William R. Moody

The life task of William Revell Moody, in carrying on the school at Northfield which his father founded, successfully supplemented and rounded out Dwight L. Moody’s labors. If the father’s career overshadowed in public interest that of his son and educational successor, it was less on account of the work at Northfield than because of earlier and very remarkable chapters in the elder Moody’s life. During a good part of this country’s history, it used to be expected as a matter of course that a great financial crash and the consequent depression would be followed by spectacular and nation-wide religious revival. The present industrial depression has not produced that particular phenomenon, nor did the two or three depressions which preceded. But it certainly happened after 1825 and 1837 and 1857 and it was equally the sequel to 1873. Some of us who are getting on in life remember (mostly as boyhood recollections) the famous revival meetings in New York during 1874 and 1875, when, day after day, the largest uptown hall in the city would be crowded to capacity to hear the evangelist. The episode became a “newspaper sensation.” Today it is an astonishing reminiscent picture—Moody’s overpoweringly earnest exhortation; the assemblage, coming unmistakably from Wall Street and Fifth Avenue as well as from humble neighborhoods, breaking into tears when Sankey followed with “The Ninety and Nine,” and the long lines of weeping penitents that moved up to the anxious-seat. Doubtless the New Yorker’s well-known instinct, to be present at any much-discussed event and experience any new sensation, accounted for much of the immense attendance. Prospective backsliders were probably as numerous as in the still older frontier camp-meetings. Yet the picture somehow does not seem to belong to the New York we know, and, as a matter of fact, these demonstrations of the Seventies were the last of their kind.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1934 Century Association Yearbook