Even while Dwight was occupied with building two schools in Northfield, he saw the need for a school in Chicago to train Christian laymen for the church. He had nothing against theological seminaries, stating, “They have their place.” As he pointed out, “A young man doesn’t know until he is twenty or twenty-three what he wants to do for a profession. But if he wants till then to decide to be a minister and goes to college or seminary, he will be fifty years old by the time he is ready to begin work.”
Dwight was interested in helping college and seminary graduates, ministers and missionaries, and laymen who were interested in pursuing English Bible study and practical evangelism. With the latter group he wanted to reach “the three-fourths that do not go anywhere to church,” thus getting “a lever under all the churches.” He wanted men and women who were willing to “lay their lives alongside the laboring-class and the poor, and bring the gospel to bear upon their lives.” He spoke from his own background working with Chicago’s poor and needy.
Instrumental in the planning was Emeline Dryer, who resigned in 1873 as head of the faculty at Illinois Sate Normal School to go to work for Dwight in Chicago. By 1883, with Dwight again in England, her Bible classes were drawing more people than ever.
When Charles A. Blanchard, a teacher at nearby Wheaton College, asked her what her plans were, she told him of Dwight’s calling her from public school work to organize just such a training school. She needed, she told Blanchard, five hundred dollars to enlarge the operations. Blanchard got involved at that time and raised the necessary money.
By the fall of 1883, Dryer had gotten Dr. William G. Moorhead of Xenia, Ohio, involved and was teaching fifty young men and women.
The previous summer, Dwight had stressed the need for city missionaries in Chicago: “I know the need of this. I walked the streets of Chicago day after day, feeling that I must preach, yet knowing that I was not fitted for the work and wanted to learn. Had there been some place where I could have been trained and allowed to study, while I was at work, I could have been more successful.”
Preachers also needed more than textbook learning; they needed to be “trained in the school of human nature.” As Dwight explained, “They need to rub up against the world and learn how to read men. They fail to get hold of men for this very reason.”
PREACHERS NEEDED TO BE “TRAINED IN THE SCHOOL OF HUMAN NATURE.”
When a New Yorker pressed Dwight to take five thousand dollars for just such a school, he felt he could not turn it down. Coming to Chicago a short time later, another five thousand dollars was given him to start the school in Chicago.
Dwight returned to the British Isles in 1883, and while he was gone, Miss Dryer met with several others each Saturday morning to pray for guidance and support. She prayed that Dwight would “come and plan something commensurate with the needs.” By January 1885, Dwight agreed to come and begin such a work if others would raise the money. But people who could do the fund-raising were busy with other ventures.
The following January, Dwight made a public appeal for funds. He told his audience that 100,000 dollars had been raised for a building in Edinburgh, and challenged them to raise 250,000 dollars.
Every time Dwight tried to forget about the Bible Institute, he would be persuaded otherwise. Finally, he started a subscription paper. Several people sitting on the platform of his current campaign subscribed five thousand dollars apiece. Cyrus Hall McCormick offered fifty thousand dollars. Dwight suggested, “Better make it a hundred.” And McCormick, tickled at Dwight’s boldness, said, “That will require some consideration,” but nevertheless came through with the 100,000 dollars.
The money seemed to pour in from everywhere for the Institute. In the meantime, training took place at the Chicago Avenue Church to provide workers for the mass evangelism Dwight had encouraged in the city. He gave the first one hundred dollars toward a large gospel tent to be pitched in “Little Hell,” to be manned by an evangelist and a corps of assistants. In the winter, the mission moved into churches, missions, theatres, and even barrooms where beer kegs became seats.
Through a series of brief “Bible Institutes,” training was given these workers in the scriptures and in “practical methods of Christian work.” By May 1889 over two hundred people were attending these institutes. Dwight wrote to Whittle on May 24, telling him, “I have never been so hopeful about anything I have undertaken.” He said he felt he was trying to solve “the great problem of the century.”
Back in Chicago, Dwight became aware of three large houses for sale next to the Chicago Avenue Church. He bought them on the spot for three future dormitories to house fifty women seeking admission to the institute. Immediately he began work on a three-story brick building for the ninety men who were attending as well. And on September 26, 1889, Dwight opened the institute officially, putting Rueben Torrey, a minister formerly from New Haven, Connecticut, in charge. Dwight had selected the other necessary officials at that time, so everything was in place for the institute to grow and flourish.
The daily schedule was full, the Mondays were kept for “Rest Day.” In addition to “domestic” work, practical work assignments in the city were mandatory. Each week students were responsible for such tasks as organizing and carrying on cottage prayer meetings, working in a city mission or industrial school, holding children’s meetings, or otherwise supplementing the work of the city churches. In typical Moody style, inquiry meetings became the rule after virtually every service.
By 1890 the men’s building was finished and Dwight, surveying it, exclaimed, “There is my life work!” By fall he must have been more convinced than ever when 248 students enrolled. That year, in addition to their study, they conducted over three thousand meetings, paid ten thousand visits to homes of the poor, and went to more than one thousand saloons. By the end of the year Dwight rejoiced to see his first graduates being placed at home and abroad. Three went to India, eight to China, seven to Africa, two to South America, six to Turkey, and one each to Bulgaria, Persia, Burma, and Japan.
Forty-six of the graduates remained in the States, going into evangelistic work; thirty-one went into pastoral work; five into Sunday school missions; two into home missions; seven to YMCA work; two into YWCA work; and six into “singing evangelism.” A number took posts in charitable institutions; twenty went out as teachers; and twenty-nine went on to further education. Henry Drummond had the last word on the fledgling Bible Institute, saying, “It will be allowed that this is a pretty fair record for a two years’ old institute.” Dwight also felt pleased, and added, “My school work will not tell much until the century closes, but when I am gone I shall leave some grand men and women behind.”
“WHEN I AM GONE I SHALL LEAVE SOME GRAND MEN AND WOMEN BEHIND.”
The instructors were always chosen carefully and had to view the Bible as literal. Dwight gave them much academic freedom but admonished them about their biblical views: “Let us take our stand here, that any man can teach upon our platforms with absolute freedom whatever he finds in the Bible, but no man shall be allowed to pick the Bible to pieces.”
Dwight’s students highly respected him, even revered him. When he visited Chicago, he stayed in the men’s dorm and ate with them in the dining hall. Each Monday morning that Dwight was away, Torrey would write a letter to him including a statistical report for the previous week. Dwight was eager for optimistic statistics, but was even more concerned about each individual student. He held high standards and expected each of them to do the same. He wrote Torrey: “If any of the men do not come up to the mark, you will not keep them. That I told them when I left. Keep me posted about them, and give them a good trial.” For all his good humor, Dwight expected every person to do his best.
One man, Charles Stetzle, had applied to seminary after seminary but was refused admission because of academic standing. At last hearing of Dwight’s institute, he wrote him, giving a mutual friend as a reference. When Dwight met the friend later, he asked but one question of the applicant, “Has he sand?” By this he meant, “Has he the ability and interest necessary to acquire the training, and the consecration required for success?”
To another student who seemed to lack interest, Dwight gave the following volatile advice: “You know, I’d like to fasten about a quarter of a pound of gunpowder to the tail of your coat and set fire to it!” The student apparently took the hint and later became a city missionary in London.
Dwight implemented the Northfield plan for fundraising at the institute. He wrote potential donors, asking for 150 dollars to support one student. He and his wife each took one student, and he went out looking for two hundred more donors.
At the end of a decade or so, Dwight’s institution was more than a mere “whistling in the woods,” as he himself termed it shortly before his death. More than three thousand students had enrolled, tuition free, in buildings by then worth a third of a million dollars. About a third of the alumni had gone into Christian service full-time, while most of the rest filled valuable lay positions in churches across the country. The Moody Bible Institute, as it became at his death, was now, according to the public relations department, the “West Point of Christian Work.”
MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND STUDENTS HAD ENROLLED, TUITION FREE, IN BUILDINGS BY THEN WORTH A THIRD OF A MILLION DOLLARS.
In addition to getting the Northfield Schools and the Bible Institute underway, the 1880s proved to be fruitful years for Dwight. He continued to receive many invitations to revisit Scotland and England. One invitation stretched 150 yards long and was singed by numerous ministers and laymen from the United Kingdom. Finally, in September 1881, the Moodys and the Sankeys set sail for the countries of their early success.
Once again crowds thronged to hear Dwight in Edinburgh, London, and even at Cambridge University. He campaigned in most of the same places he had on the earlier trip. He was less a sensation this time and more the beloved Yankee who discovered a welcome spelled out in enormous crowds, eager to hear once again the homely aphorisms, the pungent epigrams, the down-to-earth applications, and the resurrection of Bible characters in a language that was at once simple and pithy, straightforward and humorous. In some respects this second great mission was a continuation of the first; in some respects, it was a duplication.
In 1884 Dwight spoke at Cambridge University. All had been prepared: a large choir, daily prayer meetings, and extensive advertising. But the 1,700 students did not cooperate, and on opening night were irreverent, noisy, and disruptive, even throwing a firecracker against a window. Dwight was aghast! He had preached to all kinds of people but never had had to put up with such behavior. Sankey began to sing “The Ninety and Nine,” but the men cheered, jeered, and called for an encore. Unfortunately, Dwight’s subject was “Dan’l,” the pronunciation of which set the students off even more.
Somehow Dwight and Sankey got through the night with increasingly heavy hearts. But a bedridden lady began to hold prayer meetings for the students, and the tide was turned. Increasingly, the students responded to the call to come to Christ, and by the need of the campaign, Dwight experienced a great victory in place of defeat.
Altogether, Dwight traveled to the British Isles seven times. The first three trips helped him to set his sights. The fourth established him as front-page news in secular and religious papers alike. The fifth, sixth, and seventh trips helped consolidate and extend the work of the fourth. When he returned to America in 1892, this time to stay, he left behind a grateful people. In 1874 he had declared in England, “If America is true to herself, she will occupy a foremost place in the evangelization of the world.” That she did so in the evangelization of the United Kingdom was due, in large part, to the determination of the preacher himself.