Article January 25, 1900 Issue

From the Religious Press

with contributions from William L. Gage

"If you read the lives of the men who have best served the world and brought it forward out of darkness into truth and righteousness, and perhaps left behind them imperishable names," says Rev. J. M. Greenough, "you will find invariably that they have been men richly endowed with this grace of patient continuance—full of the strong self-mastery which can work steadily for a far-off result; which does not demand its day's wages always in the evening time; which is not discouraged because the wages are long withheld; men who were not intoxicated with swift success, or disheartened by momentary defeats; who did nothing by easy brilliant leaps, but everything by painful, unresting toil, and who had infinite reliance on the Divine Justice, which is ever on the side of honest labor and patient hope. There are no lives worth reading which have not been based and built up on these qualities. The great teachers from whom the world has learned everything that is worth knowing were men who had laid to heart the eternal principle, that nothing worthy can be done without persistent work and waiting. They believed that the human heart moves slowly towards the truth; that it must be 'precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.' The world moves, but always with stolid resistance and sluggish feet, and those who push it forward must do it in the spirit of the Greatest Teacher. 'In your patience possess ye your souls.' By those words all great thinkers and workers have been swayed and inspired." —The Watchman (Baptist)

I think that after he has gone from us it may be seen and admitted that we have had with us, not alone a man of great simplicity, faith, and earnestness, but a man whose command of the English tongue is singular and almost unapproachable. When I hear him I think of Bunyan and De Foe, and wonder at the crisp, clear, transparent Saxon which he uses.... Barring certain infelicities of syntax and pronunciation, and taking his style by itself, I feel when I hear him that if Macaulay could put Bunyan almost at the head of all masters of style, for the same reason men of culture ought to admire the clear, terse, forcible, and clean English of Mr. Moody. Indeed the charm of his style is so great that again and again I find myself wondering at it, and asking myself whether, if he had had a scholastic education, he would have kept that singularly pure saxon id'om of which he is a master.

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