Dwight L. Moody: A Family Picture
I
MY father used to tell the following story with great delight. He and I were driving about the streets of Northfield when I was at a very tender age; he was amusing himself by asking me who lived in the various houses, and when I informed him, according to my limited knowledge, he pressed me for information as to their occupations. When our own familiar house appeared, he asked who lived there, and I am afraid I said not too respectfully, ‘D. L. Moody,’ and on being asked his occupation I replied, ‘He is sort of a preacher’ — a reply which pleased my father very much: He declared it described him very aptly.
It is at Northfield I remember him first most distinctly. He was an ideal companion for a very small boy. The interest he took in the affairs of his son would have flattered the son had he been old enough to appreciate it. The fact that ten years operated me from my brother (and my sister was older than my brother) left me in the position almost of belonging to a second family. I see now, far more clearly than I saw then, that my father tried to make up to me for the lack of children at home of my age. He had a most engaging way of treating a child; he never, to my recollection, talked down to me, but flattered me with the constant assumption that my opinion was sought and that he was interested in what I thought or had to say.
It was part of my father’s plan to accustom us to horses. My sister had hers and my brother his, and I my pony. Many people have commented on my father’s love for horses and his marked preference for those with speed. Before I was born, General Julius J. Estey, one of his closest friends, either purchased for him or presented him with a gray mare, ‘Nellie Gray,’ which many remember well. She lived to a good old age and served my father well and presented him with three colts, one, like herself, a mare of speed and dependability, the two others the most awkward and unmanageable pieces of horseflesh I ever knew.
On one occasion I recall, including the colts, there were fourteen horses tied in the old barn — all driving horses, for we did no regular farming. Father was, despite his fondness for horses, no acute judge of them and could easily be imposed upon. He once purchased three at the same time. We watched them brought in the drive, two men hanging at each horse’s head, and the horses on their hind legs. We were warned about driving them. But we did not need the warning, for it soon transpired that they had all been doped in some way and were far from being either spirited or energetic. Until Father died, he always kept two pairs, one usually steady and the other with more life and action. He preferred to drive the latter pair and he preferred to do the driving. No sitting in a carriage for him while someone else held the reins! He had only one rule about horses. They, like everyone else should have one day of rest. It did not need to be Sunday, but there must be one day of absolute rest. He used a horse as he used himself, driving with speed.
A drive with him, particularly in a buggy, was an experience. The buggy seat was narrow. He was stout and he used to declare that I took up ‘more than half my share.’ He disregarded roads and drove cross-lots or over fields in the most carefree way, and he would drive without a qualm on side hills on which you expected momentarily to see him spilled. And you would be laughed at as foolishly timid if you protested. His favorite hour for driving was early in the morning in the summer, and when the rest of us arrived at breakfast we usually knew he had been up, sometimes working in his study but more often just driving about, for two or three hours.
His fondness for animals was by no means confined to horses. John Wanamaker once gave him a pair of English mastiffs. When things were busiest, the female would have a litter of pups, and they were large litters. Then would begin the work of distributing the puppies. Years afterwards evidence of mastiff blood could still be seen in mongrels on the neighboring farms. When I was a small boy my father kept deer in a high, enclosed paddock behind the house. These disappeared when a buck attacked me and threw me down. Once he had pheasants, and a special house was built for them; and I have dim recollections of peacocks. My memory of the swans is not so dim. He thought they would lend distinction to a near-by pond and he ordered a pair. They were forever escaping to the river, thus necessitating a concentrated drive by everyone he could commandeer to recapture them. In the winter he built a long hut for them over a brook, a mile from the house. In order that they might swim in water free from ice, for one long winter my brot her and I stoked a fire in that hut. It really was n’t practical. To all our remonstrances he would chuckle, thinking that we were getting too soft.
Nor should our donkeys be forgotten. When he returned from Palestine, where donkeys were common, Father conceived the idea that they would be equally picturesque in Northfield, which they certainly were. He bought one which soon foaled, and we had two. He thought they might be useful dragging the lawn mower, but this was not a happy idea and the donkey protested with braying which could be heard half a mile. For some unearthly reason my father seemed to enjoy this, or perhaps he enjoyed the effect it had on other people.
Swans and peacocks, pheasants and donkeys, were nothing, however, to his hens. Now a hen always seemed to me one of the least responsive of all created things. But Father loved them, not individually but in the mass, and he had hundreds of them, fortunately at least a mile from the house. Two or more men had to give their entire time to the henhouses. It may have been the very unresponsiveness of the chickens that appealed to him after a winter of crowded meetings. He loved to get into an old pair of rubber boots, an utterly disreputable hat, and a brown velveteen jacket and go to feed more corn to his overfed hens. His family called this outfit the ‘bumblebee suit,’ and it was a welcome escape from the more formal dark suits he wore the rest of the time. It is the fastidious man who tastes to the full the pleasure of letting go. And this my father did.
He liked to lure members of the family into riding with him to the henyard. We displayed a regrettable reluctance. After one or two trips we discovered that our function was to hold the horse while he held endless, wordless communication with his hens. Occasionally he would sell some hens or some eggs, and when that happened he could rarely avoid the temptation to boast of how much he had made. Then the secret was to look at my mother, who paid all the bills. Her face would be a study. She had early abandoned the attempt to argue with him or point out that she was paying out money for labor and grain which must have brought the price of those eggs up to siege value. The most practical of men, he reveled in being as utterly impractical as he wanted to be at play. It was an escape, a release, and he made the most of it.
II
The henyards were surrounded by vegetable gardens. Now a good-sized family can be comfortably provided for from a garden plot well tended and not more than one hundred feet square. I hope the size of our family will not be judged by the fact that we usually had four acres at least under cultivation. Father liked to see things grow. We could have gone into market gardening had we chosen. An asparagus patch was maintained which could have fed a hundred, and the same thing was true of the strawberry bed. And as he could not bear to see things wasted, these strawberries would be picked and the asparagus cut and given away. To this end he usually drove about in gardening time in the most uncomfortable of express wagons and dispensed his crop at back doors over a radius of three or four miles. As most of this work was done by hired labor and the garden truck was given away, there was nothing in it but fun. And not much of that for me. I said most of the work was done by hired labor. Not all. Mindful of his own barefooted youth, Father would be visited now and again by a theory that I ought to get closer to the soil, so he would ordain that I put in an hour or two hours a day weeding, and add to this order — which was an order — his powers of persuasion that I should do it barefooted. This I would not do. Usually, as the summer wore on, he would forget about this established discipline and it would be overlooked till the following spring. But not always. He overheard me once say, as I marched off for the garden, that he had one of his work fits on but he would recover. He chuckled away, and was a long time forgetting the discipline that year.
If he liked to raise hens and vegetables on a large scale, it was because he liked to do everything on a large scale. And it was quite impossible to foretell at what point this predilection would break out. On one occasion he became aware — or thought he did — that the china in the house was inadequate. He placed so large an order that barrels of it arrived and we have some of it still. In the same manner his attention was once caught by some Oriental rugs. They were good rugs and he apparently could n’t decide which he liked best, so he bought them all — and we could have gone into the retail rug business. On another occasion, out West, he saw some paintings, and fully a dozen must have been shipped on. Our home and my brother’s and sister’s houses were equipped with oil paintings. Three still hang on the walls of my home; one of Mount Hood, one of Multnomah Falls, and another of Point Loma. Apparently he could n’t be bothered selecting, and he cut the Gordian knot by taking the lot. I shall be stretching the credulity of my readers, I know, but it is a fact that once he bought a gross of suspenders. He found he was short of suspenders, and he could not bear to be out of anything or to bother to replenish his wardrobe at frequent intervals. This was n’t going to happen again, and it did n’t. One hundred and forty-four pairs of suspenders, large size, all white, would last a considerable number of men a considerable time. Of course, long before he could wear a tenth of them the rubber in the rest had rotted. But he never ran out of suspenders again.
His neckties, the old-fashioned flat Ascot which he had made to order, he also bought by the gross — which was more understandable, for he would wear one only a few times. He bought his shoes with the same largess. By reason of his build he could not buy shoes readymade, his foot being both short and wide, and he would order many pairs. His early days in the wholesale shoe business had given him a knowledge of leather, and he always enjoyed buying them. As he grew stout he adopted elastic-sided shoes. Once in a misguided moment, hating the looks of them, I persuaded him to buy laced shoes. This was a very, very serious mistake, for I had to lace them and he would chuckle at my lack of appreciation of the privilege.
The way in which he came into possession of our house at Northfield, which remained his home until he died, is interesting. His mother had a neighbor with whom there was some difficulty over a line fence. This was in 1875, at the time my father was resting from his campaigns in Great Britain, living with my mother, brother, and sister at his birthplace. Disputes of this sort always distressed him, and his solution was short and direct. He made an impulsive offer for the neighbor’s farm. It was immediately accepted and the line-fence dispute was settled.
The house was a typical New England farmhouse of that period, and four main rooms remain unchanged to this day. The year that Alaska was purchased by the government, a wing was added to the north in the upper part of which Father had his own study, bedroom, and bath. This addition was nicknamed Alaska, in honor of the event of that year — and highly appropriately so, for, having no cellar under it, it was extremely cold, and indeed uninhabitable except in summer.
The house was connected with the barns in the accepted fashion of New England; the place was surrounded by an apple orchard, never scientifically tended, and meadows, and behind it, to the east, low, rolling hills. On one of them he is buried.
The view from this home was always a favorite with him. The house faces the west, and from the small front porch there is a splendid panorama of the Connecticut River, with the lower hills of New Hampshire and Vermont in the background. He particularly delighted in this view at sunset, as the sun sank behind the rolling wooded slopes across the river, and every evening when he could he watched the fading day as long as possible. The Northfield Seminary bordered on our property, and its presence increased his pleasure. When he was away during the winter, his letters were pathetic in their expressions of genuine homesickness, and with the return of spring he would count the weeks and days until he could get back, lay off his dark clothes, and give full rein to his absorbing passion for watching things grow.
III
It was during vacation that I saw most of my father. But they were hardly vacations in the usual sense. Father rose early and retreated to his upstairs study, where he worked preparing new sermons, writing outlines, and reading in preparation of his notes. I do not believe he ever wrote out a sermon, and it is certain he never used a written one. He was not a reader. I do not believe he ever wrote out a paragraph of what he was going to say. His mind worked much too fast for his hand; he contented himself with notes, great sprawling words which connoted something to him but to no one else.
There hangs on my study wall a framed outline of a sermon by Henry Drummond on ‘The Ideal Life.’ Drummond wrote a highly legible and beautiful hand, and this sermon is a model of arrangement. I remember distinctly my father showing it to me once when we were out driving. He had seen it in Drummond’s hands after an address, and it was such a marvelous contrast to his own scrawls that he had begged for it. He admired it greatly as a work of art, and then, to my surprise, gave it to me. His own notes were strikingly different, and in such large letters did he write that they would cover all four sides of folded writing paper, and there would be six or eight or more of these, folded into elastic bands, placed in his Bible. Some of his morning went into the preparation of these notes.
But not the entire morning, for, as I have said, he would be out driving, feeding his chickens, or distributing vegetables before the family were down. In the vacation he liked to have people about him, and the house would be full (too full, I often thought, as I surrendered successively one room after another to guests who were not always too fascinating to my boyish fancy). Some were welcome, like Drummond, or George Adam Smith, others less so. There were also a few nieces and nephews for good measure. Dinner was in the middle of the day. It was a waste of good time to be long at supper: supper interfered with watching the sunset over his favorite hills. Some of my clearest memories are connected with the gradual gathering about noontime in the library in anticipation of the noonday dinner. The mail would have recently come in and it was invariably large. He would sit in a huge chair he had had made, at the very desk at which I now write, the chair pushed back from the desk, his glasses on the end of his nose, opening and glancing at letter after letter. If the family and guests were gathered about, he would delight in thrusting the letter back in the envelope, flipping it at one or another with a brusque ‘Answer that.‘ If the unfortunate recipient of the letter presumed to ask what he or she was to say in answer, he would playfully snort, ‘I gave it to you to answer! I don’t intend to hire a dog and do the barking.’
Father spent a great deal of time, not only in vacation, but when away on preaching missions, signing by hand hundreds and thousands of begging letters for the Schools. For as long as he lived he carried this burden of solicitation. He sought funds in large gifts where possible, but he spent more time in soliciting small gifts from large numbers of people. An endowment for the Schools might have been raised, but he was not so anxious for this as to secure a wide host of friends who would contribute so that the total of their gifts would equal the income from the endowment of a large amount.
I never remember seeing my father dictate a letter. My brother-in-law-to-be was asked to this country as his secretary, but, strictly speaking, he never had what we to-day would call a secretary. Later my brother answered many letters for him. But Father himself wrote in answer to many; others he turned over to my mother, who in addition to attending largely to his mail, particularly when he was away, looked after all business matters. Here again he could not be bothered. The house was hers and everything he had. I never saw his name at the bottom of a check and he had no bank account. If he went out of town he asked her for the money to go. It was she who paid the bills and the taxes and sent money to us at college and looked after the needy. He put everything into her hands without stopping to see or caring how much it was; and it was she who, with amused irony, paid the bills for his innocent but expensive hobbies, his swans and hens and garden.
My mother’s care of the household, her oversight of everything connected with my father, was the most perfect thing I have ever known. Her retiring and reserved nature and her marked preference for staying quietly in the background concealed the value of her service. That she, so markedly his contrast, should have thrown in her lot with him seemed to him, I believe to the end of his days, little short of miraculous. Mother was better-educated than he, and with more early advantages than he had had; thus he was accustomed to look upon her as being everything which in his humility he thought he was not. Their life together was idyllic, and to the end of the chapter he was a gallant, chivalrous lover. If in his innate love of teasing he sometimes liked to rally her, it was always gentle and affectionate. So perfect were the sympathy and understanding, and so completely was she wrapped up in him, that the mainspring of her life broke when he died, and while for her children’s sake she did the best she could, so absolute had been her absorption in him that life was practically over. All who knew her felt this; never in too robust health, she had been watched over by her husband and idolized, and with this loving care removed the world was a chill and empty place for her. Those closest to Father and Mother know the very large part she played as a balance wheel and what a great factor she was in his life and work.
IV
Once, when we were staying at the Murray Hill Hotel, I pointed out Richard Croker. He immediately went up and introduced himself and had a tenor fifteen-minute talk. When he rejoined me I asked what in the world he had to talk to Richard Croker about. This was in the days of Croker’s power. He replied he had asked Croker to use his influence against a bill in the New York Legislature providing for the opening of theatres on Sunday. Croker was noncommittal. I have often wondered since whether it was really Father’s interest in the defeat of this bill (which was certainly sincere) or his curiosity to meet the great Tammany chieftain that prompted him; for he had, it may be said, a veiled admiration for men who came to the top in almost any line of activity. He never attended a prize fight, but when the papers recorded the defeat of John L. Sullivan by Corbett he repeatedly referred to the matter, expressing his sympathy for one, long the champion, who had been overthrown. I think he felt genuinely sorry for the famous old John L.
He was once staying in Portland, Maine, when William Jennings Bryan on his first campaign came to that city, and, sitting at the open window of his hotel room, my father heard him. While he revolted strongly from all Bryan’s policies and platform, he was immensely impressed by the Boy Orator’s eloquence and persuasiveness and obvious sincerity, and remarked that it was fortunate he did not hear him more often. He redoubled his own personal efforts then in behalf of McKinley without actually taking the stump, and it was at this time he lectured one of his associates who remarked that, his citizenship being in Heaven, he was not going to vote. No matter where Father was, he always returned home to vote; and the exercise of the franchise he considered a Christian duty, as well as to be informed on all political matters. He was a Republican all his days, to the deep disgust of some of his prohibitionist friends who felt he might have been a tower of strength to their party. But, while a rigid teetotaler himself, he felt the control of liquor was a state or local matter and not a Federal one; and I have often heard him defend his position by saying that no law was stronger than the local sentiment. Local option was, in his view, the only way to handle the liquor question. He had among his friends anti-tobacconists, teetotalers, and one with whom secret societies had become an obsession. He tolerated these people, feeling that while they meant well they were getting the cart before the horse and letting their phobias run away with them.
Some can recall how on one occasion a movement was launched at Northfield to supplement the work of the Mission Boards. He was not on hand to quash it before it got started. But when it came to his attention his action was direct. He sent for all the hotheads and enthusiasts who had started the move. They came in the evening and were fed ice cream. He was unusually silent. After the refreshments he seized a lamp (we had no electricity) and led the now bewildered group into another room. It was a long time before they came out, chastened and subdued. On occasions like this he could be very grim. The Kingdom of God was sacred to him and was not advanced by nonsense, however sanctified, or solemn hocus-pocus. He often affirmed that dignity was never mentioned as one of the fruits of the spirit. In his judgment a man who had to stand on his dignity must be a very short man indeed to need so cumbersome a soap box. With all extremes, sensationalism or pomposity, he had scant sympathy.
If a thing needed to be done, it was a distinction to be able to do it. He never waited to see if anyone else would. Sitting, on one of those rare Sundays when he was home, at the end of his pew in church, he noticed that the deacons were passing the elements in a very haphazard way and in danger of overlooking some communicants. In an instant he had gone to the Communion table, taken the bread and the wine, passed them to some at the side of the church, and returned to his seat. It never occurred to him that he happened to have on rubber boots, as he did. Something needed to be done. He did it. A favorite adage of his was not to wait for something to turn up: go and turn something up. And he loved to say that any fool could eat soup with a spoon: it required brains to do it with a one-tined fork.
In matters of this kind he had what has been called ‘the gamy flavor of a bookless man.’ The pithy sayings of the countryside he had heard as a boy he used till his dying day with all the elisions— ‘Quick’n chain lightnin‘,’‘drier ‘n Gideon’s fleece.’ Sir Alexander Simpson declared he always pronounced ‘Jerusalem’ in two syllables. He just could n’t be bothered about unimportant details — just as when he had written enough letters of a word to signify its import he let the rest go. I never heard him say ‘Daniel’ or ‘Samuel’ and I doubt if he ever did. It was ‘Dan’l’ and ‘Sam’l.’ ‘Drier’n Gideon’s fleece’ was a very favorite figure, particularly applied to sententious sermons or dull discourses. The famous dodge by which he cut off a man who was killing a meeting by a long prayer and caught the attention of Doctor Grenfell was quite typical of him. Grenfell has always loved to tell my students of this.
We loved his quick comments on dull or foolish addresses. Once he was inveigled into inviting a man to speak at Northfield who was pretty egotistical. To tease him afterwards we inquired if he was going to have the address printed. ‘Are n’t enough capital I’s in the printing press,’ he grunted. On several occasions he asked me what I had thought of a rather dull address. I sparred for time. I did not want to admit I did n’t understand it and made some commonplace remark. ‘Shamed of you,’ he said. ‘Ought to had more sense. He didn’t say anything.’ On another occasion, when I remarked I had not known what a well-known speaker was talking about, ‘Neither did he,’ Father shot out.
One of his latest friends was Doctor Henry Weston of Crozer Seminary. He had never encountered my father, and someone persuaded him to come to Northfield. He laid aside certain prejudices and came. Father invited him to speak, but he refused, on the ground that he was a Greek scholar and not a preacher. They compromised on an afternoon service. It was my father’s custom after presiding to take a chair down off the platform and sit where he could hear better as well as see the speaker. Doctor Weston had barely got started when my father remarked, ‘ There goes one of my sermons.’ Weston turned on the interruption to ask what my father meant, and was told that a sermon on that text had been shown by Doctor Weston’s remarks to be falsely based. Doctor Weston was delighted, for, said he, ‘ The students at Crozer have justified much faulty exegesis on the ground that D. L. Moody preached on this or that text with great effect.’ Now he could answer them. The warmest sort of friendship grew out of the encounter, and Northfield had no better supporter than Doctor Weston till he died. It. was perfectly typical of Father that when he knew a passage of Scripture did not mean what he had supposed it did he could not be so dishonest as to use it as he once had.
V
I was forced to spend a good part of the summer of 1892 in a nursing home in London. Almost daily my father came to see me. His own robust health made it difficult for him to understand sickness, but he was so sympathetic and so eager to show sympathy that even his heavy and naturally warm hand placed on your forehead, where it felt like a wet dictionary, was endurable. I saw recently the simile of a hippopotamus attempting to pick up a pea. His presence in a sickroom was of this order, but his evident distress and desire to help discounted his unfitness for the duties of a nurse. Once when one of his children was ill he perched on the edge of the bed and broke it down. In the language of New England, he was not handy about a sickroom. But let him know that the sickness was no ordinary thing — that there was no chance of recovery — and no one could have been more thoughtful or tender or understanding. When in his last year of life death twice invaded his home and robbed him of loved grandchildren, his own grief was great, but, he entered completely into the sorrows of the parents.
My father had at least one characteristic of genius. He was unpredictable. Only a boy who has longed for a bicycle in that motorless age can understand just how much I was obsessed by the desire to have one. While this ambition was at its height I ran across a paper edition of his sermons. One was on prayer. In it he said that if a child of his wanted something he would prefer to be asked for it once and not nagged. This extract I cut out, prefaced it by the statement that I wanted a bicycle, then mentioned the date of my birthday some weeks hence, and remarked that such was my faith that I was thanking him in advance for it. There was no acknowledgment. But a little later he invited me to spend Easter vacation with him in Richmond, where he was preaching. I went. Neither of us alluded to the bicycle. Wild horses would not have dragged a reference from me. My birthday fell in this period, but no reference was made to it. But on my return I found the bicycle awaiting me at home. I am under the impression that had I been so indiscreet as to allude to it I might have defeated my own ends.
Four years later, on my nineteenth birthday, I received a telegram from him. ‘Thank God for the past nineteen years. The — house is your birthday present.’ And the house he presented me was a dwelling in Northfield which he and my mother owned, and which remained in my possession until long after I left Northfield. On another occasion, when I was younger, he presented me with a driving horse, a granddaughter of his own favorite Nellie Gray. This was to replace the pony which I had by this time outgrown.
His satisfaction in doing things of this sort was always great. His gifts, whatever they were, afforded him more satisfaction than they did the recipient, whatever they meant to the recipient. He seems to me in retrospect the most generous man I ever knew, taking more delight in giving than anyone else I ever met.
When his grandchildren arrived, his delight knew no bounds. The most grotesque things he proudly bore off to them — an unusually large cabbage on one occasion to an unweaned infant. When they were older and able to be about, he was seldom without one on his drives about town, and his prejudice against being photographed gave way completely, his picture being taken again and again in company with his grandchildren and his own mother and the children’s parents. He affirmed repeatedly what many grandparents have discovered, that grandchildren have all the endearing qualities of one’s own children minus the care and responsibilities, and it is safe to presume that had he lived he would have delighted in overriding parental authority and spoiling them. He wrote them delicious nonsense letters when away from them and renewed his youth. When his own children were young I gather, from all I have been told, that he was too often away from home, and too busy, to extract from them all the pleasure he had from his grandchildren.
VI
As I look back to the figure of my father, it is never the narrowness of his point of view which impresses me, but the liberality of it. If liberality is a matter of doctrine, he was not liberal. If liberality is a matter of the spirit, he was one of the most liberal of men. He died before the term ‘fundamentalist’ came to have its present connotation. He accepted most of the tenets of the Fundamentalists, it is true; but not in their spirit. He believed in the Virgin Birth, the Physical Resurrection, the Second Coming, the Atonement, and the Inspiration of the Scripture. They were not separatist doctrines with him. Some of the Plymouth Brethren broke with him. He was too liberal for them. Some of his followers at Northfield worried about the men he asked to speak there. They would have had credal tests; he would not. I have heard Fundamentalists preach on the text, ‘If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his,’ and do it in a separatist spirit. My father would have used that text, keeping close to its meaning by dropping the negatives. If a man had the spirit of Jesus Christ, he was one of His. And that would have been enough for my father.
From many talks with him, I am persuaded that he came to distinguish in his own mind between prejudices and principles. He preached his principles. He observed his prejudices. He lived in a day when a great deal was said about ‘ doubtful amusements.’ Then the doubtfulness applied to their being amusements. In all these things he was of course a Victorian. But my point, is this: that he became increasingly less inclined to be critical of those who did not agree with him in a great many of these lesser matters. In other words, his tolerance increased. There was a time, from all I can judge, when he would have said there were things a person could not do and be a Christian. When I knew him his attitude would rather have been that while you might, for example, smoke or play cards, dance or go to the theatre, and be a Christian, you probably would n’t be the most efficient sort. In other words, just as Saint Paul refused to identify legality and expediency, saying some things were lawful but were not expedient, so my father distinguished more and more. But for himself the most exacting standards were those by which he proposed to govern himself.
It is very unfortunate that for nearly forty years the attempt has been made to attach tags or labels to him. In the present sense of the word, he most certainly was not a liberal. And equally certainly he was not a Fundamentalist. Unquestionably he believed each and every one of the main tenets of the Fundamentalists, but in no separatist spirit, and such men as Lyman Abbott and Washington Gladden were not only highly esteemed but warm personal friends. If he did not invite them to Northfield, for example, it was not for any lack of sympathy, but rather because every time he did invite a liberal many of those who rallied about him would make it unpleasant for his guest — and often for him. He loved peace and hated dissension, and in his mind there was no issue at stake. If he was unafraid, and I think he was, just as certainly he would not go out of his way for useless bickerings with his painfully orthodox friends.
His founding of the schools at Northfield and the diverting of even more energy to these, and his oft-repeated statement that he would rather awaken to active service one dormant Christian than secure the conversion of the ‘unsaved,’ his conviction for me that I should not think of going into evangelistic work but into teaching, are indications to me that he saw the changing day and the need for changing emphasis to meet this changing day.
The man who is perhaps the bestinformed student of his life, who has made a painstaking study of the smallest details, and who has done much patient research in dust-covered reference books, is never tired of saying that he was ‘a mountain of rectitude.’
It is in illustration of this that I tell the following. When I was a small boy, perhaps seven or eight, he once found me sitting up beyond my usual bedtime and very properly told me to go to bed. But I was visiting with a little friend who had come in, and supposed that he meant I was to go to bed as soon as my friend had gone, so I did not obey immediately. A few minutes later he discovered this and then he was sufficiently explicit. I retreated in tears, not stopping to explain I had not meant to disobey; for it was unusual to have him speak as abruptly or emphatically as he had, and I felt he was angry. I had barely time to get into bed, however, before I became conscious of his huge figure kneeling beside my bed. Tears were streaming down his face, and in the most unabashed manner he was suing for my forgiveness for having spoken harshly to me. He never, he said, intended to speak crossly to any child of his.
This is by no means the earliest of my recollections, but it is the most vivid — the room in twilight, his great shoulders and head bending over me, and the tones of his voice, and his obvious remorse and regret and desire that I should say it was all right. This is the picture of him I have carried all my life, and it has influenced me more than any event in the years since. I have seen him before large audiences commanding attention and receiving the admiration of thousands, but to me this was the real man, greater far than the evangelist. And in that boyhood room that evening he showed me a father’s love and care which have made real to me the love of God, the Father. I think I owe to this the beginnings of my belief in God.