Dwight L. Moody Biography, Books, and Sermons

Dwight Lyman Moody never finished grade school, never learned to spell with confidence, and was never ordained. Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century this stocky, fast-talking former shoe salesman preached the gospel, by sober estimate, to as many as a hundred million people — without radio, television, or a single microphone — and founded schools, conferences, and a publishing work whose fruit continues to this day. His secret was no mystery to those who knew him. He believed God meant exactly what He said, and he acted on it with all the energy of his big, warm, restless heart.

The Boy from Northfield

Moody was born on 5 February 1837 on a small farm at Northfield, Massachusetts, the sixth of nine children. When he was four his father died suddenly, leaving the family in debt; creditors took even the kindling from the woodshed. His mother, Betsey, refused to break up the family, and the children grew up poor, hard-working, and only lightly schooled. Dwight had perhaps five years of formal education, and his letters bore the scars of it all his life. At seventeen he walked away from the farm to make his fortune, and talked his way into his uncle Samuel’s shoe store in Boston — on the condition, his uncle insisted, that he attend church and Sunday school every week.

A Shoe Store in Boston

The condition proved to be the hinge of his life. His Sunday school teacher at Mount Vernon Congregational Church, a quiet man named Edward Kimball, resolved to speak to each of his boys personally about Christ. On 21 April 1855 Kimball walked into the shoe store, found young Moody in the back wrapping shoes, put a hand on his shoulder, and told him simply of the love of Christ for him. There, among the shelves, Moody gave his heart to the Saviour. Kimball later admitted he had seldom seen anyone whose mind was spiritually darker than his new convert’s — the church examiners, in fact, turned Moody away at his first application for membership because he knew so little doctrine. Heaven measured him differently.

“Crazy Moody”

In 1856 he moved to Chicago, sold shoes with the same drive he did everything, and began renting pews in church — then filling them with young men he had rounded up off the streets. In 1858 he started a Sunday school in a slum district so rough it was called “Little Hell,” holding classes in an old market hall and recruiting scholars with candy, pony rides, and sheer persistence. Within a few years fifteen hundred children were coming, and in 1860 the president-elect himself, Abraham Lincoln, visited the school. That same year Moody made the decision his friends thought mad: he gave up a flourishing business career — and with it his ambition to be worth a hundred thousand dollars — to give God all his time. During the Civil War he ministered tirelessly to soldiers at the front and in the camps; in 1862 he married Emma Revell, whose steady wisdom balanced his impetuosity for the rest of his days; and in 1864 his mission school grew into a church of its own.

Fire and Power

Two events in 1871 broke Moody’s ministry open. On the night of 8 October, preaching to his largest Chicago audience yet, he closed by asking the crowd to go home and consider what they would do with Jesus — and to come back next week with their answer. That night the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the hall, his church, his home, and much of the city; some of his hearers were never seen again. He never forgot it: to the end of his life he refused to let an audience leave without pressing them to decide for Christ that very night.

Weeks after the fire, walking down a street in New York where he had gone to raise relief funds, the answer came. God’s presence broke upon him so overwhelmingly that he hurried to a friend’s house and asked to be alone; he rarely spoke of that hour afterwards, except to say that he had to ask God to stay His hand. The sermons, he said, were the same sermons — yet now hundreds were converted where dozens had been before.

Two Nobodies Across the Sea

Moody had already learned, from the young English preacher Harry Moorhouse — who once preached to his Chicago congregation seven nights running on John 3:16 — to preach a God who loves sinners rather than one who merely thunders at them. And he carried in his heart a remark made in his hearing by the evangelist Henry Varley:

The world has yet to see what God will do with, and for, and through, and in, and by the man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him.

— Henry Varley, words Moody resolved to answer: “By the grace of God, I will be that man.”

In June 1873 Moody sailed for England with a young singer named Ira Sankey, two children in tow and scarcely any invitations worth the name. What followed astonished everyone but God. From York and Newcastle the meetings spread to Edinburgh, where the city’s famously careful divines were won over; then Glasgow, Belfast, and Dublin; then four months in London in 1875, where attendance was counted in the millions. Britain’s newspapers could not explain how an unlettered American, preaching plain anecdotes in a rapid Yankee voice while his companion sang hymns from a little organ, was filling the largest halls in the kingdom. Moody could. “The world has yet to see…” He came home in 1875 the best-known evangelist alive, and gave the next quarter-century to campaign after campaign across America and Britain — Brooklyn, Philadelphia, the New York Hippodrome, and beyond.

Schools and Cheap Books

Moody the evangelist is remembered best, but Moody the builder may have reached further. The man with five years of schooling founded the Northfield Seminary for girls in 1879 and Mount Hermon School for boys in 1881, filling them with students too poor for other doors. His summer conferences at Northfield, begun in 1880, kindled the Student Volunteer Movement, which sent thousands of young missionaries around the world. In 1886 he founded the school that would bear his name, the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, to train “gap men” who could stand between the pulpit and the crowd. And in 1894 — convinced that good books should not be a luxury — he launched a colportage association printing solid Christian paperbacks cheap enough for a farmhand’s wages, and sent them out by the wagonload.

The Coronation

In November 1899, midway through a campaign in Kansas City, his great heart began to fail. He was brought home to Northfield, to the room where he had been born sixty-two years before within sight of the hills he loved. On the morning of 22 December 1899, drifting between sleep and waking, he was heard to say, clearly and without fear:

Earth recedes; heaven opens before me… This is my triumph; this is my coronation day! God is calling me, and I must go.

— D. L. Moody, 22 December 1899

Months earlier he had told an audience what to make of the news when it came:

Some day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now.

— D. L. Moody

He was buried on Round Top at Northfield, behind the seminary he built. The shoe clerk whom a Sunday school teacher sought out in a back room had been used to move two continents toward heaven — and his plain, warm gospel addresses still do their work wherever they are read.