Читать книгу True Tales from the Edgar Cayce Archives - Sidney D. Kirkpatrick - Страница 14

DWIGHT MOODY:

A PASTOR IN THIS LIFE AND THE NEXT

The Union Tabernacle was the place to be on weekend nights in Hopkinsville, the county seat. With stadium seating for two-thousand, the block-long civic auditorium played host to vice-presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt, African-American educator Booker T. Washington, temperance leader Carrie Nation, orator William Jennings Bryan, and bandleader John Phillip Sousa.

Eighteen-year-old Edgar Cayce, a frequent visitor, came to hear the evangelists. There was the “soul saving” and “eternal optimist” former baseball star Billy Sunday; the advocate of Christian education George Stuart, the feisty and always humorous Sam Jones, and Mordecai Ham, the preacher who later converted Billy Graham at a revival meeting in North Carolina. Edgar eagerly awaited the arrival of the immensely popular and charismatic Dwight L. Moody, known simply as “D.L.,” who sometimes drew ten and twelve thousand people to hear his sermons.

Edgar Cayce, c. 1890s.

Dwight Moody, c. 1890.

On the morning before Moody was scheduled to speak, April 5, 1898, Edgar was living with his family in a white clapboard home on the corner of 7th and Young Streets, a short walk from the tabernacle. He had grown to be quite tall, standing just over six-foot two with tousled brown hair he cut short, which accentuated his high forehead, deep-set, blue-gray eyes, and receding chin. As his father was still unemployed since leaving Beverly two years earlier, Edgar’s salary as a clerk in Hopper Brothers Bookstore was now his family’s sole means of support. Still, Edgar had chores to perform. Among his responsibilities was to milk the family cow, which that Tuesday morning had gone missing.

Edgar followed the cow’s tracks through an open gate at the back of the house, across a meadow, down a riverbank, and along a creek that ran through the middle of town. After he followed the creek some hundred or so yards, he came upon a middle-aged, overweight man seated on a log. He had a great beard, which had begun to turn white, like his hair. Edgar couldn’t help but notice that he held a Bible in his hands.

“Good morning, young man,” the stranger said. “I’ll venture you are seeking this cow here just behind me. She must have come up this way from the path you came over.”

Edgar asked him how he knew he was looking for the cow. Dressed in a suit jacket and vest, he didn’t think he still looked like a farm boy. It was the anxiety in his face that gave him away, Dwight Moody replied, and he then introduced himself.

They got to talking and their conversation inevitably turned to the Bible, the bookstore, and Edgar’s desire to become a preacher. Moody then invited him, as his guest, to attend his revival at the tabernacle, which was scheduled to run an entire week.

Edgar showed up that night and was very impressed. He sat in the front row amidst a standing-room-only crowd. The text Moody read was from the Gospel of Luke, 10:25, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Edgar had read it many times and heard various interpretations, but he had never heard it treated in quite the same way as Moody presented the subject. Edgar communicated his excitement to Moody the next morning when he found the evangelist waiting for him at the same place he had found him the day before. He and “D.L.” continued to meet by the river for Moody’s entire visit to town.

Revival Meeting, c. 1890s.

Edgar would ask Moody the same question that he had put to many different pastors. Had God ever spoken directly to him? Asked what had prompted the young man to pose such a question, Edgar told Moody the stories of his early childhood. As Edgar’s own reading of the Bible revealed to him and Lulu had drawn to his attention, the Devil often spoke through spirits. How could one be sure?

“You can tell a tree by its fruit,” Moody reminded Edgar, then shared stories with him of people, many of them children, who had received messages from God. Moody also shared his own experience on a trip to Cleveland to hold a revival meeting.

The planned visit was to last a few weeks and a large audience was expected. But no sooner did he arrive than he had a dream in which he was told to close his meeting at once and go to London, England. As Moody had never been to England and could hardly afford doing so, he was reluctant. However, as he believed his dream to be a genuine expression of the will of God, he prematurely ended the Cleveland revival and at the risk of stalling a promising career, set off for England where no one knew who he was.

Moody felt like a stranger in London and began doubting that his vision had been authentic. Then one afternoon, when he was wandering the streets in a poor section of the city, he came upon a window box on a nearby tenement in which a geranium bloomed. This was his favorite color and flower. Stepping closer to take a closer look, he heard an angelic voice singing a favorite hymn. He followed the voice inside a tenement and up the stairs to an open door. Inside was a young crippled girl.

“Oh, Mr. Moody,” she said, looking up at him. “I knew God would answer my prayer and send you here.”

The experience left Moody convinced that his coming to the child’s apartment had been God’s plan. He resumed his ministry with a prayer meeting in that same room and eventually touched the lives of a quarter of a million or more people in England. “I know it was God who spoke to me,” Moody told Edgar.

Edgar would cherish his conversations with Moody as much as he did the evangelist’s Union Tabernacle revival meetings. In each new sermon, Edgar would find what seemed like a special message intended just for him. Simply listening to Moody, Edgar said, sent chills up his spine. What he remembered most was the last morning they met.

Edgar had arrived before sunrise and found Moody holding a stick and making marks in the soil, just as the Book of John reported Jesus having done. Moody asked Edgar what he was going to do with his life. Edgar confessed that he wished to be a minister, like him. Moody advised him to be true to the spirit of that vision but to know that there were many different ways to serve God besides from the pulpit. He could be a missionary or teach Bible study. He would know the right path when the time came.

For many years to come, long after Moody had died, Edgar would reflect on how special their meetings had been. And though he never again spoke personally with him in the flesh and blood, Moody would appear in both his dreams and trance-induced visions.

In one trance vision, Edgar was on a moving passenger train riding in an ornate white and gold Pullman with plush club chairs. Outside he could hear the noise of the wheels rolling on the tracks and the blasts of the train whistle. His fellow passengers were preachers dressed in white robes, many of whom Edgar had heard preach as a youth in Hopkinsville. Though long since dead, they appeared to Edgar as they did at the height of their careers. Conversing with them, Edgar learned that they were on their way to attend a revival meeting in which John the Disciple was to speak. Edgar was along for the ride.

Among the passengers was Sam Jones, who was making jokes and chewing tobacco just as he did when he was a circuit riding revivalist. When Jones spit out the tobacco juice, Edgar was taken aback, surprised at the preacher’s lack of decorum in such a fine Pullman. As Edgar himself wanted a cigarette, he queried Jones: “Sam, aren’t you afraid you will get the tobacco juice on the cushions? Jones didn’t think anything of it. In Edgar’s dream, life went on as normal in the afterlife as it did when he was in the flesh and blood.

Another passenger was Dwight Moody, whom Edgar was especially pleased to meet again after so many years. He asked Moody if he remembered meeting him in Hopkinsville. “Oh, yes,” Moody said. I remember you and I remember the tale I told you about the little girl.”

As they got to talking, Moody said that Edgar was not in the same place as himself or the others on the train. “You are on this same train with us right now, but don’t forget you have to go back and don’t you get too far away.”

The other passengers, pleased to be together, were discussing sermons they had given and what had been their experience in the afterlife. One preacher said that he thought he had gotten it right when he was in the pulpit, while others didn’t think that they had.

Jones said, “Well, things are quite a bit different from what I preached or imagined they were.” Then he turned to George Stuart and said, “George, don’t you find it that way?”

George said that things were indeed quite different. “We are . . . still going to meetings; the only difference is that we are being preached to instead of preaching, for we have found that we didn’t know it all.”

At another point in the dream all of the preachers turned to Moody to find out what he thought. “D. L., how do you find it?” Jones asked.

Moody replied: “Well, it isn’t so different. You know what we called human nature is still human nature. It isn’t so different.”

Edgar had the impression that these men were having just as good a time in the afterlife as they did when they were alive. He wanted to continue the journey with them to hear Disciple John speak but was counseled to disembark before they reached a tunnel that lay ahead.

“You must get off before it goes too far,” Cayce was warned.

In similar visions he experienced in trance, Cayce always had to get off the train. However, there was one dream he had in 1942 in which he arrived at his destination. The dream made such an impact on him that he wrote it down for later study and reflection:

I was sitting alone in the front room [of my Virginia Beach house] playing solitaire when there was a knock at the front door. When I went to the door a gentleman whom I did not recognize said, ‘Cayce, I want you to go with me to a meeting this evening.’ At first I said, ‘But I seldom go out in the evening . . .’ He insisted I should go with him and I did. As I went out I realized that another person was waiting for us in the street. We walked . . . on as if into the air, up and up, until we came to where there seemed to be a large circus tent . . . We approached the flap of the tent, and as he pulled the flap back, I for the first time, realized that the two men with whom I had been walking were the evangelists Dwight L. Moody and Sam Jones.

In Cayce’s dream, they entered the tent, which was filled to overflowing with inspirational religious leaders, some of whom Edgar recognized, and some he did not. And then, Cayce remembered:

It seemed that there was . . . lightning in the distance. With the lightning there was a noise, not of thunder but of wind, yet nothing seemed to stir . . . When I asked one of my companions what it was, I was told ‘The Lord our God will speak to us.’ Then a voice, clear and strong, came as from out of the cloud and the lightning and said, ‘Who will warn my children?’ Then from out of the throng before the throne came the Master . . . He spoke saying, ‘I will warn My brethren.’ The answer came back, ‘No, the time is not yet fulfilled for you to return . . .” Then Mr. Moody spoke and said . . . ‘send Cayce, he is there now.’ Then the Master said, ‘Father, Cayce will warn My brethren.’

Here the dream ended. But the message for Cayce remained.