The Squire Who Sold His Horses

“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house.”

— Acts 16:31, ASV

Moody in London

In 1873 an American shoe salesman turned evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, arrived in Britain with his singing partner, Ira D. Sankey. Neither had any theological training. Moody spoke plainly, in an American accent, about the love of God and the need of every man and woman to decide for Christ. Sankey sang simple gospel songs to the accompaniment of a small organ. In two years they held meetings in Scotland, Ireland and the north of England, and in the spring and summer of 1875 they came to London, where crowds of many thousands came night after night to halls, theatres and an exhibition building in Islington. Society people came out of curiosity, and some of them stayed to pray.

Edward Studd was one of them. According to the family account, a friend persuaded him to go to one of Moody’s London meetings, and he went expecting little. He came away changed. The sources disagree about the date. Some give 1874, some 1875, others 1876 or 1877, but the account fits best with Moody’s great London campaign of 1875, when meetings were held in the West End as well as in the poorer districts. What all the accounts agree on is what happened next.

Edward Studd gave up the Turf. He kept a horse for each of his elder sons to ride as a hunter and sold the rest. He cleared the great hall at Tedworth and filled it with chairs and benches, so that preachers could hold evangelistic meetings for the neighbourhood, and he invited them to stay. Servants, tenants and neighbours were urged to come and hear the gospel. To the racing world it was a scandal and a joke. To his family it was, at first, an embarrassment.

What Moody Preached

It is worth asking what Edward Studd heard. Moody was not a learned preacher, and he had little interest in theological controversy. His sermons were built around a few great themes: the love of God for sinners, the sufficiency of the death of Christ, the need to be born again, and the urgency of deciding now. He told stories, many of them from his own experience in Chicago, and he spoke to his hearers as if each of them were the only person in the room. He did not shout or rant. Those who heard him often said that what struck them was not his eloquence but his directness and his evident love for them.

He also expected results, and he arranged for them. After the sermon, those who wished to know more were invited into an “inquiry room,” where Moody and his helpers spoke to them one by one, opened the Bible, and urged them to trust Christ there and then. The method has been criticised, then and since, for encouraging hasty decisions. But it suited a man like Edward Studd, who was used to making up his mind quickly and acting on it. It would also suit his son, whose conversion three years later followed almost exactly the same pattern: a personal conversation, a promise from Scripture, and a decision on the spot.

Moody’s preaching had a special appeal to the English upper classes, who had seldom heard the gospel put so simply. Some of them were shocked by his American manners and his grammar. Others found in him something they had never met in the polite religion of their parish churches. Edward Studd was one of the second kind, and the change in him was immediate and lasting.

The Embarrassed Sons

Kynaston, George and Charlie were at Eton when their father was converted, and they were not pleased. A father who talked about horses and cricket was one thing. A father who asked them, at home in the holidays, whether they were saved, was quite another. Their biographers record that the three young men did what they could to avoid being alone with him, and that the preachers who came to stay at Tedworth were not popular with them either. They were polite, because they had been brought up to be polite, and they went on as before.

Edward Studd did not live to see what came of his efforts. He died in July 1877, at the age of fifty-seven. Most sources give the date as 27 July 1877, though one local history puts his death in 1876. He had been a Christian, by any reckoning, for only two or three years. In that short time he had turned his house into a mission hall and given away his chief pleasure, and he had prayed for his sons. Accounts of his last years, all of them coming from the family, describe a man of transparent happiness, generous to preachers and to the poor, and almost reckless in speaking of Christ to anyone he met. The word “reckless” could be applied to his son later, and with more reason.

A Summer Visitor, 1878

The prayers were answered the following summer. In the school holidays of 1878 one of the Christian men who had been a friend of Edward Studd’s was staying at Tedworth. The accounts do not agree about his name, and this book does not guess it. During his visit he spoke privately to each of the three brothers about Christ.

The story of Charlie’s conversion comes chiefly from Charlie himself, as he told it in later testimony, and it is a very plain story. The visitor caught him alone. Asked whether he was a Christian, Charlie said he believed in Jesus Christ as much as anyone did. The visitor pressed him further: did he believe that Christ had died for him, and did he believe the promise that whoever believes in him has eternal life? If so, he had it, and he ought to thank God for it. The accounts do not say which verse the visitor used, but the best known of all such promises is in the third chapter of John’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16, ASV). Charlie saw, as he put it afterwards, that if the promise was true he could not doubt it without making God a liar. He knelt and thanked God for eternal life. He said later that joy and peace came into his soul, and that from that moment he knew what it was to be born again.

It is an evangelical conversion of a very nineteenth-century kind, built on a simple promise and a decision made in a few minutes, and it would be easy to make light of it. But it is worth noticing how much it rested on the plain word of Scripture. “He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life,” Jesus said, “and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life” (John 5:24, ASV). Charlie Studd did not have a dramatic experience. He was told what God had promised, and he believed it. Many years later, when he had become a man of extreme and sometimes alarming feelings, this simple foundation remained. Whatever else changed, he never doubted that he had passed from death into life on that day in 1878.

Three on One Day

According to the family tradition, the same visitor spoke to each of the other two brothers on the same day, and each of them, without telling the others, made the same decision. It was only some time later that they discovered it. Not every account agrees. One says that the three were impressed by the visitor’s arguments but did not decide until later; another says that Kynaston had already made a quiet decision in his own room at Eton. What is not in doubt is that by the end of 1878 all three of the eldest brothers counted themselves Christians, and that they connected it with their father’s prayers.

The verse at the head of this chapter is what Paul and Silas said to the jailer at Philippi: “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house.” It is not a promise that faith is passed down automatically from parents to children. The jailer’s household heard the word for themselves and believed for themselves (Acts 16:32-34). But it does show that God delights to work through families, and that the faith of one person can open a door for a whole household. Edward Studd did not see the door open. His sons walked through it a year after his funeral.

A Faith That Cost Nothing

For one of the three, the change showed at once. Kynaston, the eldest, became an earnest Christian at Cambridge and an organiser of evangelistic work among the students. In time he would become Sir Kynaston Studd, serve as Lord Mayor of London, and be remembered for decades of Christian work among young men. His brothers, for the time being, went on much as before.

Charlie later said so himself, without excuses. He had been converted, he said, but instead of going out to tell others of the love of Christ, he had grown cold, and the love of the world had come back. Jesus told of seed that fell among thorns: “the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful” (Mark 4:19, ASV). In Charlie’s case the thorns were not wicked. They were the pleasant things of a privileged young man’s life, and above all, cricket. For about six years, by his own account, he was what he afterwards called a backslider. He did not doubt his salvation. He simply did not let it cost him anything.

It is one of the most honest parts of his story, and it would have been easy for him to leave it out. He did not. In the years when he called thousands of others to total surrender, he told them that he had once been a Christian who wanted to keep his religion in a private corner, and that he knew from experience how comfortable that corner could be.