, soon outgrew the little room, and was
removed to a large hall, where, every Sunday, a thousand boys and girls
attended. For six years, Moody conducted that school, sweeping it out
and doing the janitor work himself, attending to his business as
salesman throughout the week. But in 1860, at the age of twenty-three,
he decided to devote all his time to Christian work.

He had no income, and to keep his expenses as low as possible, he slept
at night on a bench in his school, and cooked his own food. Then the
Civil War began, and he erected a tent at the camp near Chicago where
the recruits were gathered, and labored there all day, sometimes holding
eight or ten meetings. He went with the men to the front, and was at the
desperate battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chattanooga. The war
over, he took up again his work in Chicago. The great fire of 1871 swept
away his church, but he soon had a temporary structure erected, and
labored on.

By this time, his fame had got abroad, and finally in 1873, his great
opportunity came. Accompanied by Ira D. Sankey, the famous singer of
hymns, he started on an evangelist tour of Great Britain. At his first
meeting only four people were present; at his last, thirty thousand
crowded to hear him. In Ireland, the crowds sometimes covered six acres,
and during the four months he spent in London, over two million people
heard him preach. Great Britain had never before experienced such a
religious awakening; but it was as nothing to the reception given him
when he returned to America two years later. There are many people still
living who remember those wonderful revivals in Philadelphia, New York,
and Boston, with their great choirs, and Ira Sankey's singing, and
Moody's soul-stirring talks. From that time forward he was easily the
first evangelist in the world--perhaps the greatest the world had ever
seen.

It is doubtful if any man ever faced and preached to so many people. He
spoke to thousands night after night, week in and week out. In his
themes he kept close to life, and few men were his equal in making
scriptural biography vivid and realistic; in reconstructing scriptural
scenes and setting them, as it were, bodily before his audience. He was
not a cultured man, as we understand the word--not a man of broad
learning; perhaps such learning would only have weakened him--nor did he
have the presence and voice which go so far toward the equipment of the
orator. But he burned with an