A Message from Fanny Crosby the Prisoner Is a Man an Innocent Prisoner a Modern Miracle Eleventh Annual Prisoners' Number Binsba
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Eleventh Annual Prisoners' Number 50 Cents a Year PUBLISHED MONTHLY Single Copies, 10 Cents A Message from Fanny Crosby The Prisoner Is a Man An Innocent Prisoner A Modern Miracle Volume Cbtrteen Mar, 1910 'number tive binsbale, 1111. This Issue One-Half Larder Than Usual. Price 10c 2a} u. `7 vast expanseofwaterinthe directionofadistresssignal. The shorepatrolmanfromthe NewYorklifesavingstation,withhishandshading hiseyes,Wokingouteverthe H Y ORD IVETH—LIGHT Allilli gneelinnowseesareereareare," An Illustrated rionthly Journal Devoted to Charitable, Philanthropic, Health and Soul-Winning Work. lititored as second-elan matter, July zy, too, at the Pesteffica at Hinsdale, HI., under Act et Congress of March y, eft. Volume X111 HINSDALE, ILL. :: MAY, 1910 Number 5 A Genuine Moral and Physical Transformation A most inspiring and instructive article appeared in the March Ladics' Home Journal, written by a life term prisoner in the Sing Sing prison. His experience impressed us so strongly that we asked permission to republish it in this special number. No one can read it without becoming profoundly interested.—ED. LIFE B OAT. WAS born in New York City thirty allied himself with various free-thought years ago next July. My parents were organizations. I Southerners, Mother being a Mary- THE "DO AS YOU PLEASE" CREED. lander and Father from East Tennessee and During all of my boyhood I was thrown Kentucky. My father's mother was a wo- into the company of people much older man of remarkable power and efficiency than myself, and because of my father's land a hard worker all her life. She taught liberal views these were mostly people of school in various places; she became in- no religious beliefs, but skeptics and af- terested in phonography and aided in the firmed atheists. The creed of these people promulgation of that study; she taught was "Do as you please," and generally they phonetic classes, became a university lived up to it. I was taught to do likewise. IA teacher, and, finally, compiled an improved It was a kind of pragmatic atmosphere—all phonetic shorthand system. She did a things were to be judged by results, and if wonderful work as I now see it, and I the results proved good the means could speak of her at this length because she is not have been ill. I was taught that there the possible explanation of a part of my life was no will higher than my own: that in at least. very truth I was "Captain of my soul" and For it was from this mother that my must give account to no one save my own father received a heritage of independent conscience. This, as the years went by, be- thought which led him to discard the truths came easy because I had little conscience, of Christianity, probably not from his life, and what I had was so perverted that it was but certainly from his affirmation, and he worse than none. My habits were formed 130 THE LIFE BOAT. early. I learned to smoke at five or six. I the shop, being depended upon to do a was allowed to eat a miscellaneous lot of variety of odd jobs which were so infre- fodder, of which meat formed a large per- quent that no one person was assigned to centage and sweets and pastries another. them. I ingratiated myself in the good will Wine, beer and whisky were almost always of the officer in charge, and after about". in the house, and from the time I was ten eighteen months he permitted—even re- I was allowed beer if I wanted it. quested, I believe—my transfer to the print- THE CRIMINAL ALPHABET. ing department. There I worked on a case and did stone work for about five months, I was bad. I was not more than six or taking to the trade like a fish to water, and seven when I learned to steal pennies. was then made foreman, having entire From this beginning I never lost the habit charge of stock and the direction of forty of considering other people's property as or fifty men. This position I held with my own if I could get it. During my school- more or less credit for three years, when, ing I was dismissed from every school I a citizen instructor being employed, I was attended save two in my very early boy- transferred to the offices of the industrial hood, and, finally, when I was sixteen I departments, though I still retained charge went to work. But I shifted from one job of stock in the printing office and really did to another or loafed at home. I went from the bulk of the work which I had been bad to worse, and at seventeen I was about doing. as immoral a lad as one could find. I knew, I had lived in the prison a more or less after a fashion, that I was doing wrong, but disorderly life, stealing what I wanted if I conscience was warped and I didn't care. could and having several fights, being pun- At eighteen I fell in love with a young ished in the dungeon for one at which I was woman—one of the very few women who caught. I gave free reign to my temper excited only pure thought in my mind—and and was noted among the twelve hundred through her influence largely I was bap- or more inmates as having a reputation tized and confirmed in the Episcopal about as unsavory as it could well be in a Church. But no one told me much about prison. the salvation possible for a man like me— they mostly preached "Be good" without CHRIST SHONE ALL THROUGH HER. giving any adequate reason why I should One day a woman, perhaps sixty years be. It was not long before the parents of old, came as a visiting missionary to the this girl, quite rightly, gave me orders to prison. She talked to me, perhaps half an keep away and she was forbidden to hold hour. This woman brought to me the mes- any intercourse with me and I went back sage of Christ, and, though at this first to the old ways. interview with her I would not allow her to Of course, when a man begins to live in tell me of Him, yet He shone all through a sewer he naturally gravitates lower and her person and speech and spoke to me. lower. And one day I killed a man, a per- She made me stop and think—something I soriarlfriend, for what money he had on his had never done before. I saw in the future person. Thirty-six hours later I was ar- nothing but a blankness, a death in life—a rested. After a year in jail I was tried and life in death—and the years stretched out convicted of murder in the second degree before me as level as a sheet of paper and and sent to prison for life. This was ten with absolutely no horizon. I was living years ago: when I was twenty, to no purpose; my life had no objective; I MAKING GOOD IN PRISON. was a vegetable. When I came to prison I was put to work For two months after this meeting with on a sewing-machine, mending the shirts the missionary I thought much and finally and underclothing of the other inmates. concluded that without decency and Chris- My mind, young as I was, had not been tianity I could not do anything in life, with destroyed, and as I was quick to compre- the result that I gave my life to Christ—in hend I was a little later allowed the run of a word, was converted. That was in 1906. THE LIFE BOAT. 131 Since then I have grown in strength until There were other ills minor in degree, but now, instead of the old reputation for law- most unpleasant and denoting imperfect lessness, I am known from one end of the blood condition (for it is true that the blood .prison to the other as a Christian. My life is life, and where there is pure blood there is changed and is now entirely devoted to will be perfect health), and I wanted, quite Him. During the daytime I am employed naturally, to get rid of them all. I had been as stenographer to one of the officials, and treated by physicians for the skin eruption, my evenings are spent in choir work, of one having called it neurosis (probably cor- which body I am the conductor, and in pre- rectly) and prescribing bromides, while the paring myself in divers ways for the service other did not name it but treated it locally. of Christ. Sometimes in the early mornings But there was no relief because the symp- I write, as these pages have been written, tom was being treated rather than the afterward being transcribed on the ma- cause; and one day, while waiting for the chine. No longer is my life that of a squash physician, his attendant said to me: "The (I don't like squash), but it has an ideal— trouble is you are too fat." And I left that an objective. room with a bee in my bonnet. EATING TO THE GLORY OF GOD. EXPERIMENTING WITH FLETCHERISM. I felt my life was clean of past sins and It was then that I heard of Horace that it was "up to me" to keep it so. I Fletcher and his so-called "Fletcherism." I knew that I had been given a new start in read of how Mr.