The life story of Dwight Lyman Moody, commoner of Northfield and a man "mightily used of God," as the introduction says. The author, Richard Ellsworth Day, led churches in California and Arizona and went on to be a general evangelist and widely-read author of the column, "Beside the Golden Gate," in The Baptist. He is also the author of The Shadow of Broad Brim, a biography of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, acclaimed as one of the greatest preachers of all time.
Richard Ellsworth Day was born in the United States in 1884. In his early life he was an apprentice at the Terre Haute Gazette in Indiana serving as an associate reporter. His first book was a biography on the famous preacher Charles Spurgeon entitled The Shadow of the Broad Brim, which he published with Judson Press in 1934. The book was an immediate success which led to subsequent biographies on Charles Grandison Finney (1942), D.L. Moody (1944), and Henry Parsons Crowell (1946). Richard Day and his wife Deborah would begin each project with extensive research and study and then retreat to their little cottage in Sunnyvale, California to write. In his day he was a noted Christian biographer, and between projects, traveled around speaking in churches and schools until his death in 1965.
Without taking a thing away from the inspiring life of D. L. Moody, this biography does not do him justice. Written in 1937, the book shows its age. The author assumes a high level of familiarity with Moody's life and so chooses to summarize or skip sizable interesting parts of his life. Far too much time is spent on his colleagues or details about what happened after his death. The chapters that deal with his life in detail are great, but few and far between.
I struggled with the rating for this book, but this is an incredibly slow read. Very hard to stay focused, but if you can keep at it then you will find some gold in its pages! "I want to my human best, filled with the Holy Spirit"