Sankey began 'The Ninety and Nine' which had never failed to quieten and move an audience; 'the students' ?, he says, 'listened to the first verse in perfect silence, but at its conclusion they vigorously beat the floor with canes and umbrellas, and cried "Hear, hear!" 'Each verse produced cries of 'encore!' When they ruined 'Man of sorrows' Sankey came near to tears. Two or three dons quietly warned the worst offenders off the premises and stayed at the back to keep order, while Moody courteously pointed out that this was not a political meeting. 'The service is God's and such proceedings are irreverent.'
He preached on a favourite and suitable opening subject, Daniel in the lions' den, with its theme of faith and manly courage. His nonnosyllabic 'Dan'1' was 'too much', wrote young Barclay Buxton of Trinity, 'for the disorderly spirits who had come for fun, and they called out "Dan'l, Dan'|" whenever that unfortunate name appeared'. Scattered guffaws greeted Americanisms or un-British tonations; the 'unconscious click in his throat before saying certain pithy remarks induced imitation. There were bursts of loud laughter, pert shouts of 'Well done!'
The university's weekly journal, the 'Cambridge Review', reported 'the majority paid every attention to the service, and marked their displeasure of the minority in no uncertain manner'. The rowdies stayed unabashed: 'We went meaning to have some fun and, by jove, we had it!' Moody fixed his eye on a particularly elegant young man in the front row, fooling hard, who evidently led the others. To a generation less colourful, more indifferent, whose reaction would be to stay away in lazy scorn, the full-blooded hounding of Moody by the undergraduates of 1882 must seem astonishing. Had he lost his temper the history of that week and of all that flowed from it would have been different. Moule's young nephew thought 'Moody was visibly affected', but anecdote and teaching flowed on, somewhat smothered by the Corn Exchange acoustics which even his voice could not defeat.
Moody would have closed the meeting immediately after Sankey's final solo. John Barren whispered: 'Call a prayer meeting. Ask any who wish to pray to stay behind a few minutes?’
Four hundred stayed, many from a sense of sportsmanship and fair play: among them some of the rowdiest, by now 'quiet, impressed and apparently ashamed of their recent behaviour'. Moody spoke again briefly, still in good humour and still on Dan'l.
Christian Union men returned to their colleges 'with heavy hearts, ' Their opponents laughed. 'If uneducated men will come to teach the Varsity they deserve to be snubbed,' said the elegant youth from the front row, Gerald Lander, as he entered the Great Gate of Trinity. Moody and Sankey accompanied by Studd returned to the hotel. 'Well, Sankey,' said Moody cheerfully as he removed his sweat-saturated collar, 'I guess I've no hankering after that crowd again.' Studd says that Mr Sankey was greatly upset at the reception his singing had received. What Mr Moody's feelings were I do not know, but he was a man of great courage and determination.' Studd joined the evangelists as they prayed with fervour and in faith for days ahead.
During Monday morning, a bell-boy knocked on Moody's door and handed in a card: 'Mr Gerald Lander. Trinity College.’
'Show him up,' said Moody.
I want to apologize, sir. And - I've brought a letter of apology from the men.’
‘Come right in!' Moody warmly shook his hand.
Mrs John Barton says that some of the 'more gentlemanly (though not yet at all of Mr Moody's way of thinking) were so indignant at their companions' rude behaviour that they got up a memorial to apologise to Mr Moody’ They prevailed on Gerald Lander to present it. He went simply as an English gentleman who on reflection realized he had overstepped the bounds of decency.
They had a long talk. Lander agreed that to prove his apology sincere he must attend the next meeting. Could Moody have peered into the future, he would have seen this young man, now interested in little but racing and cards, striding through South China as a missionary bishop.
In Market Passage, close under Great St Mary's Church, a gymnasium had been adapted to hold five hundred for the week-night university meetings. Monday night was wet. When 'we assembled in the Gymnasium', writes W H Stone, an undergraduate who had been converted during Moody's Swansea campaign two months before, 'the sight was enough to depress the spirits of the most sanguine'. The bare hundred included most of the seventy men of the choir. But Lander, subdued and attentive, kept his promise. And the sparse attendance enabled Moody afterwards to move round the hall to every man in turn. Moule noted in his diary next day: ‘Last night it is said 5 men were brought to Christ at the University meeting. Lord make it stand and carry it on.'
On Tuesday, town and country folk packed the Corn Exchange an hour before the start, but at the gymnasium Moody felt 'we've come up against a brick wall'. An old lady staying at Professor Babington's for the mission suggested: 'Why do you not call a prayer meeting of mothers?' It was a regular dodge of Moody's to invite mothers to unite in prayer for their sons. He had never attempted to ask them to pray for other mothers' sons.
Wednesday afternoon, when college men were digesting a restrained and well expressed letter of protest from Studd in the Cambridge Review, saw Moody at the close of the town meeting, 'with infinite tact and feeling', collect some hundred and fifty mothers. He would recall that prayer meeting as unique in his experience: mother after mother, amidst her tears, pleaded for the young men of the University. And Wednesday night, wrote G E Morgan, the undergraduate son of one of Moody's earliest British friends, 'exceeded our strongest faith and showed us how little we really had'.
The gymnasium was fuller. Moody spoke, in Moule's opinion, with great power — a remarkable difference from the very discouraging occasion on Sunday night.’ Moody sensed that the mothers' prayers were being answered. He determined to prove it. 'I have not yet, he said, 'held an inquiry meeting for you gentlemen, but I feel sure many of you are ready and yearning to know Christ. When you are in difficulties over mathematics or classics you do not hesitate to consult your tutors. Would it be unreasonable for you to bring your soul-trouble to those who may be able to help you? Mr Sankey and I will converse with any who will go up to the empty gallery yonder. Let us have silent prayer?
The gallery - the gymnasium fencing-room - was up a clattering iron staircase 'in the centre of the hall in full view of all'. No man would reach this impromptu inquiry room without a deliberate noisy movement before friends. In a Varsity quick to ridicule eccentricity, where men hated to show their feelings, it could hardly have been chosen better to prevent shallow decisions.
Not a man moved. Moody repeated the appeal. 'There was no response,' Studd writes, 'till the third or fourth appeal, and then a young Trinity man, 'amidst an awful stillness', left his place, and 'half hiding his face in his gown, bounded up the stairs two at a time'. Another followed. Soon the gymnasium reverberated with clatter, man after man. The choir sang again. Moody said, 'I never saw the gowns look so well before, and led Sankey up the stairs.
"Moody without Sankey," by John Pollock, published by Christian Focus.
This is a very descriptive account of the personal experience at that meeting of a first-year student, A C Benson, who was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and who went on to become a famous essayist and poet.
"Our host carelessly said that a great Revivalist was to address a meeting that night. Someone suggested that we should go. I laughingly assented. The meeting was held in a hall in a side street; we went smiling and talking and took our places in a crowded room. . . . Then the preacher himself — a heavy-looking, commonplace man, with a sturdy figure and no grace of look or gesture — stepped forward. I have no recollection how he began, but he had not spoken half a dozen sentences before I felt as though he and I were alone in the world. The details of that speech have gone from me. After a scathing and indignant lecture on sin, he turned to drawing a picture of the hollow, drifting life, with feeble, mundane ambitions — utterly selfish, giving no service, making no sacrifice, tasting the moment, gliding feebly down the stream of time to the roaring cataract of death. Every word he said burnt into my soul. He seemed to probe the secret of my innermost heart; to be analysing, as it were, before the Judge of the world, the arid and pitiful constituents of my most secret thought. I did not think I could have heard him out — his words fell on me like the stabs of a knife. Then he made a sudden pause, and in a pervasion of incredible dignity and pathos he drew us to the feet of the crucified Saviour, showed us the bleeding hand and dimmed eye, and the infinite heart behind. "Just accept Him," he cried, "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you may be His — nestling in His arms — with the burden of sin and selfishness resting at His feet.” Even as he spoke, pierced as I was to the heart by contrition and anguish, I knew that this was not for me — He invited all who would be Christians to wait and plead with him. Many men — even, I was surprised to see, a careless, cynical companion of my own — crowded to the platform, but I went out into the night, like one dizzied with a sudden blow. I was joined, I remember, by a tutor of my college, who praised the eloquence of the address, and was surprised to find me so little, responsive; but my only idea was to escape and be alone. I felt like a wounded creature, who must crawl into solitude.
(This came from his autobiography, "The House of Quiet." As you can see, he writes in a flowery way in old English, which makes it difficult to understand exactly what he is saying. He studied the theology of God for several years after this meeting, but I cannot work out for sure if he gave his life to Jesus; I think he did. If he didn't it was because he allowed his head to get in the way.)
"D L Moody," by William R Moody, 1930
There is now a pub and a theatre on the site.