Young Moody At The Village School
YOUNG MOODY AT THE VILLAGE SCHOOL
Every day she taught the children a little Bible lesson, and on Sundays accompanied them to the Unitarian Sunday school. They were sent, too, to the village school. Dwight was as loth as the average young boy to endure the discipline of the school-room. It is not hard to picture him "with shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school." But the wise mother knew. Seeds were being scattered in the fertile heart and mind of the boy: and if they did not seem to sprout at once, perhaps it was for the very reason that they had not been sown in a shallow soil.
The Rev. Dr. Theodore Cuyler, when he first met Mrs. Moody, turned to her son, and said, "I see now where you got your vim and your hard sense!" Others remarked the same resemblance of the son to his mother. I speak of this merely to make it evident how much he owed her.
However completely she came into sympathy with her son's work in later years, at the outset of his labours his mother did not give him her sanction. She herself was a member of a non-evangelical church. For a long time she did not even hear her son preach. How he finally not only convinced her of his fitness for his work, but also became the means of leading her into the higher life has been related by a close friend of the family in the following words