Revival fires continued to burn in Scotland long after the Moody/Sankey campaign. Andrew Murray of South Africa, returning to Scotland a few years later, noticed “very distinctly the influence of Mr. Moody’s work. There is much more readiness to talk out and much more warmth….The whole religious tone of Scotland has been lifted up and brightened most remarkably.”
“THE WHOLE RELIGIOUS TONE OF SCOTLAND HAS BEEN LIFTED UP AND BRIGHTENED MOST REMARKABLY.”
Prior to leaving Scotland, and after a brief leisurely trip to Loch Ness and the Caledonian Canal, Dwight preached a few more times near Campbelltown where he and his family stayed with Peter and Jane Mackinnon.
The Mackinnons and Moodys found great compatibility. Dwight remarked that Peter, a partner with the British India Line, became like a father to him, more so than “any man that has crossed my path.”
Treasuring Dwight’s famous anecdotes, Jane made note of several when he stayed with them. Returning from a meeting on a windy night, he remarked, “The gas made such noise, it roared and I had to roar, and it was a battle between us, but I think I won!”; how the custodian kept opening a door which Dwight shut because a draught interfered with the inquiry work, so he locked it and put the key in his pocket; how he would inspect a church for ventilation before speaking and had all his wits about him even for the smallest detail. Jane noticed his decisiveness: “ ‘You just listen to me, and do what I tell you,’ he would urge his helpers.” She also realized his flexibility in the services: “He said he never knew, even a few minutes before, what he was going to do. I suppose he asks guidance at every step, and is sure he gets it.”
Jane enjoyed both Moodys and thought them good company. She especially liked Dwight’s combination of playfulness and seriousness. “It was delightful having him at leisure; he is so simple, so unaffected and loveable; he plays so heartily with the children, and makes fun with those who can receive it. He is brimful of humor.” He also played croquet and helped the children catch crabs on the beach.
Emma, too, won a place in June Mackinnon’s heart. She saw at once how valuable Emma was to Dwight: “The more I saw of her, the more convinced I was that a great deal of his usefulness was owing to her, not only in the work she did for him, relieving him of all correspondence, but also from her character.” Jane became aware of Emma’s independence of thought, her humility, and especially the calmness with which she met Dwight’s impulsiveness.
When telegrams arrived urging Dwight to “squeeze in a visit” to yet another place, and he asked her, “Which way should I go? I really don’t know what to do,” Emma would not sway him. She would say, “It’s up to you; you decide, tell me, and I’ll write.”
But Emma always had the last word. Just after their twelfth wedding anniversary (while at the Mackinnons), Emma wrote her mother in Chicago telling her, “Mr. Moody is nicer and kinder every day. He is a gem of a husband. I ought to be very happy.”
The Moodys rejoined Sankey in Belfast, Ireland, where the crowds were similar to those of Edinburgh and Glasgow; then they traveled to Dublin, although Dwight had been warned against going there because of its Roman Catholic majority. As usual, Dwight called the warning foolishness and proceeded fullspeed ahead.
For the first time, Dwight and Sankey had the full support of the Anglicans, including several bishops of the recently disestablished Church of Ireland. But Dwight stunned the Irish by refusing to attack Roman Catholics. His refusal opened the door for everyone of whatever religious persuasion to attend the meetings.
The campaign became the center of conversation, and even music halls were not exempt from having fun over the evangelists’ names. At one music hall, a comic turned to another and said: “I am rather Moody tonight. How do you feel?”
“I AM RATHER MOODY TONIGHT. HOW DO YOU FEEL?” “SANKEYMONIOUS!”
“Sankeymonious!”
The gallery hissed. Someone started singing “Hold the Fort,” and the whole audience began to join in while the comedians fled the stage.
Even the leading newspapers commented on the campaign, and the Dublin Times correspondent noted favorably that the campaign was “the most remarkable ever witnessed in Ireland; it had a character essentially different and seemed to possess elements of vitality wanting in others.” In particular the correspondent was impressed with “the reverence and devotion of the services,” and “not only the absence of any effort at self display but rather a sensitive avoidance of it.”
As the campaign came to a close, ministers and laity from every part of Ireland joined together in a great “Christian Convention for Ireland.” The meeting was held at the Exhibition Palace with thousands in attendance. The submerging of bitter sectarian feelings caused wonderment to many but became almost a trademark of Dwight’s wherever he went. His touch could be felt in the committee’s arrangement that clergymen from a distance were lodged with clerical families of denominations other than their own.
By November 1874, the Moody and Sankey families crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool and on to Manchester, England. Harry Moorhouse waited to greet them. He welcomed them with open arms, rejoicing that “success has not made Dwight proud. He uses his ten talents, I use my one, and we both together praise the Lord for using us at all.”
“SUCCESS HAS NOT MADE DWIGHT PROUD.”
Dwight held campaigns in Manchester, Sheffield, and Birmingham in quick succession with good results in each place. A Church of England newspaper, the Record, reported, “There is a degree of religious feeling in the town which has not been equaled for years.”
Reaching Birmingham later in January, Dwight preached to large crowds at Bingley Hall. The effect of the campaign climaxed in some doggerel verse sold on the street corners:
Oh, the town’s upside down, everybody seems mad,
When they come to their sense we all shall feel glad,
For the rich and the poor, and the good and the bad,
Are gone mad over Moody and Sankey.
Thrilled over such an unusual opportunity, an Anglican clergyman wrote of the Birmingham campaign, “Such a chance of guiding souls comes only once in a lifetime.”
One puzzled minister, Dr. Dale of Carr’s Lane Congregational Church in Birmingham, had been expecting a revival for a few years. But he expressed bewilderment when it came through two American strangers.
Watching the attentive faces of the huge crowd at Bingley Hall, he saw “all sorts, young and old, rich and poor, keen tradesmen, manufacturers and merchants and young ladies who had just left school, rough boys who knew more about dogs and pigeons than about books, and cultivated women….I could not understand it.”
Dr. Dale told Dwight, “The work is most plainly of God, for I can see no relation between yourself and what you have done.” Dwight chuckled in his inimitable way and told him, “I should be very sorry if it were otherwise.”
Many others expressed wonder, too, that an American should be the one God used in this revival, although the church had been diligent to pray for some time before Moody arrived.
Probably much of Dwight’s success lay in his simple preaching. As Dr. Dale noted, “He talks in a perfectly unconstrained and straightforward way, just as he would talk to half a dozen old friends at his fireside.”
The English preachers, on the other hand, were given to an ornate style of preaching. Spurgeon, for example, piled metaphor upon metaphor, but Dwight simply chatted about what he saw in the Bible.
DWIGHT SIMPLY CHATTED ABOUT WHAT HE SAW IN THE BIBLE.
He made the Bible come alive in everyday language. Daniel in the lions’ den looks at his watch to see if it is time to pray. Scoffers before the Flood “talk it over in the corner grocery store: ‘Not much sign of old Noah’s rainstorm yet!’ ”
Blind Bartimaeus, suddenly able to see, rushes into Jericho “and he says, ‘I will go to see my wife and tell her about it’—a young convert always wants to talk to his friends about salvation—Away he goes down the street ’n’ then turns round ’n’ says, ‘Bartimaeus, is that you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I thought it was, but I couldn’t believe my eyes! How’ve you gotten your sight?’ ‘Oh, I just met Jesus of Nazareth outside the city and asked Him to have mercy on me.’ ‘Jesus of Nazareth! What! Is he in this part of the country?’ ‘Sure. Right here in Jericho.’ ‘I should like to see him!’ and away he runs down the street.”
Or it was Zacchaeus (or “Zakkus” as Dwight would say) sitting in the sycamore tree. So the sermon would shift from one scene to another of Christ meeting people in their need.
Somehow when Dwight preached, he would fade from his hearers’ consciousness. Someone remarked about his ability: “Throughout his address you entirely forgot the man, so full was he of his message and so held were you by his earnestness, intensity, and forceful appeal. He had many illustrations drawn from his personal experiences, but never did self appear prominent. He was completely absorbed in the message and in getting it over to the mind, heart, and conscience of those listening.”
In Liverpool at a men’s meeting, several rationalistic thinkers were present who did not acknowledge Christ’s death on the cross. But as Dwight prayed in the speakers’ room before the service, Reverend F. B. Meyer found himself awed by Dwight’s overpowering “burden of heart.”
After Dwight preached that night, large numbers stayed for the after-meeting. Dwight came down from the platform, got up on a chair, “and launched out in a wonderful discourse. His invectives against sin, and his lashings of the conscience, were awful. He seemed to be wrestling with an unseen power. Beneath those burning words men’s faces grew pale under a conviction of the broken law of God. Then he began with the wooings of the Gospel, in a strain of tender and heartbreaking entreaty; by the time he finished, the whole audience seemed completely broken. One man arose and said, ‘Mr. Moody, I want to be a Christian.’ It seemed but a moment when forty or fifty men were on their feet.”
The England Dwight had come to had been primed on Christian doctrine, and most people knew something about Christ and about the Bible. However, Christianity had gained respectability in the Victorian age to the point where sins of the flesh had been concealed behind a veneer of the spirit. Dwight was able to pierce through the hypocritical veil many wore.
More importantly, real Christianity had been distorted by an ineffective gospel that preached a good person would go to heaven, a wicked one to hell. Little was known or taught of God’s grace. Against this warped teaching, Dwight proclaimed eternal life as the gift of God to the undeserving. He did not deny eternal punishment for those who refused this gift, but he would say, “I believe the magnet that goes down to the bottom of the pit is the love of Jesus.”
LITTLE WAS KNOWN OR TAUGHT OF GOD’S GRACE.
A popular example Dwight used to illustrate the difference between law and grace was the story of the prodigal son. “When the prodigal came home, grace met him and embraced him. Law said, Stone him!—grace said, Embrace him! Law said Smite him!—grace said, Kiss him! Law went after him and bound him. Grace said, Loose him and let him go! Law tells me how crooked I am; grace comes and makes me straight.”
Dwight’s message emphasized that God wanted men more than they wanted Him. He proclaimed that salvation was not a grudged reward for a consistent climb into goodness but the new birth of a repentant sinner into the life of Christ. “Instant salvation,” he called it over and over. His preaching, said Dr. Dale, “was in a manner that produced the sort of effect produced by Luther, and provoked similar criticism. He exulted in the free grace of God. His joy was contagious. Men leaped out of darkness into light, and lived a Christian life afterwards.”
Not since the days of Wesley and Whitefield had people from so many social classes found joy in Christ. Some of the very poor people had been helped by General William Booth and the Salvation Army, but at last many of the middle and upper classes were also discovering salvation in Christ.
Dwight had preached in the provinces, but he knew that for the movement to become national, he must win London. The London committee made up of the clergy, members of Parliament, and high-ranking officers had done much preparation work for the Moody campaign. They had inundated London with posters and notices of all kinds and had organized teams to visit the entire city. They had also secured the Agricultural Hall in Islington for at least a ten-week stretch. The home of the annual prize cattle show in north London’s principal middle class area, the Agricultural Hall had been freshly refurbished and fifteen thousand chairs installed.
On opening night the hall was in readiness with seats on the left for participants and distinguished guests, a railed pulpit area in the middle, and on the right seating room for a two-hundred-member choir. Red banners hung all around the hall proclaiming such texts as: “Repent ye and believe the gospel,” “The gift of God is eternal life,” and “Ye must be born again.”
When Dwight and Sankey stepped onto the platform at 7:30 and Dwight told the audience: “Let us rise and sing to the praise of God; Let us praise Him for what He is going to do in London,” a wave of expectancy swept over the tremendous crowd.
The London Daily Telegraph correspondent, who perhaps couldn’t see Dwight too clearly, described him as tall, if stout, with a “not unintellectual cast of countenance.” He said he felt relief to discover that Dwight was “altogether as unlike the conventional ‘ranter’ as it is possible to conceive,” and with some British snobbery assured readers that Moody had little American about him except “a strange Western twang.” Sankey, he said, could “be mistaken for an Englishman anywhere.”
The newspaper article spoke quite favorably of Dwight and the campaign, generally calling Dwight’s stories “good American stories picked up in Chicago.” The reporter commended the campaign’s tone that pointed the way for men and women to become better, and for them to have “a better hope in this world and the next.”
THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE SPOKE FAVORABLY OF DWIGHT AND THE CAMPAIGN.
Dwight knew from the outset of the campaign, however, there would be opposition. He warned his committee: “We must expect opposition. If you think a great work is to be done here without opposition you will be greatly mistaken. There will be many bitter things said, and many lies started, and as someone has said, a lie will get half round the world before the truth gets its boots on!”
He spoke accurately; before long, articles in the Morning Post called his teaching “wild, baseless, and uncertain. Moody and Sankey will be a puff in the wind.” In the Morning Advertiser, people read, “There must have been thousands in that crowd of uplifted faces who looked with horror and shame on the illiterate preacher making little better than a travesty of all they held sacred.” The article played on the word “vulgar,” calling Moody’s accent vulgar and stating he was “a ranter of the most vulgar type.”
There were other more penetrating criticisms that could not be easily dismissed: “Where the corpulent old expounder is known he is regarded as a selfish, sensual, hypocritical variegator of facts.” And poor Sankey was accused of starting his career as a black “minstrel” until he found that evangelism paid better. The article also stressed all the money the two evangelists were making. They would return to America and “gaze upon their cosy homesteads purchased with good English gold” and claim that they had “spoiled the Egyptians.”
Actually, Dwight and Sankey had refused to touch the considerable money from Sacred Songs and Solos and had worked out an arrangement with Hugh Matheson to give the royalties to worthy charities.
Despite libel and criticism, attendance at the Agricultural Hall rose to an estimated twenty thousand. More space was made for an overflow crowd. Even the Lord Chancellor of Disraeli’s new Conservative Government, Mr. Cairns, attended the meetings frequently. And former Prime Minister Gladstone talked privately with Dwight, also sitting on the platform once or twice. Dwight had remarked that “Gladstone is a converted man and a true and humble Christian.”
ATTENDANCE AT THE AGRICULTURAL HALL ROSE TO AN ESTIMATED TWENTY THOUSAND.
Gladstone had exclaimed to a friend how thankful he was that “I have lived to see the day when He should bless His church on earth by the gift of a man able to preach the Gospel of Christ as we have just heard it preached!”
Complimenting Dwight on his powerful voice, Gladstone said, “I wish I had your chest, Mr. Moody!”
Dwight came back with: “And I wish I had your head on top of it!”
Although the crowds overflowed night after night at Agricultural Hall, Lord Shaftsbury, a recent ally of Dwight’s, thought he should move to the Queen’s Opera House where he could reach the upper classes of people. Dwight expressed reluctance, but finally acquiesced to at least have afternoon Bible readings in the Opera House.
The wonderful response to the afternoon Bible readings caused Dwight to turn over the Agricultural Hall meetings to an associate nine days early and begin evening meetings at the OperaHouse in the Haymarket. Then he announced two evening meetings: one at the Opera House, the other at Bow Common where he could reach another class of people.
A much poorer class of people lived near Bow Common, but Dwight yearned to reach them, too. With the sawdust floor, galvanized iron roof, and gaslight shining on the faces of the ragged, unkempt people at Bow Common, Dwight felt right at home—like he was back in Illinois Street preaching to the people he loved best!
Each night Dwight would preach at 7:30 to roughly eight or nine thousand at Bow Common. Then at 8:30 he and Sankey jumped into a brougham, trotting as swiftly as traffic allowed up the Mile-End Road and through the city, under shored-up Temple Bar, and around Trafalgar Square to the Haymarket: they would traverse from the East End to the West End, from a world of slums and squalor to that of great mansions and the royal parks, from dock workers to duchesses.
THEY WOULD TRAVERSE A WORLD OF SLUMS AND SQUALOR TO THAT OF GREAT MANSIONS AND THE ROYAL PARKS.
Dwight’s flexibility in preaching to two very different sorts of crowds impressed an attending aristocrat: “Nothing showed me the wonderful adaptability of Mr. Moody more than his coming from Bow Road, the poorest part of the East End, to the very antipodes of it all in character and surroundings, and yet at once hitting on the right note of dealing with the new conditions.” Near the Opera House were St. James, Mayfair, Westminster, Belgravia, and the heart of fashionable London.
One eyewitness marveled at what he witnessed at the Hay-market site nightly: “The scene in the Haymarket baffles description. It was literally blocked with the carriages of the aristocratic and plutocratic of the land; and the struggle for admission was perhaps even more severe in the West than in the East.”
Another participant expressed amazement at the good acoustics in the Opera House: “When we got to the Opera House, we found an immense crowd outside; but we got a place at the very top of the highest gallery, and although at that distance Mr. Moody seemed a tiny figure of a man, every word, even his whispered words, were heard. I was struck with the impression which Mr. Sankey’s singing made on the audience.”
Opening the campaign at the Opera House turned out to be an excellent idea, for it ensured that even aristocratic people could attend. In fact, one of Dwight’s staunch supporters turned out to be the duchess of Sutherland, who “insisted on going every day.” The Sutherlands had entertained Dwight at Dunrobin Castle in the Highlands where the duchess was a countess in her own right as well as a chieftain. The duke, according to common knowledge, owned more acres than any man in Europe.
The duke expressed his thanks for Dwight’s ministry in a letter where he told him, “God bless you. I shall never forget what I have heard from you. If you knew what a life mine is, in ways I was not able to tell you the other day, and what a terrible story mine has been, you would pray for me much.” In a subsequent, more positive letter, the duke thanked Dwight “for all the joy and strength our dear Lord has given me through you, and I pray that your wonderful work may be more and more blessed.”
In her enthusiasm for Dwight’s meetings, the duchess would collect numerous friends and relatives at palatial Safford House and whisk them in her carriage along Pall Mall to the Haymarket. Some of them objected to it: “The mixture of religious fervor and the most intense toadyism of the duchess was horribly disgusting,” said Lady Barker with considerable disdain.
The Princess of Wales, thirty-year-old Alexandra, entered the royal box at one of the early Bible readings. When he realized who she was, Sankey burst into the backstage room, his eyes popping and his hands nervously straightening his bow tie and whiskers.
“Moody, the Princess of Wales has just arrived!”
“MOODY, THE PRINCESS OF WALES HAS JUST ARRIVED!”
Dwight, occupied in talking with a young English helper, looked up. “May she be blessed. I’ll be out in a minute. Now, Inglis, as I was saying.”
The young Englishman noted the difference between the two men. Sankey, he observed, was “all in a flutter,” while “Moody takes it as a matter of course. When we came out on the platform, I watched them. Mr. Moody rolled into his chair like a New England farmer. There he stood with a tweed suit on, pockets full of papers, and said in his usual way, ‘Hymn number so-and-so, let’s all rise and sing it.’ ”
Princess Alexandra attended the meetings two or three times and told one of her friends that Dwight’s ministry had been a definite help to her. On the strength of reports such as this one, the dowager countess of Gainsborough decided to write Queen Victoria.
Her letter suggested that Her Majesty would like at least once to hear the American evangelists “who are so occupying men’s minds at this time—& drawing such crowds to hear them.” The dowager countess mentioned the “Royal box which Your Majesty could go to privately.”
Queen Victoria responded saying that she did not go to large public places anymore. Aside from that, the queen thought Moody and Sankey must be “good and sincere people,” but their meetings were not “the sort of religious performance which I like. This sensational style of excitement like the Revivals is not the religion which can last, and is not, I think, wholesome for the mind or heart, though there may be instances where it does good.”
Concluding her rather barbed letter, the queen expressed her opinion that the best kind of preaching is “eloquent, simple preaching, with plain practical teaching,” which is “far more likely to do real and permanent good, and this can surely be heard in all Protestant Churches, whether in the Established Church or amongst Dissenters, if the Ministers are thoroughly earnest.”
After preaching to huge crowds gathered at Bow Common and the Opera House, and even schoolboys at Eton—although Dwight and Sankey nearly had eggs tossed at them there—they were ready to travel back to America to see their friends and loved ones again.
They had arrived in England on June 17, 1873, and were scheduled to leave on the SS Spain on August 4, 1875. The attendance at the meetings in London’s centers alone totaled 2,330,000. Scotland, Ireland, and England would never be the same. Much of the evangelistic mission work started as a direct result of the Moody campaign and continued under the able hands of local laymen and ministers.
THE ATTENDANCE AT THE MEETINGS IN LONDON’S CENTERS ALONE TOTALED 2,330,000.
Headed back to America after a two-year absence, Dwight and Sankey wondered, What does the future hold for us there?