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| [a] Evangelists - RF |
1-About Me 2-American Flag 3-Simultaneous Coin Extractor
4-Geil Visits the British Museum 5-Friends in High Places
4-Geil Visits the British Museum 5-Friends in High Places
Julia Lacher is a proud native of Des Moines, Iowa, and graduated from Beloit College in May with a double major in Anthropology and History and a minor in Museum Studies. She is the only intern working with William Edgar Geil's papers at the Doylestown Historical Society who did not take Professor Rob LaFleur's class on "The Accidental Ethnographer," and is currently wondering what she got herself in to.
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Please
note that all items marked "DHS" are property of the Doylestown
Historical Society, and used with DHS permission. If you wish to use an
image, you need permission of the Society. Please contact Robert LaFleur
(lafleur@beloit.edu), and he will put you in contact with the
appropriate people.
While William Edgar Geil may not have found the lasting fame he so desired from his careers in evangelism and pseudo-anthropological exploration, he certainly ran in the same circles of those who did.
Perhaps one of the most famous of Geil’s friends was Dwight Lyman Moody. Born in Northfield, Massachusetts, Moody was converted to evangelical Christianity in 1855. He opened his first Sunday School in Chicago, Illinois, after the Civil War, and found much success in the city. However, Moody did not become a household name until his evangelical tour of England and Scotland in the 1870s and 1880s. Geil most likely became aware of Moody during this time. Regularly preaching to crowds between 2,000 and 4,000 people, Moody was a master orator. In Glasgow, he filled the Botanic Gardens Palace, preaching to a crowd of between 15,000 and 30,000.
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| [b] The Beginning - RF |
It is interesting to note that Geil also went on an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, preaching throughout England and Scotlandin the early 1900s. Perhaps he was attempting to follow, literally, in the footsteps of Moody. It would be interesting to explore this in a different post. Moody was also affiliated with the China Inland Mission – another connection worthy of exploration between him and Geil.
Moody returned to the United States in the early 1880s, and in 1886 built the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago’s Near North Side as well as the Mount Herman School in his hometown of Northfield. Though much of his work was in Chicago, Moody preferred to live in the more rural setting of his hometown
It was during a visit to Moody’s home in Northfield, most likely in the late 1890s (Moody died in 1899), that Geil recorded this anecdote.
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| [c] Anecdotes - DHS |
Moody, having heard of a woman who was giving a series of lectures on the literature of the Bible, invited her to Northfield to speak. He was horrified, however, when for her first lecture the woman got on stage, and instead of speaking about literature “tore the bible all to pieces and told the audience to read the Arabian Nights once a year to see how [the] Bible was written.”
The next day, instead of another lecture, Moody held a prayer meeting.
Besides being a hilarious story, this anecdote gives us some insight into Geil’s evangelical career and his role in the movement at the turn-of-the-century. That he was good enough friends with Moody to be invited to his house speaks volumes about the significance of Geil’s evangelical work.
A more in-depth exploration of similarities and differences between the two evangelists’ work might reveal more about Geil’s beliefs and the role of evangelical Christianity in his explorations and interest in other cultures. Perhaps if he had stuck with the evangelism, and done less pseudo-anthropological exploration, Geil would be better remembered today.
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| [d] Moody Bible Institute - RF |
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