CHAPTER XVII TORCHBEARERS ON THEIR OWN Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness, W 'HEN Moody's mortality was laid under the snow on Round Top at Northfield there stood by the graveside one to whom his mantle might have descended. Not that Reuben Archer Torrey was unworthy to wear it, not that his labor was undeserving, but that none have come afterward of like stature to fit it, like soul to blaze under its folds. Torrey, who had stepped into the breach and carried through the unfinished task at Kansas City, who for a decade had led in Chicago the training of evangels as Moody would have them be, Torrey was foremost of all the successors of the straight-Gospel preacher. He found his Sankey in Charles M. Alexander, the Tennessee singer, to whom the Moody Bible Institute taught the art of revival music, and together they went over the world to places where Moody had been and to places he had had no time to reach, the Antipodes, the Orient, besides America and Britain, and they mobilized their tabernacle thousands under the new century's rubric of "Get Right with God." Both had served apprenticeship with Moody and Sankey and inherited their direct-dealing tactics. But now Moody was dead, Sankey was singing alone and the revival itself had passed the peak of high spirituality and was levelling toward commoner courses. Trite slogans, convert counts, calculated publicity, herd lip-Gospelling, mobsinging, hero-worshipping of self-centered revival rangers, and churches looking for members that did not come when the shouting was over-all this was gathering like an avalanche to crash down upon America in the name of evangelization. It was a transitional age in the life of the nation, a time of material and emotional expansion yet growing sophistication which challenged ingenuity to keep pace with volatile people. Good men and honest, broad-minded yet deadly in earnest, their conviction their message, bore lone torches over the land. Others, starting sincerely, set off pyrotechnics in eagerness to burst barriers and extend themselves with their missions. Dr. Torrey and his immediate contemporaries changed the rigging a bit but steered the Moody Gospel ship pretty close to the old seaway the while flamboyant sails were being hoisted. The father of Dr. Torrey was a banker who was ruined in the panic of 1857, a year after the birth of the son, but recouped and was able to pay the youth's card and racing losses at Yale without a reproach. Young Torrey's conscience, however, almost drove him to suicide. Moody arrived in New Haven in time to spoil a legal career and make a minister of him. Bible in hand, Torrey stalked the young woman who had been his frequent dancing partner. Two hours of importuning and she knelt and forswore the waxed floor forever. His first preaching was tremulous, with fright and not feeling, and Niagaras, of sweat and not tears, ran down his face and neck. A pastorate in an Ohio nest of infidelity made him a bold fundamentalist of the "whole Bible from cover to cover" and provoked a three-year revival all his own. It was highly successful. A poker game was suspended while he led in prayer in a saloon. The next day the boss of a rival bar-room indignantly protested the discrimination and Torrey promptly set things right with another praise service. He founded the "Open-Door Church" in Minneapolis and thence graduated to the Moody sanctum sanctorum in Chicago where not a Sabbath got by him without new names written in heaven. In 1898 he was with the army "eating, drinking, breathing dust with the soldiers," and in 1899 by the side of the evangel chieftain up to the moment when the command fell to him at Kansas City. A week of supplication at Chicago in 1901 prayed down a world-wide revival. Dr. Torrey took the commission and chose Alexander his lyric lieutenant. They were a contrast to the prototype preacher and singer, Moody the gruffly domineering, Sankey the ingratiating. Dr. Torrey, graceful of gesture and movement for all his portliness, attained domination with perfect suavity and induced agreement with his positivism. His close-trimmed white beard enhanced either beneficence or solemnity of mien. Alexander bent over no organ. Tall and long of reach, he was the amiable upstanding chorister who lifted people out of themselves in their singing. Alexander was on his feet when he sang and his sensitive, long, thin smooth face mirrored the feeling borne by the tender "Tell Mother I'll Be There" or the exultant "Yes, There Will Be Glory for Me." After twice girdling the globe with Dr. Torrey, he teamed up with M. B. Williams |