More than anything, D.L. was glad that he had agreed to go back to Northfield to help his family plant potatoes and watermelons. This would provide a great opportunity for him to tell his entire family about how he had received Jesus Christ into his heart and how happy it had made him feel. However, things did not work out quite that well. His brothers and sisters stared blankly at D.L. as he tried to explain how the Son of God wanted to have a personal relationship with each of them. His mother grew impatient with the talk and muttered under her breath, “I will be a Unitarian until the day I die.”
Not long after D.L. returned to Boston, he received a cheerful letter from his mother. As he read, he quickly learned why she was so happy. After thirteen years away, D.L.’s brother Isaiah had returned to Northfield. His mother explained that after Isaiah left Northfield, he had headed west, where he had worked on various farms. D.L. was four years old when he had last seen his oldest brother, and he had to admit that it was difficult to remember him. He wished he could be back in Northfield to see Isaiah and share his mother’s joy.
In Boston D.L. found it difficult to explain his newfound faith at church. Mr. Kimball suggested that he apply for church membership, and D.L. soon found himself in front of the pastor and deacons, who took turns asking him questions. Since D.L. wasn’t quite sure how to answer many of the questions, he kept his responses to yes and no. Then the chairman of the deacons asked him a question that he could not answer easily. “Mr. Moody, what has Christ done for you—for us all—that entitles Him to our love?”
D.L. was stumped. He had no idea what the chairman wanted him to say. “I don’t know… I think Christ has done a lot for each of us,” he stammered.
“Please go on,” the chairman responded.
“Well, I can’t think of anything particular as I know of.”
Even before the pastor told him that he had failed, D.L. knew he would not be welcomed into membership. This was difficult for him to accept. He felt like a new man, he wanted to read his Bible all the time, and he prayed constantly for his family. He didn’t even want to swear anymore, but still he was not good enough to be admitted into membership of the church.
It did not take long for D.L. to dust himself off after the encounter and continue his Christian walk. Two deacons were assigned to help him understand more of the gospel truth. D.L. met with them privately for Bible studies. When he applied for church membership a second time about a year later, he was accepted into full membership at Mount Vernon Church. It was a proud day for D.L.
Dark days followed, however. Things were not going well with Uncle S.S. at the shoe store, and one day in September 1856, the two men got into a massive quarrel. Following the argument, D.L. wrote to his brother Warren, “I lov Boston and have got some warm friends there but as I was situated there it was not very pleasant.”
In fact, things in Boston had become so unpleasant for D.L. that he felt he needed to get out of town fast. He had no thoughts of going back to Northfield, and impulsively he plunked down five dollars for a ticket on an immigrant train bound westward for Chicago. Late in the afternoon on Monday, September 15, 1856, nineteen-year-old Dwight L. Moody walked to the Causeway Street train depot and joined the throngs of people hoping to find a better life in the newly opened western territories. D.L. had little money and no prospects, but he had faith that God would somehow make a way for him.
Chapter 5
Chicago
The trip to Chicago took much longer than the trip from Northfield to Boston. The first stage of the journey took D.L. back through Bellows Falls, Vermont, where he felt a pang of guilt that he had not told his family he was heading west. The guilt passed. His family might have met him at the station for a brief visit, or more likely, tried to persuade him to come home.
The train chugged onward through the night to Rutland, Vermont, where it arrived around two o’clock in the morning. All those headed for points west were instructed to disembark and wait for a connecting train. D.L. spent the time sitting on the station platform in Rutland. The next train took him past Lake Champlain and on to Ogdensburg, New York, where he boarded a lake steamer for a trip across Lake Ontario to Canada. From there it was on to another train to Windsor, Ontario, and then a ferryboat across the river to Detroit.
In Detroit D.L. had hoped to see his oldest brother Isaiah, who was now living and working there. However, the ferryboat was late getting across the river, and D.L. did not have enough time before catching the next train for the final leg of his journey. He would just have to visit Isaiah some other time. On the evening of Thursday, September 18, 1856, three days after setting out from Boston, D.L. arrived in Chicago.
D.L. was exhausted, but the raw energy of this bustling western city quickly revived him. He took in all the new sights. One of the first things he noticed was that the surface of many streets looked new and seemed to be higher than the surrounding buildings. Workmen were toiling with large jacks to raise the buildings to street level. This was quite odd, and soon D.L. learned what was going on. Because of its location beside the lake, Chicago was low-lying and had little natural drainage. When it rained, huge puddles of water would lie in the streets for days. These puddles soon turned into festering pools that led to diseases like dysentery, typhoid fever, and cholera. After an outbreak of cholera killed 6 percent of the city’s population in 1854, something had to be done about the situation. The solution was to install a sewer system under the streets. But for the sewer pipes to do their job and drain the surface water, the streets had to be raised. That part of the project had been completed, and now many of the buildings in central Chicago were being raised to the new street level. D.L. was impressed with the ingenuity of the engineers who had found a solution. It seemed to him that in a city like Chicago, anything was possible.
D.L. did not have much money in his pocket, but he had enough to pay for a room in a boarding house. Once settled, he set out looking for employment. He found a job at the Wiswall Shoe Store on Lake Street. As an added bonus, Mr. Wiswall, the owner, suggested that D.L. sleep in one of the rooms above the store with several other clerks. D.L. was very pleased. He had a permanent roof over his head and a job, and on Sunday he found a church to attend. Within a week of arriving, D.L. was sure that his decision to move to Chicago had been a good one. Looking back, Boston felt as stuffy as a shuttered parlor in summertime. Chicago, positioned between Lake Michigan and the Great Plains, was a refreshing wind. D.L. thought the people in Chicago welcomed change, and he was confident that they would make room for a man on his way up, a man like himself with an ambition to make $100,000 and live in a big house on the lake.
With total confidence that he was in the right place, D.L. wrote to his mother to tell her where he was and how much he liked the place. He also told her that he had made a number of friends at church and that he had realized God was the same in Chicago as He was in Boston.
D.L. transferred his Mount Vernon Church membership to the Plymouth Congregational Church, where he attended prayer meetings and began saying a few words publicly in the meetings. Since few college-educated men were in the church, D.L. felt much more at home. He was appalled, though, by the local lack of respect for Sunday and shocked to see stores open on the Sabbath. In response, D.L. rented five pews at the front of the church and invited young men who did not normally attend to come with him.
D.L.’s plan had mixed results. Sometimes he squirmed as the pastor’s message became too involved for his non-Christian guests to follow. Still, D.L. continued bringing new friends, but he was restless. He needed some kind of focus, some way to use his boundless energy. He found another church in town—the First Methodist Church—that met later on Sundays. D.L. was not concerned that this church held some different beliefs from his Congregational church. As long as the church preached the gospel, he felt at home.
Within weeks of attending the First Methodist Church, D.L. joined the mission band, a group of young Methodist men who visited hotels and saloons on Sunday mornings, distributing tracts and inviting people to services at the church. It was through this ministry that D.L. became acquainted with the poorest, most destitute area in Chicago. “The Sands,” as it was called, was located on the north side of the Chicago River where Irish and German immigrants lived. Conditions in The Sands were atrocious. Even the police were reluctant to enter the slums. They simply turned a blind eye to the murder and mayhem that went on there.
D.L.’s heart went out to the children he saw living in The Sands. Many of them had barely enough clothing to cover their thin bodies. D.L. heard stories of men spending their meager wages on whiskey, leaving their children to beg for food, and of women dying in childbirth and being buried—without ever having seen a doctor. The more he thought about conditions in The Sands, the more D.L. felt compelled to do something to help.
D.L. soon learned of a Sunday school on North Wells Street, close to The Sands. After work one night he set out to find the superintendent of the Sunday school. He was welcomed into a small, dark room—the headquarters of the mission that ran the Sunday school. He explained that he had come to offer himself as a Sunday school teacher.
Then the unexpected happened. The Sunday school superintendent laughed out loud. “You are welcome to join the other eighteen teachers on the roster, but the truth is that we have more teachers than students,” he told D.L.
D.L. frowned. “How can that be? I bet there are a hundred children within shouting distance of this building, and each of them has a soul. I’m sure that they would enjoy singing and listening to stories.”
“That could well be true,” the superintendent responded, “but we can’t get the children to come through the doors. Some of them are held back by their drunk or wayward parents, but a lot of them are just too wild to sit and listen to anyone.”
“I expect I can do something about that!” D.L. exclaimed. “I might not be a great Bible scholar, but I believe I can get children into the building. I will see you next week.”
Over the next few days, D.L. prayed hard. He desperately wanted to bring children to the mission Sunday school, but he had to find a successful way to do it. By Sunday morning he had an idea—rock candy. All children liked candy, and D.L. decided to use it to get the children’s attention. That morning a determined Dwight L. Moody walked into The Sands. Drunk men and women were lying about in the street. D.L. wondered how many of them had children at home waiting for breakfast.
D.L. soon attracted a crowd of unkempt children. He sat on the edge of a horse trough and shared candy with them. Then he told them about Sunday school and how they would hear amazing stories and learn things that would change their lives forever. He persuaded eighteen of the children to follow him to the North Wells Street mission Sunday school. The superintendent was shocked when D.L. walked in looking like the Pied Piper, the children trailing behind.
“Here, you take this lot and put them in classes, and I’ll go back and get more,” D.L. said.
Indeed, D.L. had found his calling. He knew that he was not a good speaker or a Bible scholar, but he could recruit children off the street to come to Sunday school. Soon over one hundred new students were attending the mission Sunday school, and each Sunday D.L. would go out to find more.
With the growing number of students at the Sunday school, more teachers volunteered to help. D.L. found himself drawn to one of them, Emma Revell. Although Emma was only fourteen years old, she had a poise and quiet faith about her that D.L. admired. Perhaps, he decided, it was because they were about as different from each other as any two people could be. D.L. wanted to get to know Emma’s family. He soon learned that her father was Fleming H. Revell, a shipbuilder in Chicago who had immigrated to the United States from England with his family in 1849. Emma was six years old at the time. Soon D.L. was a regular visitor at the Revells’ home.
