At the age of nineteen, Dwight removed to Chicago, secured another position as shoe-salesman, and offered his services to a mission school as a teacher. His appearance made anything but a favorable impression, but finally he was told that he might teach provided he brought his own scholars. The next Sunday he walked in at the head of a score of ragamuffins he had gathered up along the wharves. The divine fire seems to have been working in him; he was finding words with which to express himself, and burning for a wider field. So he rented a room in the slum districts which had been used as a saloon and opened a Sunday school there. It was an immense success, soon outgrew the little room, and was removed to a large hall, where, every Sunday, a thousand boys and girls attended. For six years, Moody conducted that school, sweeping it out and doing the janitor work himself, attending to his business as salesman throughout the week. But in 1860, at the age of twenty-three, he decided to devote all his time to Christian work.
He had no income, and to keep his expenses as low as possible, he slept at night on a bench in his school, and cooked his own food. Then the Civil War began, and he erected a tent at the camp near Chicago where the recruits were gathered, and labored there all day, sometimes holding eight or ten meetings. He went with the men to the front, and was at the desperate battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chattanooga. The war over, he took up again his work in Chicago. The great fire of 1871 swept away his church, but he soon had a temporary structure erected, and labored on.
By this time, his fame had got abroad, and finally in 1873, his great opportunity came. Accompanied by Ira D. Sankey, the famous singer of hymns, he started on an evangelist tour of Great Britain. At his first meeting only four people were present; at his last, thirty thousand crowded to hear him. In Ireland, the crowds sometimes covered six acres, and during the four months he spent in London, over two million people heard him preach. Great Britain had never before experienced such a religious awakening; but it was as nothing to the reception given him when he returned to America two years later. There are many people still living who remember those wonderful revivals in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with their great choirs, and Ira Sankey's singing, and Moody's soul-stirring talks. From that time forward he was easily the first evangelist in the world—perhaps the greatest the world had ever seen.
It is doubtful if any man ever faced and preached to so many people. He spoke to thousands night after night, week in and week out. In his themes he kept close to life, and few men were his equal in making scriptural biography vivid and realistic; in reconstructing scriptural scenes and setting them, as it were, bodily before his audience. He was not a cultured man, as we understand the word—not a man of broad learning; perhaps such learning would only have weakened him—nor did he have the presence and voice which go so far toward the equipment of the orator. But he burned with an intense conviction, and his sermons were so free from art, so direct, so persuasive, that they were perfectly adapted to the end he sought—the conversion of human beings.
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Girard, Stephen. Born near Bordeaux, France, May 24, 1750; sailed as cabin-boy to West Indies, and then to America; established in Philadelphia, 1769; financial mainstay of government in war of 1812; died at Philadelphia, December 26, 1831.
Smithson, James Lewis Macie. Born in France in 1765; matriculated from Pembroke College, Oxford, England, 1782; Fellow Royal Society, 1786; distinguished as student of mineralogy and chemistry; died at Genoa, Italy, June 27, 1829.
Cooper, Peter. Born at New York City, February 12, 1791; apprenticed to carriage-maker, 1808; engaged in various enterprises and established Canton Iron Works, Canton, Maryland, 1830; Greenback candidate for President, 1876; died at New York, April 4, 1883.
Peabody, George. Born at Danvers, Massachusetts, February 18, 1795; settled in London as a banker, 1837; died there, November 4, 1869.