He also has great tact with his young converts. "Every man can do something," he says. "I had a Swede converted in Chicago. I don't know how. I don't suppose he was converted by my sermons, because he couldn't understand much. The Lord converted him into one of the happiest men you ever saw. His face shone all over. He came to me, and he had to speak through an interpreter. This interpreter said this Swede wanted to have me give him something to do. I said to myself, 'What in the world will I set this man to doing? He can't talk English!' So I gave him a bundle of little handbills, and put him out on the corner of the greatest thoroughfare of Chicago, and let him give them out, inviting people to come up and hear me preach. A man would come along and take it, and see 'Gospel meeting,' and would turn around and curse the fellow; but the Swede would laugh, because he didn't know but he was blessing him. He couldn't tell the difference. A great many men were impressed by that man's being so polite and kind. There he stood, and when winter came and the nights got so dark they could not read those little handbills, he went and got a little transparency and put it up on the corner, and there he took his stand, hot or cold, rain or shine. Many a man was won to Christ by his efforts."
In 1860, when Moody was twenty-three, he made up his mind to give all his time to Christian work. He was led to this by the following incident. He says, "In the Sunday-school I had a pale, delicate young man as one of the teachers. I knew his burning piety, and assigned him to the worst class in the school. They were all girls, and it was an awful class. They kept gadding around in the schoolroom, and were laughing and carrying on all the while. One Sunday he was absent, and I tried myself to teach the class, but couldn't do anything with them; they seemed farther off than ever from any concern about their souls. Well, the day after his absence, early Monday morning, the young man came into the store where I worked, and, tottering and bloodless, threw himself down on some boxes.
"'I have been bleeding at the lungs, and they have given me up to die,' he said.
"'But you are not afraid to die?' I questioned.