He offered his services to a mission school as a teacher. "He was welcome, if he would bring his own scholars," they said. The next Sunday, to their astonishment, young Moody walked in at the head of eighteen ragged urchins whom he had gathered from the streets. He distributed tracts among the seamen at the wharfs, and did not fear to go into saloons and talk with the inmates.
Finally he wanted a larger field still, and opened an old saloon, which had been vacated, as a Sunday-school room. It was in the neighborhood of two hundred saloons and gambling-dens! His heart was full of love for the poor and the outcasts, and they did not mind about his grammar. A friend came to see him in these dingy quarters, and found him holding a colored child, while he read, by the dim light of some tallow candles, the story of the Prodigal Son to his little congregation. "I have got only one talent," said the unassuming Moody. "I have no education, but I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I want to do something for him. I want you to pray for me."
Thirteen years later, when all Great Britain was aflame with the sermons of this same man, he wrote his friend, "Pray for me every day; pray now that the Lord will keep me humble."
Soon the Sunday-school outgrew the shabby saloon, and was moved to a hall, where a thousand scholars gathered. Still attending to business as a travelling salesman, for six years he swept and made ready his Sunday-school room. He had great tact with his pupils, and won them by kindness. One day a boy came, who was very unruly, sticking pins into the backs of the other boys. Mr. Moody patted him kindly on the head, and asked him to come again. After a short time he became a Christian, and then was anxious about his mother, whom Mr. Moody had been unable to influence. One night the lad threw his arms about her neck, and weeping told her how he had stopped swearing, and how he wanted her to love the Saviour. When she passed his room, she heard him praying, "Oh, God, convert my dear mother." The next Sunday he led her into the Sabbath-school, and she became an earnest worker.
He also has great tact with his young converts. "Every man can do something," he says. "I had a Swede converted in Chicago. I don't know how. I don't suppose he was converted by my sermons, because he couldn't understand much. The Lord converted him into one of the happiest men you ever saw. His face shone all over. He came to me, and he had to speak through an interpreter. This interpreter said this Swede wanted to have me give him something to do. I said to myself, 'What in the world will I set this man to doing? He can't talk English!' So I gave him a bundle of little handbills, and put him out on the corner of the greatest thoroughfare of Chicago, and let him give them out, inviting people to come up and hear me preach. A man would come along and take it, and see 'Gospel meeting,' and would turn around and curse the fellow; but the Swede would laugh, because he didn't know but he was blessing him. He couldn't tell the difference. A great many men were impressed by that man's being so polite and kind. There he stood, and when winter came and the nights got so dark they could not read those little handbills, he went and got a little transparency and put it up on the corner, and there he took his stand, hot or cold, rain or shine. Many a man was won to Christ by his efforts."
In 1860, when Moody was twenty-three, he made up his mind to give all his time to Christian work. He was led to this by the following incident. He says, "In the Sunday-school I had a pale, delicate young man as one of the teachers. I knew his burning piety, and assigned him to the worst class in the school. They were all girls, and it was an awful class. They kept gadding around in the schoolroom, and were laughing and carrying on all the while. One Sunday he was absent, and I tried myself to teach the class, but couldn't do anything with them; they seemed farther off than ever from any concern about their souls. Well, the day after his absence, early Monday morning, the young man came into the store where I worked, and, tottering and bloodless, threw himself down on some boxes.
"'What's the matter?' I asked.
"'I have been bleeding at the lungs, and they have given me up to die,' he said.
"'But you are not afraid to die?' I questioned.
"'No,' said he, 'I am not afraid to die; but I have got to stand before God and give an account of my stewardship, and not one of my Sabbath-school scholars has been brought to Jesus. I have failed to bring one, and haven't any strength to do it now.'