Jonathan Blanchard’s son Charles, though deeply dedicated to preserving his father’s views, completed Wheaton’s transition into the new evangelical, and eventually fundamentalist, outlook. The alliance with the Moody forces was clearly the crucial step. During 1883 and 1884 Charles Blanchard, who had assumed the presidency of Wheaton in 1882, preached regularly in the “Moody” (Chicago Avenue) Church in Chicago. There he met Miss Emma Dryer who enlisted the educator’s support in founding the Bible Training Institute that Moody himself soon made one of his enterprises. Most importantly. Miss Dryer helped to convince Blanchard of the truth of dispensational premillennialism,42 a doctrine central to the emergence of the later fundamentalist movement. By the end of his career, Charles was a significant figure in the fundamentalist movement. In 1919 he drafted the doctrinal statement of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association and in 1925 arch-fundamentalist William Bell Riley delivered the eulogy at his funeral.
Charles Blanchard saw an essential continuity in his work which covered the era from Finney to Riley. The best evidence for this continuity was the continued presence of opposition to their stand for what was right. In his projected autobiography he recalled a conversation he had with Finney when Blanchard was still a young lecturer for the National Christian Association. Finney remarked that Blanchard must be experiencing much opposition and recalled that there used to be much opposition at Oberlin also. “That is always true when you are doing good,” the aging evangelist affirmed. “Now we are really too popular. The world does not hate us any more…. You need not be worried when the world hates you.” Blanchard took the lesson to heart. Among his favorite texts, recalled from his anti-Masonic forays, were “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness” and “Come out from among them and be separate.”43
Yet the evils opposed had become increasingly circumscribed since the days when the Blanchards had worked for emancipation, peace, rights of Indians, and popular democracy. No longer was the goal to build a “perfect society;” at best it was to restrain evil until the Lord returned. Reviewing his own “labors for the purifying of human society,” Charles Blanchard mentioned in addition to education and anti-Masonry only his reform efforts against Sabbath-breaking, strong drink, and “narcotic poisons” (mainly tobacco).44 Apparently he perceived these causes as the essentials of the “Puritan” heritage. Speaking in 1912 at the seventy-fifth anniversary of Knox College, and doubtless having in mind its lax moral course since his father had left, he declared of the founders of such institutions: “They were Puritans. They knew that greed and pleasure loving never could construct a glorious civilization. They did not play cards, nor go to dances, nor tolerate liquor shops, nor attend theatres….45 The abolition of selected sins of the flesh was the principal moral concern remaining for those whose hopes for a Christian America had been crushed by the changes in the modem world.
Much had changed since the days of the alliance of Jonathan Blanchard with the Beechers. One side of American evangelicalism was becoming a movement of the disinherited. In 1915 Charles Blanchard wrote that the true disciples of Christ usually would be found “in smaller, poorer churches.”46 So also had the Blanchard ethical rigor subtly shifted away from efforts to transform the culture toward symbols of separation from it. Jonathan Blanchard had been a Puritan exhorting America to become Zion; Charles was a Puritan in an American Babylon.
III. D. L. Moody and a New American Evangelism
“As he stood on the platform,” wrote the Reverend Lyman Abbott in praise of Dwight L. Moody, “he looked like a business man; he dressed like a business man; he took the meeting in hand as a business man would….1 Abbot’s comment, written shortly before Moody’s death in 1899, points out some characteristics of Moody’s revivalism that since have sometimes been obscured. Moody’s evangelism had a degree of middle-class respectability about it that was not always present in American revivalism. His methods and his message sparked nothing like the fierce controversies that stalked his immediate predecessor, Charles Finney, during Finney’s early career. Neither did Moody’s businessman style partake of the extravagant, theatrical, acrobatic, and country-yokel touches of his immediate successor, Billy Sunday. Moody’s meetings, although warmed by the informalities of Ira Sankey’s hymnsings, were relatively decorous. Sentiment rather than sensation characterized his messages. They contained (as the title of a collection of his sermons advertised) “living truths for head and heart, illustrated by … thrilling anecdotes and incidents, personal experiences, touching home scenes, and stories of tender pathos.”2 His message, aside from the constant stress on the necessity of conversion, was of the love of God. His theology, although basically orthodox, was ambiguous to the point of seeming not to be theology at all. Moody could thus maintain cordial relations with mem bers of both emerging parties in American Protestantism. As Lyman Abbott, Henry Ward Beecher’s successor and a spokesman for the new theology, put it, “Not the least of the many services which Mr. Moody rendered to the age has been this practical demonstration that religion is more than theology, and that, based upon this principle, a true Christian catholicity is always possible.”3
Moody’s contribution to emerging fundamentalism was both large and complex. Moody was a progenitor of fundamentalism—it could even be argued that he was its principal progenitor. He believed in Biblical infallibility and premillennialism. He did as much as anyone in America to promote the forms of holiness teaching and the ethical emphases that were accepted by many fundamentalists. His closest associates had virtually all the traits of later fundamentalism, and many of them in fact participated directly in organizing the fundamentalist movement in the twentieth century. Yet Moody himself lacked the one trait that was essential to a “fundamentalist”—he was unalterably opposed to controversy. Moody was a pragmatic activist, determined that nothing should stand in the way of preaching the Gospel effectively. “Couldn’t they [the critics] agree to a truce,” he suggested in 1899, “and for ten years bring out no fresh views, just to let us get on with the practical work of the kingdom.”4 As best he could, he tried simply to avoid the new issues. While he disapproved of liberalism in the abstract, he cultivated friendships with influential liberals in the hope that peace would prevail.5 ‘People are tired and sick of this awful controversy,” he remarked in one of his last sermons. “I hope the motto of the ministers of this country will be, ‘quit your fighting and go to work and preach the simple gospel.’”6
Although by the end of his career his popularity was fading, Moody’s influence was broad and lasting. Scarcely a leader in American Protestantism in the next generation, it seemed, had not at some time been influenced by Moody.7 He was a transitional figure in an age of rapid change, yet he helped to make some characteristics of that age lasting parts of the revivalist tradition. Perhaps as much as Henry Ward Beecher, although in quite different ways, he helped to fuse the spirit of middle-class Victorian America with evangelical Christianity.
MOODY AND HIS EMPIRE
Moody was a Horatio Alger figure—the honest and industrious boy from a New England village who went to the city to find fame and fortune.8 Arriving in Boston at age seventeen in 1854, Moody’s first evangelical interests were aroused through contacts with the YMCA, an organization that had recently originated in England for evangelism to young men in cities. Moody soon moved to Chicago where his religious fervor was intensified by the urban revivals of 1857–58. By 1860 he decided to give up a promising shoe business to devote himself full-time to YMCA work and to other Christian ministries in the city. He started his own Sunday school for poor and immigrant children and eventually (by 1864) organized the Illinois Street Church, a congregation with no denominational ties. In 1866 he became president of the Chicago YMCA and was a locally known evangelistic leader.
That the YMCA rather than any denomination should be Moody’s main formal contact with the Christian community was indicative of an important tendency in American evangelicalism, greatly furthered
by Moody himself. During the awakening of the first half of the century an “empire” of independent evangelical organizations had burgeoned to support home and foreign missions, publication and distribution of Bibles and Christian literature, Sunday schools, charities, and reforms of most of the notorious vices. Like the YMCA, many of these programs were imported from England. Also, like the YMCA, they were extra-ecclesiastical organizations, often with lay leadership, enlisting volunteers to support specific causes.
This system encouraged the personal empire-building which developed during Moody’s time. Events in the business world of the Gilded Age paralleled this trend and likewise encouraged individual initiative and freedom from centralized regulation.9 Moody himself followed such a pattern. His success soon took him beyond the YMCA and, although he cultivated cordial relations with all evangelical denominations, he had formal connections with none. Many of his associates followed a similar pattern. While most of them retained some formal denominational ties, their strongest allegiances were to a variety of specialized works: revival agencies, prophetic conferences, schools, publications, and local churches. These practices were perpetuated in later fundamentalism. Even where denominational concerns continued, the organizational dynamic of the movement was built around individual leaders and empires made up of agencies dedicated to specific causes. It was a religion structured according to the free enterprise system.
Moody’s own rise to success was spectacular. His YMCA work gave him contacts in England, where he was invited to conduct some modestly conceived evangelistic services in 1873. Aided by Ira Sankey as song leader, Moody succeeded beyond all expectation. By the end of 1873 they had touched off something akin to a national revival in Scotland, making Moody and Sankey internationally renowned figures. During the next year they triumphantly toured the British Isles, returning to America in 1875 as national heroes. Americans were, of course, immensely impressed by the accomplishments of the American evangelistic innocents abroad. The religious leaders of virtually every American city clamored for their services.
Following his highly successful first round of campaigns in America, Moody turned to building structures that would widen and perpetuate his principal concern—evangelism. His methods reflected the influence of his earlier YMCA connections—the key to the future was to reach and train young people. In 1879 he founded a school for girls at his home base in Northfield, Massachusetts, followed in 1881 by the Mount Hermon School for boys. In 1886 he gave his support to Emma Dryer’s new Bible training school in Chicago, which he designed for quick Christian training of laymen to meet the needs of urban evangelism. In addition, beginning in 1880, he made his home in Northfield the site for summer conferences—another of the popular new evangelical institutions. At Northfield a wide variety of Protestant leaders spoke, although Moody’s personality and piety were always dominant. The most significant of the conferences was the inspiring international gathering of students in 1886 which led to the formation the next summer of the immensely influential Student Volunteer Movement, embodying the missionary enthusiasm of thousands of collegians in America and England for “the evangelization of the world in this generation.”10
MOODY’S MESSAGE
The motto of the Student Volunteer Movement summarized exactly the controlling principle in Moody’s own thought. Although Moody was not a frankly pragmatic analyst of the techniques of successful evangelism in the way Charles Finney had been, he often tested doctrines for their suitability to evangelism.11 “His system of theology,” explained an early interpreter, “is bounded by his work as an evangelist.” Moody judged his sermons, said the interpreter, by whether they were “fit to convert sinners with.” “By this rule of fitness he tests all the ideas which present themselves to his mind.”12
This test kept Moody’s message simple and positive. The “Three R’s” adequately summarized his central doctrines: “Ruin by sin. Redemption by Christ, and Regeneration by the Holy Ghost.”13 Moody presented these themes in an attractively informal fashion, primarily through illustrations and anecdotes, often from Scripture. Although most of the Biblical and evangelistic aspects of his message were not new to revival audiences, the one feature that almost everyone noticed was that Moody emphasized the love of God. Moreover—a striking omission—he did not preach Hellfire and God’s wrath. Although he never repudiated the doctrine of eternal punishment, his uneasiness with the subject was not far from that of the evangelical liberalism of Henry Ward Beecher. In Moody’s case, it appears that he avoided distressing subjects largely because he sensed that because of the mood of the modern age they did not meet his pragmatic test. As he himself explained, “Terror never brought a man in yet.”14
If Moody’s theology was shaped by evangelistic concerns as adjusted to the spirit of the age, so also was his view of what it meant to be a Christian. The sins emphasized most in his preaching were a rather stereotyped set of notorious vices, thoroughly familiar to revivalist audiences. In a sermon on “Temptation”—to cite a particularly clear, and characteristic example—he denounced the “four great temptations that threaten us to-day”: (1) the theater, (2) disregard of the Sabbath, (3) Sunday newspapers, and (4) atheistic teachings, including evolution.15 Since Moody’s sermons were filled with illustrations from Scripture, they did at times touch on a full range of sins, including subtle tendencies as well as notorious vices. He frequently attacked greed and avarice among businessmen, and would warn against putting “other gods” such as family, wealth, honor, or self, before the true God.”16 Jealousy, envy, self-seeking, irritability, peevishness, and snappishness were also among the sins against which a person should struggle.17 Still, the themes that pervade his preaching on sin and on which he most often dwelt were drunkenness and selling liquor, Sabbath breaking (including boating, fishing, hunting, excursions, and using public transportation), “pandering the lusts of the body,” sins of fallen women, “telling vile stories,” theater attendance, “worldly amusements,” and disrespect for parents, especially mothers whose hearts would be broken by their children’s indulgence in the above vices.18 These vices he described as evidences of loving “the world” or “worldly pleasures.” “A line should be drawn,” he said, “between the church and the world, and every Christian should get both feet out of the world.”19
Equally important as Moody’s preaching to the success of the revivals was the immensely popular singing of Ira Sankey, whose message reinforced Moody’s both in sentimentality and content. Sankey’s hymns used simple and touching contrasts between sinners lost, wandering, and beleagured in their sinfulness and the tender love of Christ. One of the most popular hymns “The Ninety and Nine,” tells of the Saviour’s love as he makes his blood-stained way through thickets, deserts, and thunder-riven mountains to retrieve one lost sheep. Jesus and home were often virtually equated—as in the similarly popular, and even more sentimental, “Where is my Boy tonight?”, a mother’s lament for the lost innocence of her wandering boy—a song that incidentally mentions nothing more explicitly Christian than the mother’s “love and prayer.” The famous “Hold the Fort for I am Coming,” based on a Civil War incident, and appealing to less passive sentiments, suggested a similar contrast between a world almost hopelessly beset by sin and the power of Jesus to save.20
Wholly spiritualized allusions to the Civil War, together with temperance hymns (as “Where is my Boy tonight?”) were, however, about as close as the Moody-Sankey revivals came to explicitly social or political questions. Moody, in fact, probably did as much as anyone to set the trend (which fit the national mood of the 1870s and 1880s) away from earlier nineteenth-century evangelical emphasis on the directly social dimensions of sin and holiness. This shift was quite intentional for Moody, who in his YMCA and city work had at first adopted the common evangelical idea that charity and evangelism should naturally go together. As he reportedly remarked in a frequently quoted statement,
When I was at work for the City Relief Society before the fire I us
ed to go to a poor sinner with the Bible in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other…. My idea was that I could open a poor man’s heart by giving him a load of wood or a ton of coal when the winter was coming on, but I soon found out that he wasn’t any more interested in the Gospel on that account. Instead of thinking how he could come to Christ, he was thinking how long it would be before he got the load of wood. If I had the Bible in one hand and a loaf in the other the people always looked first at the loaf; and that was just the contrary of the order laid down in the Gospel.21
As the last sentence indicates. Moody dropped direct social involvement for the same reason that he avoided controversial theology—both threatened to distract from his primary concern for evangelism. In his mind it was certainly not a question of condoning a lack of compassion for the poor; rather he was convinced that the most compassionate possible care was for a person’s eternal soul. Furthermore, evangelism was, according to his theology, the best way to meet social needs. Conversion inevitably led to personal responsibility and moral uplift, qualities which the conventional wisdom said the poor most often lacked. The emphasis on motherhood and domesticity in Moody’s preaching was part of the widespread evangelical conviction that stability in the home was the key to the resolution of other social problems. Once wanderers came “home” and the poor acquired the sense of responsibility found in strong Christian families, poverty would cease.22 So individual conversions would eventually bring social reform. The context of Moody’s remark on his own change was the Biblical statement, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”23
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