6. Children’S Friend
6
CHILDREN’S FRIEND
Amazed, Dwight gasped, “What’s wrong?”
His friend’s response: “I have been bleeding at the lungs, and the doctor says that living on Lake Michigan is bad for me. I need to return to New York State—probably to die.”
The teacher’s ghastly white face and shaken demeanor startled Dwight even more. “What is the matter? Are you afraid to die?”
Again, the teacher shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. But I’m concerned for my class.”
Dwight knew the class was made up of frivolous girls from twelve to sixteen. On one occasion, he had had to take the class, and their silly pratthng and marching around the room nearly caused him to say, “Leave, and don’t come back!”
Now the teacher’s real concern came out: “I’m burdened for my class. I have failed them—not one of them has been led to Jesus. Now my strength is gone. I have done the girls more harm than good. How can I face God? Not one of my girls has been converted!”
HE HADN’T CONSIDERED THAT HIS WILD, YOUNG CHARGES COULD EXPERIENCE CONVERSION LIKE ADULTS.
Dwight listened attentively but with perplexity. He had never heard anyone talk in this manner. His entire effort had concentrated on the numbers of students in the mission. His heart thrilled each time he looked at overflowing crowds, at hundreds of noisy children, and he would be downcast when the numbers dropped even the slightest. He hadn’t considered that his wild, young charges could experience conversion like adults; he hadn’t thought of them as individuals.
Then Dwight suggested to the teacher, “Why don’t you go around and tell them how you feel? If you want, I will go with you in a carriage.”
After assisting the man to the street and hiring a carriage, Dwight accompanied his friend to the shabby part of Chicago. As they reached the tenement home of the first girl, the teacher rasped weakly, “I have come just to ask you to come to the Savior.” The girl listened with rapt attention as he shared that he must leave Chicago and would die. He urged her to put her trust in Christ. Then, as the teacher prayed, the girl tearfully agreed to settle the question of salvation then and there.
Following this encounter, the men climbed back into the carriage and rode to another girl’s home. The teacher again pressed the claims of Christ on this girl, telling her he would be leaving Chicago to die. After making a few calls, he was exhausted, so Dwight drove him home.
Ten days later, Dwight was at work when the teacher “came to the store with his face literally shinning. He told me, ‘The last one of my class has yielded herself to Christ. The great vital question of their lives was settled. They have accepted my Savior. My work is done, and I am going home.’ ”
But Dwight urged him to wait for a day. Then he suggested getting the entire class together and bringing them over for tea.
That evening, each of the girls and the teacher came to Dwight’s place. Then the teacher read some scripture and spoke with them, after which the girls sang a parting hymn. As they knelt to pray, the teacher pleaded with God to deepen the girls’ newfound faith. Dwight prayed next and was just rising from his knees when one of the girls began to pray for her dying teacher.
Amazed, Dwight listened to the faltering, spontaneous prayer of a slum girl whom he had known to be an empty-headed scoffer. Another girl prayed asking God for power to win others to Himself. One after another, the girls haltingly prayed. As Dwight listened incredulously to these genuine, fervent thanksgivings, these earnest petitions, the hundred thousand gold dollars of his dreams turned to tinsel. His ambition to build a commercial empire appeared tawdry and fleeting. All at once, he found himself weighing the desire of the world for wealth and power against the things of eternity. He would rather spend the rest of his years as this dying teacher had spent the past ten days.
HE FOUND HIMSELF WEIGHING THE DESIRE OF THE WORLD FOR WEALTH AND POWER AGAINST THE THINGS OF ETERNITY.
The following evening, Dwight hurried to the railway station to see his friend off. Incredibly, without any prearranged plans, each of the girls came to the station to say good-bye to their teacher. They sang a hymn, and as the train rolled out of the depot, Dwight remarked later, “We could see the teacher’s pale hand pointing towards the heaven where he wished to meet them.”
The impact of this entire episode on Dwight was tremendous. It proved to be God’s way of drawing on his heartstrings to leave the business world, but he struggled for over three months before he arrived at a decision. He did not want to leave business! He relished the give-and-take and challenges of business, especially the competitiveness involved in salesmanship. As he thought afterward: “I fought against it. It was a terrible battle. But oh! how many times I have thanked God’s will.”
He faced losing the prestige of wealth in a city that only recognized wealth. Then, too, he would have to postpone marriage and be able to offer Emma only a small income when they did marry. His main struggle; however, was over leaving the business world. Emma would understand, but to lose face in the business world simply by bowing out…it was nearly unthinkable. At last, Dwight decided to leave Buell, Hill, and Granger. He realized he couldn’t serve God and mammon; one had to have first place in his life.
Dwight hadn’t shared his long, difficult struggle with anyone, but in the fall of 1860, his friend J. V. Farwell discovered that Dwight had left both his place of employment and Mrs. Phillips’ exclusive boardinghouse. Dwight was sleeping on a settee in one of the rooms used by the YMCA in the Methodist Church block. Instead of nourishing his quite hefty frame in fine restaurants, he either ate in cheap diners or managed on cheese and crackers. Dwight determined to stretch his savings. He told himself, “I’ll live on what I’ve saved. When that is gone and there is no means of support, I’ll take it as a call to return to business.”
The next year, Dwight received an appointment as an official of the YMCA. The clerk who inserted the Resolution of the Board of Managers put down for Dwight: “For the coming year at a salary of $_____.” The blank was never filled in because Dwight thought receiving a salary would hamper his newfound freedom from monetary restraint. He never again accepted a salary. In a year’s time, his income went from roughly $5,000 to $150. He did it gladly in the name of Christ.
Having left the business world, Dwight poured himself with abandon into his mission Sunday school. He still had some financial resources from savings, but he spent freely on his “scholars” and on the school. He would fill his pockets with candy and other confections to entice the children to come to the school. He would also offer prizes such as a squirrel in a cage to the scholar who brought the most recruits in a given time. Nor did he ever fail to keep his promises to the children, and they knew they could trust him.
DWIGHT POURED HIMSELF WITH ABANDON INTO HIS MISSION SUNDAY SCHOOL.
On the other hand, Dwight expected the children to keep their promises to him. One girl recalled: “If for some reason I broke my promise, I would sneak along the streets, in the hope of avoiding Mr. Moody and a reprimand. When I had almost reached home, he would stand before me with his hand outstretched and a sad look, and he would greet me with, ‘Why, Jennie, where have you been? I missed you at Sabbath school. I hope you were not ill? Your folks are well? You will not disappoint me this coming Sabbath, will you? It will make me very sad indeed if you fail me.’ ”
Dwight intensified his efforts to strengthen the school. He pressed his friends into a systematic slum visitation project. One of them, J. B. Stillson, reported, “We used to carry with us bread tickets, and a little money to relieve the sick, widows, and orphans, and had an arrangement with several physicians to visit the poor and sick without charge, and also to furnish the night watches.”
Now that Dwight concentrated all his energy on the school, he became a whirlwind. People found it difficult if not impossible to refuse the persistent Mr. Moody. A family living above the North Clark Street store soon encountered Dwight’s persistence, which bordered on sheer stubbornness! The family’s six children, recalled the store owner, were “noisy and ill-bred, and the father—who was a giant in size—was habitually drunk and violently abusive to his tiny wife. She supported the family by washing and scrubbing. Mr. Moody went again and again to try to convert the drunken father.” Almost every day they would receive baskets of groceries, fruit, coal, or cordwood sent by Dwight.
Betsey Moody would have heartily endorsed her son’s tireless battle against whiskey. Dwight, in keeping with the vow he had made to his mother, became a one-man crusade in his war on liquor. At one slum house, the father being absent, Dwight found, according to Farwell: “Not only children but a jug of whiskey. He took both out of the house: the children to his school, and the jug of whiskey to sprinkle the streets with.” When Dwight next visited home, the irate father shouted at him: “Did you pour away my whiskey?” As he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, he added, “I’ll thrash you!”
Calmly, Dwight replied, “I broke the jug for the good of yourself and family. If I am to be thrashed, let me pray for you all before you do it.”
But after the man listened to Dwight’s heartfelt prayer on the tenement floor, he felt ashamed and mumbled, “You had better just take the kids, not a whipping.”
Dwight also exhibited a great deal of patience in waiting for his young students. He wasn’t easily deterred. A small girl promised she would take Dwight home to get her mother’s consent to come to the Sunday school. But she told him she had an errand to run first and asked him to wait on the street corner.
Dwight waited and waited—at least three hours—but still no sign of the girl. A few days later, he caught sight of her—and she saw him. She ran. He chased her as she ran over the raised plank sidewalks, clattering down and up the steps where the levels varied, dodging horse-drawn trams, and scattering dogs and old ladies, until finally she dashed through an alley. But Dwight pursued her even as she ran into a saloon and up the stairs to a bedroom and under the bed. Dwight followed her, perspiring and breathless, and at last coaxed the young girl to come out from under the bed. Through his doggedness in pursuing the girl, the entire family came to the Lord.
PEOPLE OFTEN REFERRED TO DWIGHT AS “CRAZY MOODY,” BECAUSE OF HIS STAMINA AND SINGLE-MINDEDNESS IN SHARING CHRIST.
John Farwell observed the dark circles that had developed under Dwight’s eyes and decided to give him a pony to ride so that at least he wouldn’t have to walk the considerable distances within the city. People often referred to Dwight at this time as “Crazy Moody,” because of his stamina and single-mindedness in sharing Christ. He became a familiar figure as a young, twenty-five-year-old man, riding a small pony through the Chicago streets, his trousers in bootlegs and a cap on his head.
Sometimes Dwight had to exert tough discipline on his children. One boy made his teacher’s life a misery and disrupted neighboring classes. Dwight told Farwell, “I am going to take that boy into the police office below and whip him, and when you see me start for him have the school rise and sing the loudest hymn in the book until I return.” Farwell did as he was told, and when Dwight returned, his face was very red from this “religious exercise.” A month later, the boy became a Christian and proved to be a great help to his teachers.
Dwight’s reputation in and around Chicago grew quickly. People considered him a “children’s missionary.” When some Irish Catholic boys broke some windows in the Mission Hall and beat up the scholars in the streets, Dwight decided it was time to take action. So he went to see the Roman Catholic bishop, the well-known James Duggan. Dwight persuaded the bishop to pray with him, and soon the trouble over the windows was resolved.
Another time, Dwight worked to get a young saloon keeper’s son involved in the school. As he recalled: “I had never been in a saloon in my life. I walked by the door about a dozen times. I said, ‘I can’t go in there. People will think that I have come to get a drink.’ ” Then, as he looked in every direction and didn’t see anyone from the church, he dashed in. The old father was behind the bar, and Dwight told him what he had come for. Later Dwight recalled that the father replied: “We won’t have any canting hypocrites here,’ so I went back out quickly. But I tried a second time, and again he drove me out. On the third try, the old man wasn’t quite so drunk or quite so cross but he said he would rather have his sons drunkards and his daughters harlots than Christians.”
But when Dwight discovered that the man edited a small rationalist newsletter, he promised to read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason in return for the man’s promise to read the New Testament.
One Sunday morning, Dwight saw an opportunity, so he said to the man, “I wish you would come to church with me.”
The man retorted: “I haven’t been to church in eighteen years. No, I won’t go. But you may have a church here if you want to.”
APPALLED, DWIGHT THOUGHT, A CHURCH IN A SALOON?
Appalled, Dwight thought, A church in a saloon? However, it seemed the only way to reach the man. Afraid of the church officers’ disapproval, Dwight scheduled the service for a time when the regular church services were being held.
Then the man said, “I want you to understand, young man, that you are not going to do all the preaching.”
“What do you mean?”
The man clarified his remark by saying, “I may want to say something, and my friends may want to say a word. We won’t let you preach all the time. We may want to answer back.”
So it happened that the atheists would speak forty-five minutes, and Dwight only fifteen. Actually, Dwight wasn’t sure he could preach more than fifteen minutes! Word got around about the meeting, and soon the place had to be moved because of the large number of skeptics attending. Dwight simply brought one small boy with him. But as he said, “He was one of my ‘best’ boys.”
Describing the meeting, Dwight said, “They began to poke questions at me, but I said, ‘No sir. You have got to preach forty-five minutes.’ ” Which they did, until Dwight was “sick and tired of infidelity.” Then he quietly invited them to join him as he said, “Let us pray.”
All the while Dwight prayed, they protested, jeered, and sneered. Then he introduced his “secret weapon,” the small boy who had come with him. The boy prayed “with a pleading voice and asked God to forgive these men for talking so against His dear Son.” Each of the men began to steal away. Finally, the old saloon keeper said, “If that is what you teach your children, you may have mine.”
Dwight rejoiced in the steady growth of the school. Now that he no longer “got the children for one hour in the week while the devil had them for the rest,” he sensed God’s peace about the situation. He wrote to his family, “I have been holding meetings in my school every night this winter. It has taken all of my time.”
Seated on the platform, his eyes looking out over the crowd of dirty, ragged scholars, Dwight had no doubt that he had found his life’s work and that he would be consumed within the city of Chicago, serving the children of the slums for the rest of his life.
Dwight little suspected the turn his life was about to take.