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On December 23, 1899, newspapers across North America were filled with stories of a man whose death the day before marked the end of an era in American Christianity. Lay evangelist Dwight L. Moody had for a quarter of a century stirred audiences of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. Life had hardly left his huge frame before publishers were feverishly vying for biographies of the man who was eulogized as "the great evangelist of the nineteenth century" and even the "world's greatest evangelist." Fourteen biographies appeared within twelve months of his death!Within a very few years eulogy turned into controversy as various persons and institutions claimed to be the heirs to Moody's mantle. An interesting sidelight of the modernist-fundamentalist debate in the 1920s can be partially traced in the pages of the Christian Century and the Moody Bible Institute Monthly as they debated whether Moody's sympathies would have been with the modernists or the fundamentalists.

From our perspective, both the eulogies and the controversies seem to be uncritical and overdrawn, but his should not obscure the significance that Moody had for both British and American Christianity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Indeed, historians have recently begun to take another look at the man who Martin E. Marty has said "could plausibly have been called Mr. Revivalist and perhaps even Mr. Protestant" at a critical stage in American religious history. Having spent three years in detailed research in the life and sermons of D. L. Moody, I have not only been impressed with his significance for his own time but have also seen that certain themes emphasized and exemplified in his ministry need very much to be reiterated today. (Most of the following quotations from Moody may be found with documentation in a book compiled by Patricia Gundry and me, The Wit and Wisdom of D. L. Moody, Moody Press, 1974.)

Moody's life itself was an example of a principle that he himself often emphasized: God can take what seems small and insignificant to the human eye and use it greatly if it is given over completely to him. Moody declared:

It will be found that more has been done by people of one talent than by those who have many. If each one with one talent would wake up to realize this responsibility, what a work would be done to wake up and say, "Here am I, use me to do the work Thou hast for me to do" Look at the widow's two mites her all; look at Mary's precious box of ointment. Empires have come and gone since then and are no more heard of, but her name has come through the ages with the sweet savour of her loving service.

Moody's early years gave no indication of the impact he was to have later, and his natural endowments and circumstances offered no such promise. It is thought that he had no more than a fifth- or sixth-grade education, and the quality of even that is suspect. His widowed mother struggled to keep the family together, and apparently there was little religious training in the home. When young Moody left his Northfield, Massachusetts, home for Boston in 1854 and attended his first Sunday-school class, he thumbed through Genesis looking for the Gospel of John.

Moody's Sunday-school teacher shortly thereafter led him to Christ, but when the young convert presented himself to the membership committee of the Mount Vernon Congregational Church his application was deferred because of his utter ignorance of Christian teaching. His Sunday-school teacher, Edward Kimball, was on that committee and years later testified that he had seen few persons whose minds were spiritually darker than Moody's and that the committee had seldom had applicants who seemed more unlikely to fill any sphere of public or extended usefulness. And yet Moody was drawn into evangelical Christian circles in Boston and later in Chicago, eventually becoming a leader in the YMCA and in the Sunday-school movement. He began to read and to educate himself by plying Christian ministers and teachers with questions whenever he found himself in their presence.

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December (Web-only) 1999, Vol. 43