[Next Project] The Way to God and How To Find It by D. L. Moody

[Jon Erdman]

Since I would like to read something that's not by Ring Lardner for the first time in probably six months, I decided to change things up and do some nonfiction.

This book is over 40k words and it's a theological work written from an Evangelical Christian perspective. Should be no issues with the collections policy since it's a book about religion rather than a religious text. Moody is a very significant figure in the history of Christianity in the United States, so he'd be a meaningful addition to the corpus.

I haven't created a repo yet because we'd have to make a canonical decision of how we'd present his byline in case more of his work gets produced for SE. In print, you almost always see his name as D. L. Moody, so even though Gutenberg uses his full name of Dwight Lyman Moody, I propose that D. L. Moody is what we should use. It's what people familiar with him will be looking for.

Scans: https://archive.org/details/waytogodhowtof00mood

Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30449

[Alex Cabal]

OK, sure. Yes, use D. L. Moody. We typically prefer the bylines used in
actual print unless some special exception is warranted.

Please send a link to your repo once you start.

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[Jon Erdman]

Repo link: https://github.com/homestar92/d-l-moody_the-way-to-god-and-how-to-find-it

[Alex Cabal]

Ok, Robin will manage with Weijia reviewing.

On 5/4/26 8:27 PM, Jon Erdman wrote:
> Repo link: https://github.com/homestar92/d-l-moody_the-way-to-god-and-
> how-to-find-it

> > Scans: https://archive.org/details/waytogodhowtof00mood <https://
> archive.org/details/waytogodhowtof00mood>
> > Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30449 <https://
> www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30449>

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[Weijia Cheng]

Ok, noted.

[Jon Erdman]

Am I correct in my assumption that I should not keep changes made by modernize-spelling if the Bible is being quoted? I don't think a reader would find it jarring to find older spellings of words when the King James Bible is being quoted, since it's pretty much expected that text from the King James Bible will use archaic spellings. I know that the chapter and verse references do get modernized, so I'm just focused on actual Biblical text quotations.

[Weijia Cheng]

It would probably be helpful if you showed a specific example of a spelling you think should be kept.

[Jon Erdman]

Sure! Here's one example:

Modernize-spelling wants to modernize "for evermore" to "forevermore". Which is probably the right call if it's straight prose, but I'm not sure, since it's quoting scripture, if we should leave it alone since having "for evermore" as two words is the canonical text of the King James Version of the Bible. There are several other passages that use either "for ever" or "for evermore" in the context of a quote from the Bible, so I'll assume same logic applies throughout.

Another interesting one is this one:

modernize-spelling obviously wants to change "to-day" to "today". This one is interesting though, because every physical KJV Bible that I own renders it as "to day" (two words, no dash) as do online ones that I consulted. 

So that's basically the question - it's not even that scripture needs to be regarded as a special case for SE purposes as it is a matter of him quoting a primary source and that primary source having a canonical way of being rendered.

[Alex Cabal]

We surely have had Bible quotations elsewhere in the corpus and this has
never come up, so we must have modernized them in the past and therefore
I think it's fine to modernize them here. As you can see based on
to-day, it's not like historically writers/printers were being
especially careful anyway.

On 5/6/26 3:45 PM, Jon Erdman wrote:
> Sure! Here's one example:
>

> Screenshot 2026-05-06 163417.png
> Modernize-spelling wants to modernize "for evermore" to "forevermore".
> Which is probably the right call if it's straight prose, but I'm not
> sure, since it's quoting scripture, if we should leave it alone since
> having "for evermore" as two words is the canonical text of the King
> James Version of the Bible. There are several other passages that use
> either "for ever" or "for evermore" in the context of a quote from the
> Bible, so I'll assume same logic applies throughout.
>
> Another interesting one is this one:

> moody_the-way-to-god-and- <https://github.com/
> homestar92/d-l-moody_the-way-to-god-and->

> waytogodhowtof00mood> <https://
> > archive.org/details/waytogodhowtof00mood <http://
> archive.org/details/waytogodhowtof00mood>>
> > > Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30449
> <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30449> <https://
> > www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30449 <http://

> www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30449>>
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[Vince]

We do and we have. And there isn’t really a “canonical way of being rendered” for KJV. Like any book, the KJV went through numerous editions over the (three hundred) years, and each one adjusted spelling and in some cases phrasing. Making the kind of soundalike-only changes we make (I expected one of the differences to be “show” vs “shew”) do much less violence to the text than any of the editions themselves did to previous editions.