MOODY: A Biographical Portrait

Written by the author of The Cambridge Seven, Earth's Remotest End, etc., this ""biographical portrait of the pacesetter in Modern Evangelism"" presents a highly readable account of the career of Dwight Lyman Moody, the great American 19th-century revivalist. Moody was born in Northfield, Mass., of poor parents in 1837. He was a large, genial man with an enormous appetite, little formal education, and a fondness for dubious practical jokes. Converted from Unitarianism at the age of 18, he met his co-worker in religion, Ira David Sankey, in 1870, and thereafter for some years the two labored together for the Lord. Excellent business men, talented fund-raisers who refused to profit personally from the fortune their efforts brought them, they conducted enormously successful revival meetings on both sides of the Atlantic. Moody, an inspired salesman of religion, saved souls in droves: Sankey, with a voice that could stir multitudes, sang the Gospel hymns for which the two are still famous. Devoted to his family and to his God, to whom he prayed constantly in public and in private, Moody established schools in Northfield and the Bible Institute in Chicago; followed by poor men and by duchesses, he died, world-famous, in Northfield in 1899. Written with gusto and admiration, this book will appeal to church members and to students, God-fearing and otherwise, of 19th-century religious movements; it should find a place in public and church libraries and in the more comprehensive lending libraries. The non-converted may grow weary of an excess of prayer.