The response to the Sunday afternoon meeting was so great that it led to a campaign like nothing Northfield had seen before. The old church building was shored up to stop it from collapsing. Night after night hundreds of people streamed in from town and the surrounding area to hear D.L. At first D.L.’s mother refused to attend the meetings, but his brothers came out of curiosity. Eventually curiosity also got the better of his mother, who came to a meeting one night. D.L. preached his heart out and at the end of the meeting asked those who wanted to receive Christ as their Savior to stand and he would pray for them. People all over the church stood, and when D.L. looked up, he could scarcely believe what he saw: one of the people standing was his mother. He was so deeply moved that he could barely get the words out as he asked another pastor to pray for those standing. On the last night of the campaign, D.L.’s brother Sam stood to receive Christ.
One day as D.L. was riding in a buggy, he passed Elisha Alexander tending his corn. He pulled the buggy to a halt and went to talk with his neighbor, hoping to settle the issue with his mother’s chickens.
“I want to buy the piece of this field that runs along our boundary,” D.L. said.
“I don’t care to sell a piece unless it is the whole property,” came Elisha’s terse reply.
“How many acres?” D.L. asked.
“Twelve.”
“How much?”
“I’ll take thirty-five hundred dollars for the whole place with house and barns,” Elisha replied.
“I’ll take it!” D.L. exclaimed.
A shocked Elisha stared at D.L.
Edward Studd, a wealthy British nobleman who had been converted at one of D.L.’s meetings at the Royal Opera House in London, had sent D.L. a check as a donation. Not wanting to accept a personal donation, D.L. had twice sent the check back. But when Edward sent the check to him a third time, D.L. decided he had better keep it in case he might offend him by sending it back yet again. D.L. put the money to work buying Elisha’s farm. He supposed that he would separate the piece of the cornfield along the boundary line and one day sell the remaining land and house.
While at home in Northfield, D.L. prayed and thought about what he should do next. He wanted to impact the United States in the same way that he had impacted England with the gospel, but how?
In the end he decided to begin with a campaign in Brooklyn in October. He chose this city because, as he explained to Ira, “Water runs downhill, and the highest hills in America are the great cities. If we can stir them, we shall stir the whole country.”
Before the campaign got under way, meetings were held among the various denominational groups in Brooklyn. The groups pledged to work together to gather the crowds and find a site large enough to hold meetings. Five hundred men and women volunteered to be ushers and counselors, and another six hundred volunteers made up the choir.
The building chosen for the campaign meetings was a large skating rink on Clermont Avenue. The venue could hold five thousand people, and on the opening night it was filled to overflowing. The newspapers reported on the meetings and gave favorable coverage. The New York Tribune commented, “They are not money-makers; they are not charlatans. Decorous, conservative England, which reprobated both their work and the manner of it, held them in the full blaze of scrutiny for months, and could not detect in them a single motive which was not pure. Earnest and sincere men are rare in these days. Is it not worth our while to give to them a dispassionate, unprejudiced hearing? …If the Christian religion is not the one hope for our individual and social life, what is?”
After a month of packed meetings in Brooklyn, D.L. and Ira went to Philadelphia, where 180 pastors of every denomination in the city had signed a petition asking them to come and pledging their support. John Wanamaker, a rich merchant and friend of D.L.’s, had recently bought an abandoned freight depot from the Pennsylvania Railroad for his business and refitted it for D.L. to hold his meetings in. The doors to the facility were opened one and a half hours before the meetings, and within ten minutes the place was filled to capacity with twelve thousand people.
On Sunday, January 19, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant and members of his cabinet, who were in Philadelphia for the Centennial Exhibition, attended one of D.L.’s meetings.
Night after night D.L. preached, and as had happened in England at the end of each meeting, a large number of people responded to the call to give their lives to Christ. Each Friday afternoon D.L. held a special meeting for alcoholics, many of whom were despondent Civil War veterans. D.L. also held special women’s and men’s meetings.
The Philadelphia campaign came to a close at the end of January 1876, and D.L. and Ira moved on to New York City. The campaign meetings in New York were held in the Hippodrome, a large arena in which P. T. Barnum held his circus. From the start, as in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the number of people coming to the meetings was enormous, with the huge venue packed for almost every meeting. People arrived in the city by the trainload from outlying areas to attend the meetings. D.L. did not like to keep a tally of the numbers of those attending his campaign meetings, and when a pastor asked him how many people he estimated had been led to Christ in the campaign, D.L. replied, “I don’t know anything about that. I thank God I don’t have to. I don’t keep the Lamb’s Book of Life.”
After two months in New York City, D.L. and Ira moved on to Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. After three years away, and before moving on to a campaign in Boston, D.L. returned to Chicago for a visit. He found it hard to adjust to the rebuilt city, which was so different from the Chicago he had known before the fire. Nonetheless, the people of Chicago were glad to have their evangelist back. D.L. had left town as “Crazy Moody,” but he was no longer called that. The city embraced him with reverence and respect.
Before his trip to England, D.L. had purchased land at the corner of Chicago Avenue and LaSalle Street for a new church. On June 1, 1876, the church officially opened, with D.L. preaching at the first service. D.L. marveled at the magnificent brick church that had been built in his absence, though he had played a key role in helping the building project along. He and Ira had agreed not to take any money from royalties on their songbook. Instead, they poured the money back into their work. As a result, thousands of British pounds had been sent back to Chicago to help pay for the church construction. On July 16 the official dedication ceremony for the new church building was held, and D.L. preached at this service.
It felt both wonderful and strange to D.L. to be back in Chicago. The city no longer felt like home. Perhaps, D.L. told himself, it was because he and Emma no longer had a place of their own here. D.L. also wondered whether God might be sending him in another direction.
While D.L. was in Chicago, his old friends and pastors urged him to hold a campaign in the city. John Farwell offered to build a large hall for the event. So D.L. decided to postpone his Boston campaign until later and hold a campaign in Chicago starting in early October. While the city prepared and John oversaw the construction of the hall, D.L. and his family returned to Northfield for two months.
The Moody family moved in to the farmhouse D.L. had bought next to his mother’s property in Northfield. The farmhouse was solid, and the family enjoyed being in a place of their own after more than three years. While in Northfield, D.L. got to spend time with Sam, his favorite brother. Since his conversion, Sam had become an active Christian. He was involved with the local branch of the YMCA and was not bashful telling others about his faith. One day as the two of them were out riding on a wagon around Northfield, Sam spoke about some of his concerns for the physical and spiritual well-being of the community. One thing that greatly concerned Sam was the plight of girls in the town. Often these girls received inadequate, if any, high school education and instead were kept at home to work and take care of domestic duties. Sam told D.L. about his dream of one day starting a quality high school in Northfield just for girls. D.L. agreed with his younger brother that this was an admirable plan.
On September 30 D.L. and Ira arrived in Chicago for the campaign. Everything was in place, and D.L. looked forward to a fruitful time in the city. Sure enough, from the start, the crowds were huge. The local omnibus company even organized special buses to transport people to the venue.
On the afternoon of October 6, 1876, during a meeting with a group of deacons from the Chicago Avenue Church, D.L. received a telegram. As he read the message, he let out a wail and burst into tears. His brother Sam had died. Heartbroken, D.L. asked a fellow evangelist to take over preaching at the campaign meetings in Chicago while he rushed to Northfield by train to bury his brother. On the train ride, D.L. recalled how Sam had told him about his dream of starting a school for girls, and he promised himself that he would find a way to make Sam’s dream come true.
A week later D.L. returned to preaching in the Chicago campaign. Throughout October, November, December, and into January, the meetings continued. D.L. invited the hymn writer and musician Phillip Bliss and his wife to join him for a special meeting he had planned for New Year’s Eve. Neither Phillip nor his wife made it to Chicago. On the way there, they were both killed, along with over one hundred other passengers, in a train wreck at Ashtabula, Ohio. It was a brutally cold night, and the train fell off a bridge onto the frozen stream below, where it caught fire. D.L. learned that Phillip initially escaped from the wrecked carriage but crawled back inside to free his wife. Both had perished in the flames. The special New Year’s Eve service went on as planned, but in his heart, D.L. grieved deeply for his talented friend.
The Chicago campaign ended in mid-January 1877, and D.L. and Ira headed straight to Boston to hold the campaign there. As he left Chicago, D.L. was still unsettled as to whether the city would ever be his home again.
In Boston over ninety churches had banded together to support the campaign, and a six-thousand-seat tabernacle had been built for the occasion. On January 28 meetings began in the tabernacle, and as in the other places where D.L. had held campaigns in the United States, people packed the building at every meeting.
A week after starting the Boston campaign, D.L. celebrated his fortieth birthday on February 5, 1877, with a special meeting for young men—anyone under forty! As he celebrated his birthday, D.L. marveled at the course his life had taken so far. Boston was where he had accepted Christ. It was the city he had escaped to from Northfield as a seventeen-year-old. Then he’d had the dream of becoming a wealthy businessman and making something of himself. But God had other ideas for him. Instead of business, evangelism was to be his life’s work, at least so far. Now here he was, back at the place where he had dreamed of going into business, as an evangelist. Instead of escaping from Northfield to Boston, D.L. was very much looking forward to the end of the campaign and escaping back to Northfield.
Chapter 14
Schools
After his return to Northfield, D.L. couldn’t get Boston out of his mind—not the campaign, but his interesting conversations with Henry Fowle Durant. Henry had been a friend and supporter of D.L.’s for many years, and D.L. had stayed with him throughout the Boston campaign. Henry had been a prominent Boston lawyer, but when his only son died, he retired to devote himself to establishing a college for girls at Wellesley, his large estate on the northwestern outskirts of Boston.
D.L. wanted to learn all he could about the school and plied Henry with all sorts of questions. He learned that the college was designed for girls from families with moderate incomes and was intended to give them an education equal to that offered at Harvard University across the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The girls paid $250 a year in fees, which was half of what it cost the college to educate them. The college paid for the other half of the girls’ education. To help defray some of the costs, the girls also shared the daily domestic chores around the college. Henry explained to D.L. that the college was designed not only to educate the girls academically but also to nurture them spiritually in the Christian faith.
