Moody and Sankey.

From the New York Herald.

Both men made a favorable impression. Many were disposed to think they belonged, to the traditional type of Down-East camp-meeting leaders—lank, lantern-jawed, and hollowed-eyed: In Sankey they found a face of the regular English type, framed in black side-whiskers, and as smooth-skinned, full, and round as if he had been raised from childhood on the roast-beef and plum-pudding of old England. In Moody they saw a very fair example of a type of face that has come to be recognized as Western American. A full-beard and mustache are essential to constitute it, and Moody has these. His voice also is Western and energy of his delivery must be born of the same great and vigorous soil. “Let us go and take the land,” repeated a hundred times in rising, vigorous tones by a strong-bodied man of intense earnestness, struck the keynote of the revival. He had no occasion to explain that he called for an army of believers to go forth and drive sin out of the nation. His audience was responsive. He used neither logic nor rhetoric, but he thrilled them with the energy and boldness of his belief and plain appeal. It was as if Cortez, hungry and disheartened, turned to his timid but famishing followers and, pointing to the gilded battlements of Montezuma’s palaces, cried out in desperation, “Let us go up and take the land;” and history records that they went up and took it.

The secret of success in England of the two evangelists was made plain to everybody. Moody’s overpowering energy is calculated to stir even the most phlegmatic audience, and even the most intelligent and refined appear to fall under the spell of this influence as quickly as the simple and illiterate, to whose minds only, some would think, these sermons should be addressed. Sankey’s singing has no tricks of vocalism. Take an average Sunday-school singer, and magnify the volume of the voice eighteen or twenty times, and you have Sankey. But it is not his clear, full, rounded voice alone that has made him so successful. His hymns have a music in them that possesses a great charm for the mass of church-going people who niether understand nor care for the dazzling intricacies of operatic or concerted music.

Moody is far ahead of the short-hand writers, and his words are like a mountain torrent—rushing, leaning, and carrying all before it. He elevates himself on his toes, strikes with the force of a sledge-hammer the rail in front of him, turns a three quarter circle, and sends a volley of sentences flying right and left, like the discharge of a whole battery of mittailleuses.