[I] am just transported into another world. A world that one cannot help but see, feel, hear the goodness and the love of God. I now am never able to put into words what I feel, but it is there, and [I] know I am better able to at least try and serve others better when I have been with you.
Three years after meeting Beatrice, Edgar suffered a stroke which resulted in complete paralysis of the entire left side of his body. He was sent to Roanoke, Virginia, to recover. Knowing the end was approaching and wishing to die in the company of friends and family, he asked to be driven home. But on the drive back to Virginia Beach he requested the ambulance take a detour to Blackstone. He wished to see Little Anna one last time.
Beatrice and Richmond Seay were not home when Edgar’s ambulance arrived in their driveway. They, too, had sensed that the end was near and had driven to Virginia Beach in hopes of seeing him for one last time. They had left for Virginia Beach while the ambulance was driving to Blackstone.
Beatrice never got to say goodbye to her beloved Edgar, just as, some forty-years earlier, Eddy had been too late to say goodbye to Little Anna.
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
