spiritually poor and blind and bruised and imprisoned, but its
historical setting suggests the improvement of temporal conditions.
Indeed, the twentieth century test of Christianity is its ability to do
this very thing--to produce social values.
Jesus Christ astonished His hearers by His stupendous claims. His
program sounded pretentious, and it was, for one who was less than the
highest type of man and the very God himself. Do you comprehend the
scope of Christ’s undertaking? He himself defined it:
“To preach good tidings to the poor”--Almshouses.
“To proclaim release to captives”--Prisons.
“Recovery of sight to the blind”--Asylums.
“To set at liberty them that are bruised”--Hospitals.
He proposed a program of happiness for almshouses, health for hospitals,
healing for asylums and freedom for prisons.
He announced that His presence brought the joyful year of jubilee, when
liberty was proclaimed to slaves, release to debtors and the restoration
of family estates to their dispossessed owners. In His mind the jubilee
year typified the Messianic era, the period of the bestowment of a free,
full and finished salvation. Oh! glorious era, foreseen in prophecy,
inaugurated by Jesus, and drawing near through the benevolent efforts of
this and similar organizations.
What then was the message and the meaning of Christ’s life as related to
prisoners? I answer: He preached an evangel of emancipation. He
proclaimed the privileges of the pardon. He promised a supernal splendor
to the penitent.
He sanctioned punishment. Punishment is justified mainly upon three
grounds: The vindication of the law, the protection of society and the
reformation of the wrongdoer.
Jesus Christ sanctioned it for the same reasons. In the sublimest
discourse ever delivered upon this earth he declared: “I am not come to
destroy the law. I came not to destroy but to fulfil; for verily I say
unto you, Until heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no
wise pass from the law, until all be fulfilled.” Many of His acts were
performed in order that “it might be fulfilled,” and the pendulum of His
life swung through the arc of obedience. Among the elements entering
into the mystery of the atonement is Christ’s vindication of that law,
“The wicked shall not go unpunished,” by bearing the penalty in His own
body on the tree.
Another ground for the imprisonment of the criminal is the protection of
society. The Saviour’s entire life gives authority and force to that
position. Did He not teach that it is better for one member to suffer
than the whole body? that the commonweal should control individual
conduct? and did he not leave a violent robber unpardoned on the cross,
whose liberty might have disturbed the public order?
You teach that punishment is also reformatory, and with you the
Scriptures agree. To be very accurate, we should say that justice is
satisfied by punishment, and the wrongdoer is disciplined by
chastisement. Punishment is for the good of the law, and chastisement is
for the good of the sufferer. Incarceration is intended to _reform_ the
prisoner as much as to punish him. While rebuking the lawless, you seek
to help him back to an honorable career. This you attempt, not by a
maudlin and demoralizing sentiment, which minimizes guilt or ignores
wrong, but by a sympathetic and educational administration of prisons.
Sufficient support is found in the Bible for chastisement. Indeed, to
spare the rod would more certainly harm the criminal than it would spoil
the child. The rod of chastening, however, must not be held by a
vindictive hand, but by one of love, and its strokes modified by a
knowledge of the offender. Then it may become the saving agent in the
life of the criminal, as the crosses of the thieves enabled them to see
the cross of Christ.
Society writes over the convict’s Inferno, “Abandon hope, all ye that
enter here.” Even Byron was more cheerful and charitable. His prisoner
of Chillon, doomed to solitary despair, saw a rift in his prison walls.
Dragging his chain, he climbed upward and looked through. There lay the
silver lake framed in the mountains, and the blue heavens over all. As
he gazed through tears for his dead brother, a bird began to sing:
A lovely bird with azure wings,
And song that said a thousand things,
And seemed to say them all for me.
The gospel sheds upon the prisoner the ray of light, uncovers to him the
glad sky, thrills him with songs of redemption and inspires him with the
hope of a better life. This must ever be the method of all successful
prison reforms.
Reclamation is impossible except by creating self-respect and enkindling
hope. To know that good behavior shortens the term incites all save the
incorrigibly bad to a noble life. To sit in a dungeon of despair must
make the prisoner indifferent to all the good without.
Two young women artists have painted a great picture, which should hang
in every prison where all prisoners can see it. The benignant face of
Jesus, full of love and compassion, stands out in glorious relief. A
poor man, whom each prisoner might take to be himself, kneels with his
back to the observer. The Master’s hand is stretched toward the kneeling
form, and He is saying, not in rebuke, but in hope, “I condemn thee not;
go and sin no more.” We decorate our libraries and public buildings with
suggestive mottoes and inspiring scenes of history. We leave the
prisoner to gaze through iron bars or look upon bare walls. Jesus Christ
would adorn those walls with pictures of hope.
Jesus was not a reformer, but a Redeemer. He reforms man by regenerating
him. His mission was not to Pharisees, but to publicans, and in his day
the publicans and harlots entered in before the self-righteous.
He came to seek that which was lost. The modern church ministers mostly
to the saved. Jesus showed a more excellent way. A convicted robber was
the first fruit of the cross, and Gibbon records that the first
Christian devotees were social outcasts.
Yes, Christ came to set the captives free--free from their old
natures--by making them new creatures, free from the dominion of sin by
providing them with the power of righteousness; free from the bondage of
despair by enkindling a fadeless hope.
While blest with a sense of His love,
A palace a toy would appear;
And prisons would palaces prove
If Jesus would dwell with me there.
If we could completely change the nature of all prisoners in America, so
that they would henceforth love good and hate evil, I venture that this
congress would vote in favor of opening the jails and freeing the
captives. Nothing short of that is the Gospel program.
Do you remind me that this is ideal? I grant it, but our ideals are the
tides of the moon that lift the waters from the ocean of the
commonplace. We shall not lower the standards to our lives, but rather
raise our lives to our standards. When the decree of papal infallibility
was declared there was loud and tumultuous confusion in St. Peter’s.
Archbishop Manning, of England, standing upon an elevation and pale with
excitement, held the decree aloft in his hands, and exclaimed: “Let the
whole world go to bits, and we will reconstruct it with this paper.” To
all of the pessimists and doubters, amid all the clamor and criticism of
the world, we hold aloft the glorious Gospel of the Son of God, and say,
“Let society go to pieces, and we will reconstruct it with this truth.”
Christ proclaimed the privileges of the pardoned. One privilege is to
live without suspicion. A certain writer in a recent and readable book
takes the position that when a man is sent to the penitentiary even for
a year, he is sent there for life, since he will always be regarded as a
convict. Therefore, he concludes that a man ought not to be sent to the
penitentiary at all. The fact which he states must be admitted with
regret, but to adopt his conclusion would encourage wrongdoing and
subvert the moral order.
True prison reformers will prefer the method of Jesus. When He forgives
a sinner, He blots out the memory of his past life. The debt of sin is
not only canceled, but erased. The pardoned are permitted to go in
peace. How long will it take a Christian people to imbibe the spirit and
imitate the example of their Lord?
The only stigma which He allowed to remain was that in the sinner’s own
memory. God forgives and forgets, but the forgiven sinner can never
forget. The nails are out, but the holes are there still; there, mark
you, to be seen only by himself. God remembers them no more, and God’s
people, in beautiful and divine charity, ought to cover them from their
eyes and thoughts.
When we shall have attained to this standard set by our Lord, we shall
have gone a long way toward solving the problem of the ex-prisoner. To
that noble end this Association is moving.
Society has no more perplexing question than the treatment of prisoners
who have served out their sentence and desire to lead new lives.
Minister as I am, I must confess that the average church member is
unwilling to receive the ex-prisoner into his home, or even to look him
in the face. People whose only superiority consists in that they have
never been convicted scornfully raise their skirts and pass by on the
other side. The punishment which society inflicts is more intolerable to
the sensitive soul than confinement in prison walls. The ex-prisoner is
free, but not restored.
Vastly different from modern society was the attitude of Jesus. He
received publicans and ate with them. He went to be the guest of one
who was a sinner, and he welcomed the approach of the shame-covered,
broken-hearted woman, who came with her tears of penitence and alabaster
of affection.
As the last Christmas approached a kind-hearted friend conceived the
idea of securing a pardon for a young man who had committed a crime in
hot haste, and was apparently penitent and reformed.
The Christian man said, “I want to present him to his mother as a
Christmas gift.” Armed with the pardon, he called at the penitentiary.
“Andrew,” he said, “what would you think if I were to tell you I am
going to get you a pardon?”
“Oh, sir, I would think it was too good to be true!”
“What would you say if I told you I had your pardon in my pocket?”
The young man threw himself at his benefactor’s feet, clasped his knees
devotedly and said: “Oh, captain, have you got it? Have you got it?
Thank you, sir; thank you! Thank God! Thank God!”
The friend dressed him in citizen’s clothes and escorted him to the
priest (he was a Catholic), and had him swear faithfulness; then took
him to his own home for supper, and treated him as a member of the
family.
Christmas eve they rode together to the prodigal’s far-away home. The
train did not run fast enough, and the impatient youth, with sleepless
eyes, read the name of every station. Tenderly did he cling to the
friend, and gratefully did he thank him. As the train pulled into the
home depot brothers, sisters and widowed mother were there to receive
with tears and caresses the returning boy, and they were as happy that
night as the home of the prodigal’s father in the long ago.
The friend saw him safely among his family, and turned to go; but, no,
they clung to him, they praised him, they prayed God to be good to him,
and the ex-convict said, “You have treated me like a son and helped me
to be a man.”
My friends, if we had more of the Christian religion in our treatment of
the erring, we would make it harder for them to do wrong and easier for
them to do right.
The lot of the ex-convict is an exceedingly sad one. Be he ever so
anxious to make a new start, he cannot do so without the encouragement
of his more fortunate mortals.
How few concern themselves for him! Who will give him the hand of
greeting? What business firm will trust or employ him? He needs help and
cannot rise without it, and a nominal Christian public refuses to give
it. They let him wander forth like King Lear, with uncovered head, into
the dense darkness and sweeping storm.
Now the people who help that man to his feet again are the true
disciples of Jesus. Excepting alone His purity, Jesus’ most striking
trait was His capacity for tenderness and helpfulness toward the
straying. He believed in giving the unfortunate another chance, and that
is what He meant when He said, “Go and sin no more.” Go, be a clean,
respectable and successful woman. Go, and I am with you.
Paul wrote Philemon to receive back the runaway slave, Onesimus, and
treat him as a brother. A prisoner is not fully saved until he is saved
to society. He is not saved to society until he earns an honest living,
and he cannot earn an honest living without the help of the more
fortunate.
Fiction tells of one injured by his own sin, brutalized by injustice,
and finally changed after nineteen years of imprisonment, who built
factories, became a banker, founded a hospital for sick women, and an
industrial school for children, and made a city and filled it with the
hum of industry.
One day my ’phone rang, and I was asked by a Hebrew merchant and banker
in this city to make an engagement to meet him and a young man in whom
he was interested.
I called at the appointed time at the bank, and the business man said:
“Doctor, this is Mr. Blank. He is one of the unfortunates. He ended his
term in the prison last week, and I have secured him a position in a
shoe factory. His mother is a Baptist, and I tell him he ought to be
under the wing of the church, and I know you will help him and be his
spiritual adviser.”
Beloved, that was a unique and joyful experience. A Jew committing to
the care of a Christian minister an ex-convict!
The young man was full of appreciation. He promised to meet me at the
Sunday school the following Sunday morning. He was there bright and
early. On his face shone the light that never was seen on land or sea.
With joyful emotion he confessed: “I have given my heart to Jesus since
I saw you. He forgave my sins at the tent meeting Wednesday night. My
mother wants me to join her church, and I told her I promised to meet
you here this morning, and I must keep my promise.”
You may be sure the minister was almost as happy as the convert, and
very heartily was the young man urged to join his mother’s church. He
did so, and is now a circumspect Christian and a self-supporting member
of the community.
Jesus in His day found the greatest faith in a Gentile, and, lo! in our
day, I have found the finest flower of Christian charity and helpfulness
in a Jew!
He promised garlands of joy. Reverting to the prophecy in Isaiah, we
find the beautiful promise to captive Israel: “Garlands for ashes, the
oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of
heaviness.” One day they shall arise from the ashes of humiliation and
march forth with garlands of victory wreathing their brow. Their weeping
may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning. Their broken
spirits have humbled their frames, but they shall yet stand erect and
beautiful in the garments of praise. The Gospel penetrated the prison
walls with that joyous news. And every chaplain who ministers to those
behind the bars may promise them a salvation as full and free as any
bishop offers to his parishioners.
God is no respecter of persons. If He is on one side more than another,
it is the side of the weak. And often we are reminded that the
compensations of salvation more than balance the losses of sin. “Where
sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”
Again, our prophecy says: “They shall be called trees of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.” The Gospel
undertakes the task of cleansing the defiled and clothing him in robes
of righteousness. It proposes to make possible the survival of the
unfit. It goes to the prisoner with this message of cheer and
confidence: “You have been weak and wicked. You may be strong and
upright. You have been a brittle reed, bent and broken by the winds of
temptation. You may become a stalwart oak, withstanding all storms.”
And this strength and goodness come through the abounding grace of God,
which flows from Christ into the sinner’s heart through the channel of
faith. It is sufficient for all spiritual needs and is able to save unto
the uttermost. It not only changes the heart, but the life, and brings
forth fruits of repentance and righteousness.
To deny such power in the Gospel is to manifest the deepest _unfaith_
and to doom to despair every repentant prisoner. And any man who does
that is not worthy of a position in penal institutions. To believe it is
to feel a solemn and binding obligation to commend that Gospel to the
prisoner. Every prison official then seeks to better the moral and
spiritual condition of the prisoners. He feels for them the unutterable
compassion of Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost, and
he sees underneath the prison garb the marred image of Deity, which may
yet be restored and glow with the image of the heavenly.
The mission of the prison is for this more than for the protection of
the innocent. It is for the reclamation and _restoration_ of the
delinquent. Leaving such an institution, the ex-prisoner might truly
say: “I came in a thief, I leave an honest man; I entered a murderer, I
depart loving God and man. My conscience, which once made me a coward,
now makes me a true man.”
The supreme hour of Christ’s passion was devoted to two convicts. Let us
stand a moment around that cross and hear the message it speaks to us.
Does it not say, “The law must be executed”? for Jesus refused to accept
the challenge to come down from the cross, and one of the malefactors by
His side said they were receiving a just penalty for their crimes.
Does it not also say, “There is redemption for the penitent thief”? for
when one cried, “Lord, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom,” the
answer came swifter than light and sweeter than the murmur of the
evening zephyrs, “To-day thou shalt be with Me in paradise.”
Christ gave them both the same chance. One died in stubborn rebellion
and was lost. The other turned in humble supplication and was instantly
transformed from a criminal to a Christian. When heaven lifted up her
gates for the King of Glory to come in, and He swept through the
celestial portals, He took with Him the penitent thief as a first sheaf
of the harvest of prison redemption.
The great poets have as their theme the loss and redemption of the
immortal soul. Homer sings the wrath of Peleus’ son in the “Iliad,” and
shows how one sin destroyed a building that many virtues support. Virgil
sings the wandering of Anchises in the “Æneid,” and describes how youth
sails afar, while maturity seeks out ports of peace. Dante sings of the
soul’s stain by sin in the “Divine Comedy,” and preaches its
purification and perfection. Milton sings of man’s first disobedience
and the fruit of the forbidden tree in the “Paradise Lost,” and
“justifies the ways of God to man” in the victory of “Paradise
Regained.” Tennyson sings of the error that ruins the soul in the
“Idylls of the King” and beholds the Divine Friend, whose ceaseless
efforts recover the undimmed glory.
Victor Hugo sings of the sin which defaces the divine image and which
sears the conscience in “Les Miserables,” and exhibits the melting mercy
and lasting love which recover the pristine splendor. That book is
unique among the world’s literature in showing that in the heart of the
meanest man is a nucleus of good around which a noble character may be
grown.
Victor Hugo could never have written this immortal work had he not known
Jesus Christ. Jean Valjean, the youthful criminal, after nineteen years,
emerged from the prison with a heart as cold as marble and a will as
hard as granite. Tides of revenge tossed through his soul like billows
in a storm. Society has robbed him, and now he will rob society. The
inhumanity of man has all but quenched the last spark of the divine
within him.
In front of this convict, furious with the black wolves of hatred, Hugo,
with the hand of a master, places the good bishop, sympathetic as
divinity and patient as destiny. He speaks as an apostle of love, “We
are ourselves ex-prisoners; let us be charitable.” As an apostle of
justice, he declares, “The State that permits ignorance and darkness for
the youth should now be sent to _jail with the thief_.”
Landlords close their doors to despised Jean Valjean. A woman casts her
bread to dogs while he goes hungry. Coming to the bishop’s door, he is
welcomed. “Sit down and be warmed, sir, and sleep and lodge with me. You
are my brother. Take this money and never forget you have promised me to
employ it in becoming an honest man.”
Conscience whispers, “Jean, you may go up by the bishop and be an angel,
or stay below with the demons and be a devil.”
In that hour the sleeping virtues of his nature awoke, and he arose to
return to God to sanctify his life. The thought of doing wrong went
through him like a knife, and he became incapable of stealing. The
bishop’s smiles filled his heart with unspeakable happiness, and the
power of God transformed the sinner into the saint.
In the end, when emaciated by suffering, scarred by many battles with
wrong, he lay down to die, he said: “My children, remember God is above.
He sees all. He is Love.”
They saw him looking, like Stephen, into the open heavens, and heard him
say, “I know not what is the matter with me, but _I see light_.”
And the waiting angels bore his spirit away to the land of eternal day.
EVENING
The evening session was held in Beth Ahabah Temple. Homer Folks,
Secretary of the New York State Charities Aid Association, presented the
following report of the Committee on Prevention and Probation:
“To the average person the word ‘crime’ suggests some isolated act of an
individual, having as to its origin little relation presumably to his
other acts, still less relation to other persons, and no relation
whatever to the community at large, except in its unfortunate effects.
The instinctive feeling of the average person to the criminal is that he
is an irrational being, and our hope is that he may be put away, or at
least kept a safe distance from us. The average person’s philosophy of
crime is intensely individualistic.
“There are those, however, who challenge this view and deny it
absolutely. Crime, they say, is not essentially individual; it is
actually a social product, the result of a faulty social system. Adopt
their plan of social reorganization and in their opinion crime will
disappear. Without accepting the too easy optimism of the reconstructors
of society, it is evident that their point of view is a valuable
corrective of the extreme individuality of our earlier views. It must be
evident to anyone who keeps his eyes open and tries to be honest with
himself that crime is a joint product of the individual and his
environment. A crime is not an isolated act; it is, as a rule, the last
step in a long process. It is at once a symptom and a result; a symptom
of instability, a result of deterioration. It is the appearance at the
surface of a stream whose source is far back, but which is for the
greater part of the distance entirely hidden or not easily observable.
It is an unwelcome fruit, but it has slowly ripened, in our presence,
and on a tree which we have permitted to grow. The process of
deterioration ending in crime is the resultant of the reaction upon the
individual of the sum total of influences, economic facts and
associations constituting his environment.