Decision on Mount Hermon

Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, has been waiting expectantly for years beside the Connecticut River, waiting for the Mount Hermon Conference to reconvene. Up to this day, however, it has not seen the like. Though many decades have passed since then, the effect the conference had on the students who participated and on many other people in countries around the world has scarcely been surpassed.

Dwight Moody had called the conference, the first national intercollegiate Bible study in America. Mr. Moody was one of the two or three most prominent evangelists in American history to that day, an unlettered ex-shoe salesman whose message commanded the attention of English nobility as easily as that of his beloved street urchins he cared for in Chicago.

To a generation resigned to an “every man for himself” approach to life, the immediate outcome of the Mount Hermon Conference may seem strange, though the actions taken were simple enough. By its close, 100 young men had decided to give their lives away in the bright New England summer of 1886.

John R. Mott, in later years a leader in what came to be called the Student Volunteer Movement, was a student then, and by his own reckoning the conference marked a decisive turn in the course of his life. What follows is excerpted from his first-person account, written down when he revisited Mount Hermon years later:

“There came together here at Mount Hermon in the month of July, 1886, 251 student delegates. We came from eighty-nine different universities and colleges. With nine of my fellow-students I came from one of the eastern universities, Cornell University.

“The leading universities of Canada were represented, likewise every section of the United States, unless it was the Pacific Coast. There were some quite large delegations, especially from Dartmouth, Amherst, Yale, Cornell, and Randolph-Macon, one of the colleges of Virginia.

“Among the delegates were a few professors and teachers, but speaking generally, it was an undergraduate gathering. We met for a period of four weeks…. We had one platform meeting each day, which was what we might call a double-header or a triple-header.

“Another feature of the daily program was the little company—little, I say, although before the conference was over it included nearly every delegate—which met for an hour every morning to discuss methods of carrying on work among our fellow students in the schools and colleges.

“In the long afternoons and in the early evening, often beneath these beautiful elm trees … I remember discussions about the superhuman work of Christ in conversion, about the principles that should guide one in choosing a lifework, about the second coming of our Lord. As a result of these many discussions under the trees, possibly even more than through public addresses, men’s doubts were dissipated,” and their faith became a reality.