Introduction
INTRODUCTION
BY REV. SIMEON GILBERT,
Editor, Advance
Said Mr. Moody to a friend, as he was returning from the dedication of the Bliss Statue at Rome, Penn., last August: “I must go home and go to making pictures!” Mr. Moody’s preaching is not, however, more remarkable for the amount of illustration employed, than for the kind of illustrations which he is most apt to use. His preaching is always picturesque; and his pictures, when not descriptive of well-known Bible scenes, almost always kindle the imagination over touching incidents close by our own home life. Not even Frœbel himself had a keener sense or a tenderer heart toward the little ones, than this great evangelist.
One of the manliest of men, Mr. Moody is at the same time one of the most childlike. Beneath those burly shoulders there beats a heart that has never forgotten its childhood. His sympathies respond with the utmost delicacy and depth of feeling to all the peculiar experiences of children. In the use of apt illustrations that flash the truths of a whole sermon at once upon the heart and the memory of his hearers, he is never so much at home as when narrating and picturing what has happened at somebody’s home. More than any other preacher of our time, Mr. Moody possesses the power of appealing to the domestic affections, and using them for the purposes of religious persuasion. It would not surprise us to learn that he has never read a page of one of Dickens’ matchless stories; and yet, to a remarkable degree he exhibits the same absolute memory of child-life and children’s feelings, the same almost starthngly realistic imagination, and a similar genius for description, such that others are made to see what he sees, and especially to see just how things seem to children.
It is not merely accidental that no other great evangelist in former times has drawn so large a proportion of his illustrative anecdotes from domestic scenes. Contrast, for instance, Whitefield’s preaching in this respect with that of Mr. Moody. Nor is the contrast wholly due to the fact that Mr. Moody, in the earlier part of his Christian career, had so much to do with Sunday schools, and with mission schools where the relations of so many of the children to their godless parents, were often so deeply pathetic, if not also essentially tragic. But the reason is partly, and very significantly, because the age in which we live is, more than ever before, domestic. As peace prevails and civilization progresses and the Christian spirit gets a chance to manifest itself freely, the home life of the people obtains larger attention.
No sign of the times could be more propitious than evidences that the heart of the fathers is being turned to the children, and the heart of the children to the fathers. And wonderfully does this admirable collection of Child Anecdotes, which Mr. McClure has with so much care and skill gathered out of all Mr. Moody’s addresses, show that such is now the case.
Mr. Moody lays no claim to peculiar knack as a talker to children. He tried it once in London, before an audience or rather a rabble of some ten or twelve thousand children; he has never repeated the experiment. Yet he preaches to children best when he preaches to them exactly as he does to adults. His anecdotes about children are fitted to touch alike the heart of child and parent. Many of them are told with a skill and simplicity and beauty almost inimitable, and many are irresistibly affecting. In all the recent “Moody literature” that has gone abroad so widely, so usefully, nothing has appeared more unique, more attractive, more really useful than this little volume of his child-stories, which illustrate so well how to illustrate certain gospel truths, most effectively.