwight, according to Whittle, “very kind and tender.”
ANOTHER BLOW TO DWIGHT CAME WITH THE SUDDEN DEATH OF PHILIP BLISS.
In spite of the tragedies, Dwight still had work to do. On January 28, 1877, a week before his fortieth birthday, the Boston campaign began. If Dwight failed in Boston, it would be the death knell to his influence in America. However, when he finished there on the first of May, he had received a new vision.
Some of those opposed to Dwight and his campaign included Unitarians, liberal intellectuals, and Irish Catholics. However, his friends were led by the Reverend A. J. Gordon, the saintly pastor of Clarendon Street. Few of Dwight’s boyhood friends remained; Edward Kimball had moved to California, and Dwight’s Holton uncles had retired.
A tabernacle had been specially built for the campaign, with over ninety churches participating. Though the building seated only six thousand, Dwight and Sankey considered it one of the most pleasant places in which they had ministered.
“Christianity,” Dwight exclaimed the first night, “has been on the defensive long enough, specially here in New England. The time’s come f ’r us to open a war of aggression. Remember during the War of the Rebellion some of the generals kept their armies on the defensive until they got confiscated? I guess a good many Christians here in New England have just got into their cushioned pews and gone to sleep.” Dwight got their attention with these opening remarks!
Then he urged a course of action. Christians needed to “wake up and move forward in solid columns.” And they should not be defensive, but aggressive. “These drinking shops ’n’billiard halls ’n’gambling dens should be visited ’n’ told of Christ ’n’ heaven ’n’ if they won’t come to the tabernacle ’n’ hear the gospel, let us go to their houses ’n’ preach the gospel to them ’n’ it won’t be long before hundreds are reached.”
Many of Boston’s newspapers took a positive approach to the campaign, and the weekday papers, in particular, gave it much space. The Globe actually recovered from financial disaster by printing ample coverage of the campaign.
THE GLOBE RECOVERED FROM FINANCIAL DISASTER BY PRINTING AMPLE COVERAGE OF THE CAMPAIGN.
Even Walt Whitman, the well-known American poet, got into the act. But his poetic remarks tended to be disparaging, particularly in the final stanza:
I Walt tell him he is an ignorant charlatan, a mistaken enthusiast, and that Boston will ere long desire him to git.
However, Boston did not desire him “to git.” Not even cultured Bostonians. A telling indication of Dwight’s popularity occurred when the Thomas Orchestra gave a benefit for the “Old South” fund and played to a half-empty hall. The same night over six thousand people crowded into the tabernacle to hear Moody and Sankey.
So successful was the Boston campaign as far as Dwight and Sankey were concerned that they ranked it alongside the Edinburgh campaign. Among the wonderful new friends Dwight came to know during the Boston meetings was Phillips Brooks, the author of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Brooks, an Episcopal minister, preached during Dwight’s absence one night.
As usual, at the close of the campaign, Dwight held a two-day Christian Convention. He also tried to gain entrance to Harvard but failed. He advocated temperance, holding a Temperance Conference, and brought Frances Willard as a leader of evangelism for women. She was well known for her stand on temperance, and Dwight wanted her to sit on the campaign platform; she refused, saying she would not sit with Unitarians.
For Dwight, however, the future seemed not to be reckoned by sinners saved or drunks redeemed. Throughout the campaign, he stayed with Henry Fowle Durant, the founder of Wellesley College for girls. When Durant talked about his ideas implemented in his college, Dwight listened carefully. Durant’s vision for Wellesley seemed to echo Samuel’s dreams for Northfield that he had shared with Dwight the summer before he died.