GLASGOW was visited after the Edinburgh mission closed, in fact
preparations began as soon as the Edinburgh work started. In the middle of December a meeting was held in Glasgow to arrange for the visit of the Americans, which was attended by more than a hundred ministers and laymen of all the evangelical churches. At the first of a series of union prayer meetings in St. George’s Established Church on January 5th, Mr.
Moody spoke briefly, returning to Edinburgh for the evening meeting.
After beginning their work in Glasgow, he returned to Edinburgh two or three times to assist in special meetings. Berwick-on-Tweed, Melrose, and Dundee were visited, and meetings lasting a few days each were conducted there after the Edinburgh mission closed.
The Glasgow meetings had been going on uninterruptedly for more than a month when Moody and Sankey reached there on February 7th, and began their labors on the following morning, February 8th. At nine o’clock a stirring meeting of Sabbath-school teachers was held in the City Hall, attended by about three thousand. The evening evangelistic service was held at half-past six, but more than an hour before that time the City Hall was crowded, and the great multitude outside were drafted off to the three churches nearest, which were soon filled. The next day prayer meeting began in the morning in the United Presbyterian Church.
Dr. Bonar thus referred to the meetings not long after they were started:
“There have been not a few awakened of late, and the interest is deepening. The ministers of all denominations take part most cordially. Men are coming from great distances to ask the way of life, awakened to this concern by no directly human means, but evidently by the Holy Spirit, who is breathing over the land. It is such a time as we have never had in Scotland before. The same old Gospel as of aforetime is preached to all men: Christ who was made sin for us, Christ the substitute, Christ’s blood, Christ’s
righteousness, Christ crucified; the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation; but now the Gospel is preached ‘with the Holy Ghost sent down from Heaven,’ and amid all this the enemy is restrained, so that we are reminded of <660701>
Revelation 7:1-3, the time before the coming of the Lord, when the four angels are charged to let no storm burst in, nor to allow the wind of Heaven to ruffle the sea’s smooth surface or move the leaf of any tree until the seal of the living God has been put upon His elect. Is not this sealing going on daily among us? Are not the four angels looking on? Surely it is the time to seek the Lord that He may rain righteousness upon us.”
From Glasgow as a center, occasional meetings were arranged in adjoining towns, and Helensburg, Greenock, and Paisley were visited, while the ministers of Glasgow and other cities took the regular meetings during the absence of Mr. Moody.
On Thursday, April 16th, a convention of ministers, office-bearers, and other Christians from all parts of Scotland and the North of England was held in the Crystal Palace Botanical Gardens. Five thousand people were present, the larger proportion being men. Professor Charteris, of
Edinburgh, read a paper showing how the revival movement could be advanced and directed into the ordinary church channels. Professor Fairburn, of the Free College, spoke upon the great doctrines which had been emphasized during the meetings. Dr. Cairns, of Berwick, Mr. Van Meter, of Rome, and others took part.
One of the most impressive gatherings during this mission was a meeting held in the Kibble Crystal Palace especially for warehouse girls, of whom there are probably more than twelve thousand in the city. Tickets were issued, and while five thousand were seated in the building and several hundred standing, outside was a crowd of more than a thousand girls. On the following evening the meeting was for young men, when nearly six thousand were brought together. A service was held for children also, and another for young women.
The final meeting was held in the Botanical Gardens on the following Sunday. Mr. Sankey found his way into the building and began the service with six or seven thousand, who were crushed together there, but so great
was the crowd outside, estimated at twenty or thirty thousand people, that Mr. Moody himself could not get inside. Standing on the coachman’s box of the carriage in which he was driven, he asked the members of the choir to sing. They found a place for themselves on the roof of a low shed near the building, and after they had sung Mr. Moody preached for an hour on “Immediate Salvation.” So distinct was his voice that the great crowd could hear him without difficulty. The evening was beautiful, the air calm, the sun near its setting; the deep green foliage of the trees that
enclosed the grounds framed the scene. Writing of this, a witness said:
“We thought of the days of Whitefield, of such a scene as that mentioned in his life, when, in 1753 at Glasgow, twenty thousand souls hung on his lips as he bade them farewell. Here there were thirty thousand eager hearers, for by this time the thousands within the Crystal Palace had come out, though their numbers quietly melting into the main body did not make a very perceptible addition to the crowd; and many onlookers who knew something of such gatherings were inclined to estimate the number much higher.”
After the sermon Mr. Moody asked all those who wished to attend the inquiry meeting to enter the palace. Those who could remain were
requested to gather in the neighboring church, Kelvinside, for prayer. In a few minutes the Crystal Palace was filled, and when Mr. Moody asked for those who were unsaved and yet anxious to be saved, two thousand
people rose to their feet.
“It was a strange and solemn sight, so many unsaved and yet seeking salvation,” said a spectator. “It made the heart yearn in an intense desire for them, and assuredly it was of the Lord that these two thousand should thus appeal to the Lord’s people for help at the very moment when these special meetings were brought to a close. It was a sight that summoned the Lord’s people to continue every effort in their behalf, hastening with sharpened sickles to the fields ready for the harvest.”
Thursday, May 24th, being the Queen’s birthday and a general holiday in Edinburgh, a farewell meeting was held on the grassy slopes between Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Craig above Holyrood. Here Mr. Moody
preached to an audience of twenty thousand, and the scenes witnessed in Glasgow the previous Sunday were repeated.
From Glasgow Mr. Moody went to the north of Scotland. In Dundee, where he was holding meetings, he was taken to visit a bed-ridden cripple, and the conversation he held there left a lifelong impression upon him, and in after years frequently figured as an illustration in his sermons. The sufferer had fallen and broken his back when he was a boy of fifteen. He had lain on his bed for about forty years, and could not be moved without great pain. Probably not a day had passed in all those years without acute suffering, but day after day the grace of God had been granted to him, and his chamber seemed as near Heaven as one could get on earth.
“I can imagine that when the angels passed over Dundee they had to stop there for refreshment,” said Mr. Moody. “When I saw him, I thought he must be beyond reach of the tempter, and I asked him:
‘Doesn’t Satan ever tempt you to doubt God, and to think that He is a hard Master?’
“‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘he does try to tempt me. I lie here and see my old schoolmates driving along in their carriages, and Satan says: “If God is so good why does He keep you here all these years? You might have been a rich man, riding in your own carriage.” Then I see a man who was young when I was walk by in perfect health, and Satan whispers: “If God loved you, couldn’t He have kept you from breaking your back?”’
“‘What do you do when Satan tempts you?’
“‘Ah, I just take him to Calvary and I show him Christ and I point out those wounds in His hands and feet and side, and say,
“Doesn’t He love me?” and the fact is, he got such a scare there eighteen hundred years ago that he cannot stand it; he leaves me every time.’ That bedridden saint had not much trouble with doubts; he was too full of the grace of God.”
At Aberdeen no building could accommodate the audience, and on Sabbath afternoon, June 14th, the meeting was on the links in the natural
amphitheatre of the Broadhill, where a platform had been erected for choir and speakers. Some ten thousand people were around the platform long before the hour of the meeting, and when Mr. Moody spoke on “The Wages of Sin is Death,” it is estimated that from twenty to twenty two thousand people heard his words.
Montrose, Brechin, Forfar, Huntley (where more than fifteen thousand people were gathered in the open-air service), Inverness, Arbroath, Tain, Nairn, Elgin, Forres, Grantown, Keith, Rothesay, and Campbelltown were some of the places visited during the summer.
An employer was converted at one of the meetings in another part of Scotland. He was very anxious that all of his employees should be reached, and he used to send them one by one to the meetings. But there was one employee who wouldn’t attend. The moment he heard of his employer’s desire he made up his mind he wouldn’t go. If he was going to be
converted, he said, he was going to be converted under some ordained minister; he was not going to any meeting that was conducted by
unordained Americans. He believed in the regular Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and that was the place for him to be converted.
After we left that town and went away up to Inverness said Mr. Moody in relating the incident, “the employer had some business up there, and he sent this man to manage it.
“One night, as I was preaching on the bank of a river, I happened to take for my text the words of Naaman: ‘I thought.’ I was trying to take men’s thoughts up and to show the difference between their thoughts and God’s thoughts. This man was walking along the bank of the river. He saw a great crowd, and heard someone talking, and wondered what that man was talking about. He didn’t know we were in the city, so he drew up to the crowd and listened.
He heard the sermon and became convicted and converted right there. Then he inquired who was the preacher, and he found out it was the very man whom he had said he would not hear — the man he disliked. The very man he had been talking against was the man God used to reach him.”
An all-day meeting was held at Inverness on August 27th. Mr. Moody with a few friends then went down the Caledonian Canal to Oban, where much preparatory work had been done during the two preceding months by Drs. Horatius and Andrew Bonar. After a few hours’ rest at the home of Sir William McKinnon at Ballinakill he concluded his stay in Scotland by a mission to Campbelltown.
A year after the evangelists left Glasgow Dr. Andrew A. Bonar said:
“We in Glasgow who have watched this movement and taken part in it are aware that our testimony cannot have much influence on those to whom we are strangers, but to any of those who will listen we should like to testify to the permanence of the work among us, and any who will come and see for themselves will at once discover how extensive and sincere this work has been.
Personally I can say, and many of my brethren are prepared to make the same statement, that the fruit of last year has been as satisfactory in every way as at any period in my ministry, while it has also had some new features of special interest. There have indeed been cases of backsliding, but what of that? Is not the parable of the sower true in all ages?”
In his biography of Henry Drummond, Dr. George Adam Smith states that the power of the revival movement in Scotland at this time spread beyond the congregations immediately gathered, and that one of its most striking features was the social and philanthropic work it stimulated.
“Like all religious revivals,” he says, “this one had its origin among the merely well-to-do classes, and at first offered some ground for the sneers at bourgeois religion which were cast upon it. But Mr.
Moody, who had a knowledge of the city, and the power to bring up before others the vision of its needs, inspired the Christians of Glasgow to attempt missions to the criminal classes and the relief of the friendless. The lodging houses were visited, with every haunt of vagrants about the brick kilns upon the south side and elsewhere. Temperance work was organized, and although there were, as always in that work, very many disappointments, a large number of poor drunkards were befriended and reformed.
“A huge tent was raised on the Green, and afterward replaced by a hall, which became the scene of a Sabbath morning breakfast to the poor and the center of a great deal of other philanthropic activity.
New interest was aroused in industrial schools, and, on the advice of Sheriff Watson, a veteran in this line of education, an industrial feeding school was established for ill-fed and ill-clad children. At Saltcoates a house was bought and furnished for orphans; new impulses were given to the Orphan’s Home of Scotland, founded in 1871 by Mr. Quarrier, who, with his fellow workers among the poor of Glasgow, has given inestimable assistance to Mr. Moody’s mission. A boarding house for young women was opened in
Glasgow.
“Mr. Moody gave great attention to the Young Men’s Christian Associations, and at the height of the movement secured very large subscriptions for their foundation or expansion. He felt strongly that they had been conducted upon methods which were either too vague or too narrow, and that for their success ‘clear and liberal views were needed.’ He defined their aim — to promote the spiritual instincts and look after the temporal welfare of young men. Each ought to be a nursery of Christian character, a most efficient evangelistic agency, a center of social meetings, and a means of furthering the progress of young men in the general pursuits of life. But along with liberality in your aims you must have thoroughness in details. The spiritual must be distinctly dominant. Do not, however, put the Association in place of the church; it is only a handmaid and a feeder of the church. For every man it must find some work, and use every particle of power in the young convert.”
Professor Smith has not been able to trace with exactness how Henry Drummond was drawn into the movement by Mr. Moody. But from the first, he says, Drummond felt Mr. Moody’s sincerity and the practical wisdom of the new methods. The aim at the individual, the endeavor to arouse and secure him — this was what he had missed in ordinary church methods and now found. The inquiry meetings bridged the gap between the preacher and the hearer, and brought them together, man to man, before God. On his side, Mr. Moody was feeling the need of a young man to take
charge of the meetings for young men, and it is a tribute to his insight that he chose one whose style and tastes were so different from his own. At first Drummond was employed, like other students, only in the inquiry room. From working in the inquiry rooms he began to address meetings.
After some time Mr. Moody sent him to continue the work among young men at places which he had visited. In Sunderland alone one thousand persons gave in their names as converts, the Rev. James Stalker and the Rev. John F. Ewing working with Drummond. Newcastle and other towns in which Mr. Moody had held meetings were in turn visited by the three Scotchmen. “The Sunderland mission made Drummond a man,” says Professor Smith. “He won from it not only the power of organizing and leading his fellowmen, but that insight into character and knowledge of life, on its lowest, as on its highest, levels, that power of interest in every individual he met, which so brilliantly distinguished him and in later years made us who were his friends feel as if his experiences and his sympathies were exhaustless.”
The Rev. Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren) recently made this reference to Mr. Moody’s relations with Professor Drummond:
“As soon as Moody came to Edinburgh, Drummond allied himself with the most capable, honest, and unselfish evangelist of our day, and saw strange chapters in religious life through the United Kingdom. This was the infirmary in which he learned spiritual diagnosis.”
W. Robertson Nicoll, editor of “The British Weekly,” in his introduction to Drummond’s “Ideal Life,” speaks as follows regarding the awakening in Scotland, and the relation to it of Moody and Drummond:
“A crisis was sure to come, and it might very well have been a crisis which would have broken the church in pieces. That it did not was due largely to the influence of one man — the American evangelist, Mr. Moody. In 1873 Mr. Moody commenced his campaign in the Barclay Free Church, Edinburgh. A few days before, Drummond had read a paper to the Theological Society of his college on ‘Spiritual Diagnosis,’ in which he maintained that preaching was not the most important thing, but that personal
dealing with those in anxiety would yield better results. In other words, he thought that practical religion might be treated as an exact science. He had given himself to scientific study with a view of standing for the degree of Doctor of Science. Mr. Moody at once made a deep impression on Edinburgh, and attracted the ablest students. He missed in this country a certain religious provision for young men, and he thought that young men could best be molded by young men.
“With his keen American eye he perceived that Drummond was his best instrument, and he immediately associated him in the work. It had almost magical results. From the very first Drummond
attracted and deeply moved crowds, and the issue was that for two years he gave himself to this work of evangelism in England, in Scotland, and Ireland. During this period he came to know the life histories of young men in all classes. He made himself a great speaker; he knew how to seize the critical moment; and his modesty, his refinement, his gentle and generous nature, his manliness, and, above all, his profound conviction, won for him disciples in every place he visited. His companions were equally busy in their own lines, and in this way the Free Church was saved.”