Dwight L. Moody was the greatest religious commander the modern world has known
Dwight L. Moody was the greatest religious commander the modern world has known. He called volunteers around him when preparing for a battle, drilled them in the tactics of winning souls, encouraged the timid, rebuked the indifferent, cheered the intrepid, and when equipped for the conflict placed sentinels in the aisles of the great hall or the spacious church, which ever was his battlefield, sent scouts out through his vast audiences and fired like a sharpshooter until sinners were ready to capitulate and lay down their arms. The calling away of Mr. Moody is a personal loss to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. The sun shines on no state where he was not known and loved. In the composing room of the Herald yesterday for example the printers recalled Mr. Moody’s visit to El Paso. “You could hear a feather drop,” said an old printer, “when Mr. Moody addressed the crowd that gathered to hear him here,” and one of them hummed softly a line or two of the “Homeland,” the song the old evangelist loved so well. The secret of Mr. Moody’s success in his earlier campaigns and of his victories on every field of battle on which he met the enemy is universally admitted to have been his childlike reliance upon the bible. He was a man of one book. That book was the bible. It was his shot tower, his ammunition wagon, his gun carriage, his inspiration, his all in all. Men of every shade of belief can admire his steady persistence in the work he had chosen, even though they may have disapproved of some of his evangelistic methods.