12. D. L. Moody
12
D. L. MOODY
As early as 7 a.m. on October 24, 1875, the streets were full of people in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Rink. By 9 a.m., when Moody appeared on the platform, the huge building was packed with seven thousand people—most of them young.
The New York Times described Moody as a “well-built man, with a smiling face, a small, shapely head, small features, a full brown beard, and a red face, indicative of jollity and good humor.”
“Let us open with the twenty-fourth hymn,” he said. At once, he was joined on the platform by a “square-built, solid-looking man with a smiling face, and dark, curly hair, dark moustache, and side whiskers.” Ira D. Sankey sat down at the little reed organ and bade the audience, “Please rise and sing heartily!”
After the singing of hymns and a prayer by a local pastor, Moody read from Numbers 13 in his rapid style, with his Yankee twang, describing how the Israelites reached the land of Canaan. Moses’ spies reported a land flowing with milk and honey—but inhabited by ferocious giants.
After the reading, Sankey sang “Here I Am! Send Me!” It was the first time New Yorkers had heard the voice that had melted the heart of England. Soon, Sankey had them swaying and sobbing as his glorious baritone resounded through the huge auditorium.
Moody then strode to the lectern to preach on the theme, “Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it.” He talked of a revival in New York City, his sermon punctuated by exclamations of “Yes!” and “Amen!” from the audience. He criticized the unbelief of established churches which, he said, was hindering God’s work. He compared those who doubted the possibility of a New York revival to the Israelites afraid to enter the Promised Land. “When we believe, we are able to overcome giants and walls and everything!” he exclaimed. The audience went wild.
He closed with this message:
If I had the voice of angels, I would like to ask the forty thousand ministers, “Shall we go up to take the land at once?” If we do, we have got to get to work! We have to give way to the Lord. We have to bid farewell to the world—to stop parties and festivals and lectures!
To this advice, so strange to modern observers—even to many modern believers—came a mighty chorus of amens. Moody asked each of the local ministers who sat on the platform if he were ready. After they all had affirmed, the audience exploded into salvos of “Yes!”, “Amen!”, and “Hurrah!”
The enthusiasm was fanned to an even more frantic pitch by Sankey’s rendition of Bliss’s “Only an Armour-Bearer.” After the benediction, bands of youths poured from the rink and marched down Fulton Street, arm in arm, singing Bliss’s “Hold the Fort, for I Am Coming.”
The next afternoon, the entire area of the rink was packed with people, many of whom had crossed the East River from Manhattan. The minute the doors were thrown open, seven thousand men and women fought their way, “crushing, tearing, panting, to the available seats.” An equal number were left outside.
Who were these men who had such a profound effect in Scotland and who did so much to spread the hymns of Fanny Crosby over the English-speaking world?
WHO WERE THESE MEN WHO DID SO MUCH TO SPREAD THE HYMNS OF FANNY CROSBY OVER THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD?
Dwight Lyman Ryther Moody was an uneducated backwoodsman from northern Massachusetts. Born in 1837, he was reared as a Unitarian. In his late teens, while working in a shoe store in Boston, he was converted to orthodox Trinitarian Congregationalism. Later, in Chicago, the aggressive young man easily could have made a fortune in sales, but he decided he best could serve God by selling the Gospel instead.
During the 1860s, as a YMCA worker, Moody did much to help the poor boys of Chicago’s slums. He was so successful that he was asked to hold revival meetings, then evangelistic meetings, or “campaigns,” in Britain. Through their success there, Moody and his musician friend Sankey became international celebrities. Moody was never ordained, but by the time of his return from Europe, many Protestant clergymen and laymen looked up to him as their spiritual leader. Until his death, he was perhaps the most important and influential figure in American Protestant churches.
Moody’s appeal was not based on personal appearance. At thirtyeight, he stood five feet two inches tall and weighed a solid, muscular 245 pounds, showing no signs of the enormous corpulence that soon would overtake him. He had a small bullet head with coarse, rather unattractive features, which usually were obscured by a gigantic beard. Moody spoke with a heavy New England brogue that many found hard to understand. He spoke rapidly; it was said he pronounced the word Jerusalem in one syllable.
He sent both of his sons to Yale, but he did not idolize education. “An educated rascal is the meanest kind of rascal,” he maintained. He held biblical commentaries in contempt. “I pore over the pages [of the Bible] not through the specs of some learned commentator, but with my own eyes.” Yet Moody, who prayed several hours daily, was loved and respected not only by the ignorant but by many members of the intelligentsia.
Moody was not skilled at all in music. He could play no instrument, and he sang abominably. He loved to hear music, though, and recognized its importance in evangelization. Like Fanny, he believed the Gospel could be sung into the consciousness of people who were not easily moved by preaching. Thus he made it a point to give as much time to the song service as to preaching.
Early in his career, Moody sought a partner to “sing the Gospel” while he preached it. He found such a person in 1870 at a YMCA convention in Indianapolis. The singing was terrible until an obscure revenue official from western Pennsylvania was persuaded to sing. His rendition of “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” held the audience spellbound. When the service was over, Moody hunted up the singer, Sankey, and insisted Sankey give up his job and join him in Chicago at once. Sankey, who had a wife and two children, was shocked by the demands of the audacious stranger.
After Sankey returned to Pennsylvania, Moody continued to badger him until he gave in, resigned his job, and moved with his family to Chicago, where he became an inseparable part of Moody’s evangelical work. The two men became devoted friends as well as colleagues. Fanny referred to them as David and Jonathan, recalling the close friendship of Israel’s future king with the son of King Saul. Until his voice failed, Sankey was given equal billing with Moody, for Moody felt the singer was just as important as the preacher.
Ira David Sankey was born in Edinburg, Pennsylvania, in 1840. Like Moody, he came from a poor family and had almost no formal education. He fought for the Union in the Civil War and often, while in the army, led the singing in the religious services. While working as a revenue agent, he gained local attention as a soloist in the Methodist Church in Newcastle, where he and his wife Fanny were members.
Sankey, five feet ten inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, was suave and polished, in contrast to his rather rough-hewn friend, and loved frock coats and gray silk top hats. He wore the fashionable mutton chop whiskers. Sankey was an emotional man, usually jovial but easily irritated and depressed. He was also somewhat pompous and talkative.
Sankey apparently had a truly beautiful voice and might have been one of the world’s finest opera singers. The New York Times described his voice as “a rare combination of power and sweetness.” But Sankey had no vocal training, and after a few years of campaigning with Moody, his voice was ruined. The first sign of decline was a huskiness that became evident in early 1876. By the time he was forty, his once-magnificent voice was a wreck. The few records he made were done when he was nearly sixty, revealing only a loud, hoarse, booming shell.
These were the men who in the fall of 1875 took New York by storm. Moody and Sankey were less emotional than the run-of-the-mill evangelists of the day. The shouted acclamations at the rink were a far cry from many revivals, where people were known to embrace red-hot stoves, throw themselves on their hands and knees, and imitate the cries of animals.
At this point in his career, Moody emphasized hell much less than many other evangelists. He vigorously opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution, but he was less strict about other things. Although he did not smoke, drink, play cards, or even go to the theater, he rarely preached against these things. He was concerned for social justice, and he favored integration. The black faces that dotted the audience and even the platform at the rink startled some New Yorkers. The following year, Moody would become persona non grata in the South, accused of trying to change “the relation of the white and black race.”
But the revival grew under Moody’s preaching and Sankey’s singing in the fall and winter of 1875. They campaigned in Philadelphia in November and at the Hippodrome in Manhattan in February. Fanny and Van had moved back to the West Side and had a tenement on Hudson Street. She almost certainly attended many of these meetings. The Hippodrome revivals were received as wildly as those at the Brooklyn Rink had been.
While this was the epoch of the camp meeting and the Bible-thumping evangelist, it also was the day of the medium, séance, and spirit rapper. Evangelical Christians had to contend with a rampant obsession with the occult, as with unbelief. Séances were very popular. In 1863, President Lincoln had held a séance at the White House, consulting the spirits of Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and other deceased worthies.
Fanny was introduced to Moody and Sankey while they were in New York in 1876, and from then on, her future was indissolubly connected with theirs. Through their appearances, many of her hymns were introduced to a mass audience. And Moody and Sankey were eager for Fanny to supply them with hymns, recognizing her as one of the greatest contemporary hymn writers. Sankey began to fill subsequent editions of Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs with her efforts. Collaborating with Biglow and Main, he obtained the rights to many hymns she already had written. He engaged her to write new ones, and he began to write melodies to many of her poems. Though untrained, he often produced melodies of heartrending sweetness.
FANNY WAS INTRODUCED TO MOODY AND SANKEY WHILE THEY WERE IN NEW YORK IN 1876.
Fanny spent several days each week at the offices of Biglow and Main, was active in Christian work among the poor and prisoners, and often directed evening activities in tenement houses. She also was receiving many invitations to speak or preach and was traveling a great deal.
Remarkably, she journeyed alone. She would not allow blindness to hinder her activities, and she refused to let people treat her like an invalid.