As Dwight tried to settle back into some sort of routine following the war’s end, he became more involved with the work of the YMCA. At the noon prayer meetings, Dwight was always on hand to greet everyone who entered. His enthusiasm and friendliness and genuine sincerity never failed to touch people.
A young man attending commercial school was “miserable, lonesome and homesick in the great city amid its great throngs who passed me by in restless haste and left me alone. Even in my boardinghouse no attention was paid to me. In my desperate loneliness I dropped into the noonday meetings. There Mr. Moody was first to grasp my hand and inquire all about me.”
Prayer requests would come in from all over the city and would be read by the day’s leader. Often upon hearing a request, Dwight would weep like a child in empathy. In him lay always something of the impressionable child, never far from tears, never far from laughter. Someone remarked after one of the noonday meetings: “Mr. D. L. Moody is so earnest, aggressive, and regardless of all nambypamby notions of propriety in his work that he occasionally shocks the exceedingly proper people. At other times he is known to betray them into a laugh, a veritable guffaw right in prayer meeting.”
His boundless energy was known and appreciated all over the city of Chicago, and in 1866, when a prominent businessman turned down the presidency of the Chicago Association (YMCA), he nominated Dwight Moody. Of course, Dwight had his detractors, too. Some said he was “too radical.” Nevertheless, Dwight received the presidency at that time.
HIS BOUNDLESS ENERGY WAS KNOWN AND APPRECIATED ALL OVER THE CITY OF CHICAGO.
Too radical or not, Dwight was soon “on the warpath securing subscriptions”—as they described the energy with which he badgered the worthy and wealthy of the city. He reveled in turning the dollars of the rich into an institution which should, in a favorite phrase, “do good.”
Two of the wealthy businessmen who contributed to this venture were Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester, and George Armour, the meat packing-house entrepreneur. Dwight and Emma became good friends with the McCormicks and were frequent guests at the millionaire’s mansion.
Becoming known for his bold faith, Dwight often experienced astounding answers to prayer. One day he rushed into the study of a Chicago minister with a sealed envelope. “Open that!” he cried. “Open it! There is a check for two thousand dollars in there.”
“Are you sure? Have you seen it?”
“No. But I asked the Lord for it, and I know it’s there! I came all the way across Chicago that you might prove my faith in prayer.”
As the minister tore open the envelope, he discovered there was a two-thousand-dollar check inside, payable to the order of D. L. Moody and signed by Cyrus H. McCormick.
Dwight shard his story with the minister. He had gone to the millionaire, stating, “Mr. McCormick, the mission school is in dreadful straits!”
“Why, you are striking me rather hard as of late. I gave you something not long ago.”
“I want a thousand.”
“A thousand! Why, surely you don’t mean that, after all I’ve given you of late?” In any event, Mr. McCormick agreed to make a donation. He went upstairs to write out a check.
“Just then,” Dwight continued, “I thought to myself what a fool I was not to ask for two thousand! And I fell on my knees there in the parlor, and asked for two thousand. Mr. McCormick came downstairs with this sealed envelope. I thanked him and rushed over to you. Isn’t my faith confirmed?”
The old minister was so curious as to what happened that he went to Mr. McCormick. “Can you recall the inducements or influences acting on your mind leading you to make the check for twice the amount asked for?”
Mr. McCormick thought for a moment, then replied: “Well, as I remember, I went upstairs to my desk and took out my checkbook. I wrote in ‘D. L. Moody,’ and then I began to think of the noble work he is doing in our city, and what a splendid fellow he is. Finally I concluded to make the check for the amount I did.”
Dwight told the minister’s son sometime later that “God gave me the money that day because I needed it. And He has always given me money when I needed it. But often I have asked Him when I thought I needed it, and He has said, ‘No, Moody, you just shin along the best way you can. It’ll do you good to be hard up awhile.’ ”
Although Cyrus McCormick thought well of Dwight, Chicago’s respectful estimate of him had dissolved since the war. “He was often most brutally ridiculed and buffeted and persecuted,” recalled an acquaintance. “His language, his looks, his methods of work were made objects of ridicule and burlesque, and the most cruel remarks were passed from mouth to mouth about him.”
A Chicago journalist who had no use for Dwight criticized his “early excrescences of manner.” He added that “the established pulpit, especially in its higher or formal ranges, contended that he lowered religion.” And the man on the street spoke of Dwight’s always being on the go, “except when he might halt a stranger anywhere, to interrogate him on the state of his soul; and even when his amazed or abashed victim was gathering his wits to frame an answer suited to the astonishing occasion, off he would be to startle somebody else into ‘fits of salvation.’ ”
Dwight had made a vow to God not to pass a day without speaking to someone about Christ. His stock question to everyone became, “Are you a Christian?” He shouted this question from the platform, he whispered it in the narrow passageway, he asked it of his dinner table companions. Wherever he happened to be, Dwight was sure to confront everyone nearby with this question. When he saw a man leaning up against a lamppost, Dwight approached him and said, “Are you a Christian?” The man responded with damnation and curses and told him to mind his own business. Later the man told a mutual friend that he had never been so insulted. Three months later Dwight was awakened in the middle of the night. At the door “stood this stranger I had made so mad at the lamppost,” to confess that he had known no peace. “Oh, tell me what to do to be saved!”
DWIGHT HAD MADE A VOW TO GOD NOT TO PASS A DAY WITHOUT SPEAKING TO SOMEONE ABOUT CHRIST.
Dwight’s close friends winced with him from the ridicule, and Farwell even suggested that he was doing more harm than good when he shouted at people at every turn. Dwight replied calmly, “You are not my boss. God is my boss.”
Heckled in the stockyards and subjected to catcalls outside the courthouse, Dwight remained undaunted in his one-man mission. After one brutish episode, a young doctor in the crowd who was impressed by the preacher’s “dauntless manner” asked who he was. A bystander glanced at the inquirer with some disdain and responded, “Why, that’s Moody!”
These were the years when Dwight’s nickname became “Crazy Moody.” He drove himself mercilessly, paying little attention to Emma, who urged him to eat regular meals. He admitted later, “I was an older man before thirty than I have been since.” Despite his frenzied, sometimes obnoxious ways to win others to Christ, Dwight’s humility redeemed him. He always showed a willingness to listen, to learn, to experiment, and he possessed a basic common sense, which helped him immeasurably. His burning desire as far back as he could remember was “that every soul be saved.”
Although Dwight was willing to continue working in Chicago, his wife’s health changed his mind. The Moodys decided to sail to England because of Emma’s asthma. This trip started Dwight Moody in new directions.
THE MOODYS DECIDED TO SAIL TO ENGLAND.