RELEASE
THE PROLOGUE
IN one moment I was a confirmed criminal. In the next I was healed. It was done that quickly. Several have since told me I had come under the grace of God and the action of the Holy Spirit. This I cannot affirm. Nor can I deny it. Frankly I do not know.
I cannot explain the mystery of it. I only know that it was an inner experience of some sort, a huge and different experience. Many men and women have sat down with me to offer their explanations. They’ve spoken with what seemed authority. Yet in the sober reflective hour that followed I’ve wondered. I’ve wondered if such wisdom as they possessed was not as foolishness to God. For though the explanations have been many, they have seldom agreed with one another. Perhaps they were half truths, most of them, which made something that was quite simple very complex. I have come to be chary of man’s explanations of God’s ways. I have seen sagacious explanations fall apart and encounter defeat. I have seen the simple act of embracement by the unskilled and unlettered unify and succeed. I have seen righteous men go to pieces because they lacked the quality of mercy. Rarely, if ever, have I seen a merciful man essay to explain the mystery of God. They seem content to accept and act. It may be that a righteous man plus a merciful man equals one who is pure of heart. Says the sixth Beatitude, such a man shall see God.
Jesus was such a man. He likened the Kingdom of God; but He did not explain its mystery. It was given to His disciples to know the mystery of God and the Kingdom. They wrote no books to explain it. They pointed the way. They did not dissect it. “Here is the road,” they said. “It’s to be travelled: not torn up. It goes to a certain destination. Trust and travel will get you there.”
A man with a pick tearing up the road as he goes, pausing long enough to analyse the stuff out of which the road is made, will progress an inch to the trustful traveller’s mile. It is just possible that analysis and explanation of God’s Highway offers a dignified excuse for retarding the journey. I’ve never known a man who possessed the Cross who later explained its mystery. Its critics deny it. Those who look longingly upon it from a distance write books about it, weighty, unreadable books; and deliver addresses, tedious, insufferable addresses.
Always, however, I’ve been willing to inquire of others more gifted than I in superphysical matters. I have described this transforming experience of mine, frankly, and up to the limit of my memory and ability. I’ve said that in one tense, dark moment in my life a warm spring of living water welled up in my heart, and a bright unearthly light broke in my head.
I have said this, also, to a few who likewise had experienced the blessing. These have replied in effect, “Yes, yes, that’s it,” substituting silence for further explanation.
Apparently those most able to explain these deep, inner experiences of the human soul are those, who, not having had the experience themselves, have been sufficiently detached to study its peculiar action in others, and sufficiently bold to report their findings.
By way of explanation, about the best I can say is that for at least a moment in time I was free of the Time and Space sense; that I knew Reality and knew why I knew it. All of which is no explanation, save for those who are able to say, “Yes, yes, that’s it.” In this book I shall attempt to describe my experience. I shall not try to explain its mystery. I may state or imply personal conclusions; but not dogmatic ones. I am aware that in describing the experience I shall greatly circumscribe it.
Of an able psychologist I asked, “How do you account for it?” after I had related the occurrence. His reply was prompt and without hesitation, a fact which lessened the power of his authority to speak.
He explained that we have all sorts of psychological abnormalities. We were possessed of many inferior selves, which often found amusement at our expense. They made us walk and talk in our sleep, and do all manner of odd and freakish things while we were awake, such as using baby talk, mumbling to ourselves, telling lies and fantastical stories, nursing resentments and holding harmful grudges. They caused us to have delusions, exhibit queer mannerisms, airs and pretensions. They caused us to see visions and have hallucinations. They caused us to affect the saint complex, the martyr complex, and to believe in answered prayer when the answer was nothing but the reflex action of auto-suggestion, or self-hypnosis. They caused us to develop religious paranoia, the Hallelujah personality, the divine-wedding neuroses, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
“Your experience could probably be traced to the prankishness of one of these inferior selves,” he finished. “It was like some sort of exalted hallucination.”
“Would you say that my ingrained criminal character was reversed by a delusion or hallucination?” I inquired.
He avoided a direct reply to this, and suggested that for some reason there occurred a sudden and radical sublimation of my negative emotions, which acted as a mental gearshifting, and which simply changed my outlook from a lower to a higher level.
The metaphysicians, too, have been vague on the matter, though genuinely sympathetic and interested. Many theologians have expressed doubt. Others have been silent, or have politely changed the subject.
I know little about credal religion. I want to know much. Apart from my experience I have faith. In the experience itself I have fact. Of that I’m convinced. I write here as one jotting down a record of events, a kind of expository narrative concerning an adventure with the teachings of Jesus in prison. It is a first person document all the way. In this fact there is, I hope, no desire to dramatize myself or unwholesomely to exploit a delicate theme. I would not consciously build up sensational effects to enforce a religious argument or to defend a religious viewpoint. I simply write as one who would report and share an experience which turned my life upside-down.
Over against my experience lies theology. I must admit that here I am at a loss. For me this would be dangerous ground. At the moment, at least, I dare not trespass too far upon it. The pitfalls are too many for a novice. There are able scholars who are at home in this field of religious controversy. They move with confidence and assurance among the conflicting creeds and warring doctrines, while for me the controversial Christ is little known. Were I to attempt an understanding of this Christ my end would surely be confusion and final sterility. I cannot trust myself, therefore, to venture in a Christian orbit alien to my life-changing experience. Hence if the reader finds the personal pronoun too much in evidence, he will know the reason. An expansive experience in one direction has become my limitation in another. I trust that my good intention may counteract the effect of egotism or a too heavy personal psychology.
If I know little of the theology of Christ, what then do I know of Him as life? I have come to see Him as the WAY of life. To me He is the precept and example of all that can be known here concerning Reality. As the example He is the Divine Love working through the love of law As the precept He is the Law of Love made manifest.
I see Christ as the Saviour of mankind, individually and collectively, for except by the Law of Love, I can conceive of no genuine salvation. Nor can I perceive salvation present in the man while the love of law is absent. I see everything, therefore, which is less than Christ, or less than the precept and example for which He stands, as a compromise with destiny: a way, but not the WAY of life.
Likewise I perceive Christianity as man’s noblest hope for the ultimate establishment of a workable social science on earth. I perceive this because I see in Christianity the noblest possibility for the competitive nature of man and the co-operative nature of woman to come together in Christ and live for the good of all. I perceive in Christianity the noblest hope for a workable natural science. One of America’s most distinguished scientists recently remarked to a friend of mine that except for the spiritual application being made of scientific discoveries those were worse than useless. A broad statement, a sweeping indictment, a powerful challenge; but a little thought will justify it. Science without Christ is insufficient. It cannot time its discoveries, nor can it control them. In the absence of a redeemed humanity and an adequate social science what it uncovers as a blessing becomes likewise a curse. Finally I perceive in Christianity the noblest of all experience, direct and conscious contact with God through the ever present medium of Christ and the action of the Holy Spirit.
In this I am not unmindful of religions. (“In my Father’s house are many mansions.”) All are of the same blood, and all are children of the same God. While there are other folds, I only repeat that no religion can aim higher than the Law of Love, nor inspire any loftier sentiment than the love of Law. So far as I know Christ alone of all the great religious leaders advocated an uncompromising “Give yourself.” While the others focused attention upon the self, as a method for self-improvement and final self-conquest, He focused attention on the Kingdom, and on the forgetting of self in the loving service of the neighbour.
Perhaps a secondary difference between the religion of Christ and that of other great religious leaders is to be found in the factor of Grace, which is essentially a Christian tenet, and which belongs to the Christian by virtue of the fact that he recognizes and accepts it as an authoritative gift from the founder of Christianity Himself.
My knowledge of other religious forms precludes the gift of Grace, as I conceive Grace to be. In these other religions there is justice (Karma) and help for those who help themselves. You must reap what you sow. But Christ is not limited to this concept. He breaks through it at will and by special acts of Grace saves those who will not and cannot help themselves. In Him is the hard justice of the righteous man plus the tender love of the merciful man. I shall point out many examples, my own included, in this volume, of men who were saved by Grace in spite of themselves-all testimonies of seemingly unmerited divine mercy. The case of the Apostle Paul is an outstanding historical example of a man who, from a relative point of view, did not merit the Master’s mercy, but who received it nevertheless, and with it an unblemished passport to Glory.
If this Grace were not possible I should in all probability be somewhere today festering in a prison cell, instead of sitting here in my study, a comparatively free man, in a position to go and come at the Master’s beck and call.
To me, then, Christ becomes in practice the love of law: in essence the Law of Love. Not a way, but the WAY! Full of Grace and Mercy and Authority! A Friend and an Intercessor! A warm, colourful personal Friend upon whom we can call! An Advocate who prompts us to act and then responds to our action! A Companion of the road, a Comrade of the quest! One to whom we belong!
I know that so long as I belong to Christ all good belongs to me. I can rest in Him, forcing no issue, allowing what belongs to me to happen at the right time and in the right place. When I belong to Him the next thing that happens in my life has got to be the best thing and the right thing.
As the love of law Christ can with ease obey even the narrow and unreasonable laws of men. He can show His followers how to do likewise, how to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, while in nowise sacrificing the Higher Law in the lesser obedience.
When I read in the Sermon on the Mount that we are to be known by our fruits, I readily conceive this statement to be parabolic, and the term “fruits” to mean actual spiritual experience. Hence what I know myself about religion, about Christ, the Holy Spirit, or about the letter of God’s law does not necessarily constitute the fruits of spiritual experience. What I am by virtue of actual experience of religion, or of Christ, or of the Holy Spirit, or of God’s word, I conceive to be the meaning of this scripture, and by this am-ness or being-ness or is-ness I am to be known.
It is not what I know of the mystery of the blood of Jesus that determines my authority to speak, but what I am in the embracement of that sacrificial blood. In other words, what I am in actual Christian character. Thus I can measure the extent of my own Christian standing by the recognition of my own limitations, and in that recognition I can avoid the academic Christian’s most successful enemy, self-deception. I can say with truth that in those moments when I completely realize that I belong to Christ, I am something. With equal integrity I can say, in the absence of this realization that I am nothing, wholly unworthy, and that were it not for God’s love and Grace, I should perish. Such would be the verdict of untempered justice.
It is not what I know of the mystery of baptism, but how deeply I am immersed in the Spirit of Christ, that counts. It is not what I know of the mystery of the Cross, but how willing I am to hang myself upon it and pay its price, that of the self for the SELF, the little love for the BIG LOVE.
In other words, during the experimental stages we can learn about many phases of the Truth sought. But not until experiment has been translated into experience, ritual into realization, have we become more than intellectually identified with the Truth.
And when a verse later Jesus suggests that we cannot gather grapes from thorns and figs from thistles, I perceive another parable, which tells me that I cannot go back to the old thorns of crime and thistles of Godlessness and expect to continue to gather the grapes of my present well-being. That old life stands for another kind of experiment and experience, which produces after its kind. I must approach LOVE with love and not with reason. “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”
In my beginnings and fumblings with the parabolic teachings of Jesus I ambled along in a sort of studied soberness. The fact is, I have not felt myself fitted for the study of theology, either by intellectual aptitude or temperamental inclination. Consequently I have been more interested in the qualities of Jesus Christ than in the presentation of these qualities. The practice of His states and qualities appeals more to me than the analysis of them. The example applied outweighs the precept studied.
As I see it from this point of vantage, any passage of scripture that builds a wall between a man and Christ as the WAY of life is a passage that should be ignored until it comes to light in experience.
There are scores of such wall-building passages in the Bible, one of the greatest of them being the subject of the Virgin Birth. I do not understand this mystery. Whatever it means I accept on faith, and that puts an end to the matter. The subject stops there. I go on. But it is a mystery that has arrested the spiritual unfoldment of millions, who, by momentarily ignoring it, could have gone forward from glory to glory. Until the spiritual key is given this passage must lead to futile argument, with the danger of ending in pessimistic denial, or death, spiritually speaking. It would be more fruitful to pass on quickly to less hypothetical matters, of which the Bible is rich.
Such is my point of view.
C H A P T E R I
A HOUSE THAT CRIME BUILT
IT PARALLELS a straight stretch of the river. Because of crime it sprawls there, a grim symbol of social protest against the strong-arm methods of the morally sick. A grey-brown scar on a narrow thrust of tableland, it connects the water with an overshadowing pile of limestone, hard cliffs which have slept for incredible ages waiting to be disturbed by the sullen, unwilling hands of future quarry slaves.
Viewed from across the river this huge stone structure resembles some medieval fortress, forbidding, massive; impregnable with its ramparts and gun-turrets, its watch towers and battlements. But thus viewed from afar there is a certain venturesome fascination about it, a lure to fancy and to the memory of things heard and read, such as remote times and conditions, the heydays of the feudal barons, unscrupulous hirelings and cutthroats, armoured knights and prized ladies, love and hate, light laughter and bitter tears: for losing rivals black dungeons, luxurious suites for the winners, mystery, romance, tragedy-it is all here on the curtain of fancy.
Drawing closer, however, the scene changes. Remote memory gives way to the delights of present observation. For, if it be a summer day, one sees a deep, level, well-kept lawn, dotted with shrubs and blooming flowers. Through this lawn curves a wide, clean walk which ends at the steps leading into a stately doorway, broad and high and arched. This doorway is the main entrance into the Administration Building, a rather old and unimposing edifice of red brick and dirty grey stone. Out here in front the gardener’s art has transformed an unsightly acre into a sweep of lush green loveliness, much as an unsightly character is often transformed by the magic art of the Master’s touch. It is upon this beauty that the eye of every prison visitor first falls. And this is good for the visitor whose idea of the prison house has been entirely formed by morbid fiction, and whose idea of a convict has been fashioned out of the stuff from which Big House motion pictures are made.
Just inside the entrance is a huge iron door, which swings ponderously from the hand of a uniformed guard. As a usual thing he is a carefully chosen man. For this particular job a winning smile and a jovial disposition are favourable assets. He is, in fact, quite the equal of any first-rate doorman of any first-rate hotel, minus the latter’s passion for tips and eye for quality luggage. The rule here is, “Abandon luggage ye who enter in.”
Now that we have passed the winning smile and the ponderous door, we find ourselves in a large, rather austere reception room. The tile floor is highly polished by unrewarded toil. The ceiling is lofty, panelled, dust and cobweb free. The walls are spotless and glisten in their calcimine finish. At the far end of the room is a long table, which is divided in the centre by a screen. On one side of the table may be seen men in the regulation prison grey or blue according to their grade. The other side is reserved for their visiting friends and relatives, and of course their lawyers, who come to give them hope, refer mysteriously to new evidence, and thus earn their fee.
Near the opposite end of the visitors’ table is another door, which leads down into the prison proper. It too is manned by a uniformed guard, who may or may not be so genial, for he is closer to the atmosphere of repression and the suffocating reality of prison life.
By now we have a pleasant escort whose speciality is talk. He is a skilled descriptionist. The inner door swings open. Just beyond we pause on the iron platform above the steps which lead down into the prison yard. From this point we get our first bird’s eye view of inside the prison.
We might be looking down a rather drowsy main street. There are no parked cars. What traffic we see consists of a truck or a mule-drawn wagon. There may be a few idlers along the walk, prisoners enjoying the fruits of special privilege. Or a warder or two may be observed loitering near a building. The inevitable convict “runners” are hurrying to and fro with slips of paper in their hands, conveying good news and bad. As we stand here our escort goes into verbal action. He becomes our narrator as well as guide.
“That’s an old foundry way down yonder,” he says, pointing down the street to an old dilapidated brick building. “Don’t use it for that any more. The fires went out with contract labour in this state. The weak sisters used to die down there. The strong boys went mad. She was purty tough around here in those days. The tasks were hard, the hours long, and food was scant and poor. Old-timers still tell about men ramming their hands in molten ladles of metal, jest to get out of the place. A great change since then. It’s used now for a storage house. Just back of it is where we exercise the old ‘stir bugs’. They’re the prison cranks.”
Here he becomes analytical as well as descriptive.
“They makes little ones out of big ones,” he says tritely, and then adds, “if they happen to feel in the mood.”
This last implies official indulgence or kindness. Around election day the enemies of the Administration play it up as “coddling.” He waits for the information to register on our minds. Then: “But mostly they argue politics and prison history. They all know what’s wrong with the world. And you couldn’t find one without a plan for its salvation. None of ‘em are guilty. They’re all victims of circumstances. They know the cause and cure for crime too. Once in awhile they knife each other. Or bang a head instead of a rock.”
He now becomes a solemn authority and prophet: “They’re the old burned out prison lags. Been in most of their lives. They’ll end their days in prison. We call ‘em stir bugs. They’re kind o’ weak minded, childish and silly-like. Man’s apt to get that way after he’s served ten years. It’s a kind of harmless insanity. They jest get over-fond of prison life and grub. Get so they don’t feel at home anywhere else. Some of ‘em have eaten so much prison hash they’ve turned brown on the outside.” Lowering his voice to a confidential tone, he adds, “We’ve got old warders in here jest about as bad.”
He next points out the mess hall and commissary. He directs our gaze to various prison shops, contrasting the old working conditions against the new. He speaks of the hospital building with unveiled pride, referring to it as a modern health plant, and comments lengthily upon its services to the prison body. Pointing to the barber shop he releases an interesting bit of local colour. The barbers used to carry their tools over the prison yard. In the winter time shaving had been a race against freezing lather.
“That’s the new laundry right over there,” he says. “One of the best money can buy. That fat feller across yonder is our butcher. His shop’s in that building he’s holding up. In the back of it is our mattress works, ice plant, tobacco shop and plumbing. The boiler house and power plant’s across the alley. That’s the brick-yard below there. Back over here is the Yard Office. Right behind it, that square dark building, is the solitary, where the boys are punished for misconduct. They call it the ‘hole.’ They always make the best sound the worst. They call the Deputy Warden The Man. He don’t mind it. Away over yonder are the rock quarries and play grounds. You can see the rock crusher and dust mill back there to the right. Stone and dust is our business.”
With this we follow him down the iron steps and enter one of the long cell houses. Pausing just inside the door we gaze down the lengthy corridor with its glistening flagstones, its high barred windows, its massive, towering cell block, with lane upon lane of barred doors which mark the cells of those who have come to the end, temporarily at least, of their careers in crime. Grouped about our escort we begin our pilgrimage around the giant honey-comb of steel and stone.
“These paddles on the doors are the names and numbers of the men inside,” he informs us. We follow him up to one of the doors. Without shame we allow our curious eyes to penetrate the private den of another’s shame, perhaps to judge consciously or unconsciously the occupants, or to feel a shudder or a sense of pity; or, if we are big enough, to feel a surge of gratitude for the grace of God which has spared us from prison fare.
The cell is a tiny, crowded niche. Running across the rear is a shelf draped with a piece of stained cheesecloth. The shelf is piled high with plunder, the convict’s earthly goods. Below the shelf is a small iron door, like the door of a furnace, fitted to a square hole in the rear wall. We are told that here is where the inmate caches his night bucket.
“They’re allowed to decorate their walls with pictures-that is, within reason,” our escort tells us.
In the ceiling near the door is an electric light bulb, under which hangs a small mirror. Across the top of the door is stretched a piece of printed percale with a fringe. This substitutes for a scarf. It is a rather pathetic attempt to relieve the drab interior, to cling to the innate response to beauty. On the floor is a painted water bucket. The cell contains a double-decker iron bunk and two stools. Between the bunk and the opposite wall is a narrow passage eight feet long. The stone floor is pitted with measured hollows, worn there by the pacing feet of many convicts, or perhaps by the feet of one convict who thus has worn away the rock along with his life sentence.
We move on. After a while we come to another cell. Here our guide stops with an air of mystery and an attitude that borders well-nigh on reverence. We all feel his mood and become expectant. We wonder why he is pausing here, especially. In fact, this particular cell seems far less attractive than the other ones we have just examined. Here we see no extra frills or attempts at finery. Save for a small Hoffman Christ Head the place is entirely barren of pictures and other decorative items. There isn’t even the universal cheesecloth shelf cover and percale door scarf. Except for an ancient Bible and a couple of other worn, thin volumes the shelf is bare. The cell, however, is clean, scrupulously clean, and we seem to sense something of the character of the man who occupies it. The paddle on the door, too, seems to hold our attention. It has the appearance of great age. We have to draw close to make out the faded name and number on it.
“He’s our senior prisoner, our first man,” says the guide, as though he were awed by this fact. “We’ve got lots of lifers in here. But he’s The Lifer.” He observes each member in the group, and then adds: “He’s been here more years than some of you have been on earth, I reckon. Everybody likes him from the warden down to the lowest stool pigeon. He’s always telling jokes and stories. Sort of just makes them up as he goes. Some say that he hides a wise mind behind his yarns. I can’t say about that. But every prison has its one personality. He’s ours.”
“Why is that?” someone asks.
“Well, it ain’t all because he’s been here so long,” our escort replied. “If you were around here a little you’d hear a lot of stories about fellows who have gone out to make good. Some of them have made purty good names for themselves. Desperate criminals have been put in the cell with The Lifer. They’ve gone in ignorant and bitter. Many of them have come out changed. You could get into trouble mighty easy if you said anything against The Lifer.”
Feeling a little awed ourselves we continue our journey around the cell block. Someone suggests that his conception of a convict has been rather vague, a sort of cross between a high class chimpanzee and a low grade moron. Now he is quite surprised to discover that, even in his prison garb, the convict is not so far different from the rest of the human lot. At this our guide and narrator laughs heartily, and then retells an old prison story.
“Well, sir,” he begins, “a grand lady came to visit prison one day. She had the same notion you had about prisoners. She thought maybe they might be human. But she didn’t know whether they were more animal than man. She was taken to the mess hall at supper time. And you know while she was there she made a great discovery. And, sir, she turned it loose on an old burglar sitting next to the aisle. ‘Why you even have knives and forks with which to eat haven’t you!’ she exclaimed, hardly able to believe her eyes. Out of the corner of his mouth the old burglar replied: ‘Oh, yes, madam! Why, we even have teeth.’ I guess a lot o’ people have funny notions about our boys. A banker once thought of them as you did. When they got him in here and cropped his head and put a grey uniform on him he looked about like the rest. A little more stupid, maybe. But do you know he never did get over it. He strutted around here all decorated with invisible privileges as proud as a peacock, pretending to sicken at the other boys’ crimes. He came in with a one-to-ten sentence for betraying the trust of his friends, working folks mostly, and widows. Got away with two hundred and fifty thousand. But the boys weren’t much hurt by his opinions. They’re tolerant towards those without sin. They kinda like the cartoons people make of them. Any kind of attention is better than none. They even like the stones of the pious-more so than the hymns, I reckon.”
He goes on to inform us that the population of any major prison is made up mostly of old offenders, two-three-, and four-time losers; and that except for criminal tendencies they are a fair cross section of American citizenry at its best, it average, and its worst. Here are educated men and ignorant men. Here you may find the giant and the dwarf; the morally strong and the morally weak; men of many nations, trades, crafts, professions. Here is the cunning man with narrow eyes and loose underlip. Here, too, is the stupid dolt with dull eyes and a perpetual grin. You will discover spiritual men in prison, psychics, mediums, sensitives, cultists, and the various variety of deified freaks, wearing imaginary haloes and communicating with imaginary hosts celestial. Here you will discover the inflated Ego around whom is gathered a ring of yes men, or shadows, as they are called in prison. The atheist is here with his incessant preachment; the agnostic with his claim to realism; the cynic with his superficial rationalism; the sceptic with his affected boredom. All are here.
There are doddering old criminals and beardless, naive ones, the latter making heroes of the former. There are scholars who can point out how the invention of an Eskimo pie affected international trade; economists who can trace recurring depressions back to the causes which overthrew the Roman Empire. Here there are scientists, genuine and pseudo; inventors at work on the burglar-proof lock, and artists in all phases of development and defeat; prison poets and historians who interpret the trends in penal evolution. Here you will find the feverish genius busy with the perfect crime and the flawless escape plot. The financier is here with his too obvious grief and inevitable soft job, as well as his oft-repeated promise “to pay back every cent.” The lawyer is here, now serving without a retainer, the many who seek his legal advice. He still continues to plead his own cause and to close up the holes in his forgotten case. Here is the weak chinned and polished confidence man who intends to do it differently the next time. Here you will find the zealot with a fool-proof social order; the religious fanatic who knows how to lock all the doors of hell and bind Satan for a thousand years, or who, out of the grey ranks, searches for the elect, who will join the hundred and forty-four thousand on the “last day” to receive the crown of immortal life, body and all. You will discover in prison the ex-minister who dispatched his wife or rival because of his inordinate affection. Here are saintly men and terrible sinners; the good and the bad, the reasonable pure and the unreasonably degenerate.
It is, to a great extent, the picture of humanity. However, here in the prison melting pot the actors have all been levelled, the barriers of caste and position have vanished, and they have all scurried into the shuffling regiment of numbers.
Someone speaks of the terrible sacrifice these men have made for the dubious profits of crime.
“There are always compensations for sacrifice,” our guide says. “Women had to sacrifice their appeal with their clothes and men’s illusions. It ain’t been such a bad exchange. They’ve got used to their vanished magnetism. Our boys get used to their vanished freedom.”
With this philosophic observation, we follow our escort back to the iron steps and in a few moments the prison is behind us.
CHAPTER II
THE VERDICT OF MEN
TRULY, the best wisdom of man is as foolishness to God. To the ablest in worldly wisdom the ways of God are past finding out.
Many men have stated, many more have implied of me, “Yours is a hopeless case.” At least four of these were well qualified to speak. They had the best of the lesser light. There was integrity in their judgment. The lesser integrity. From this point I can both admire their candour and commiserate with it.
I have in mind a Trial Judge. At the time, criminally hardened as I was, I believe I felt a tinge of affection and sadness for him. I know he meant well. He was an unhappy man. His private and family life enlivened the daily rounds of jail routine. They were made the subject for cheap gossip and tawdry pastime. Had he been aware of our remarks, I’m sure his professional dignity would have been wounded. Out of his tragedy we collected soggy threads and wove them into a pattern for killing time. From its inception, the story went, his home had been a breeding place for sorrow and heart-breaking disappointment. Because of this he drank too much. But the only local criticism seemed to be, “Who could blame him?”
He wore a mask which even I could see though. He had fashioned it out of pain and pretence. His poker face and austere manner were too obviously affected. Behind them beat the heart of a born sentimentalist.
There was a rumour that he had wanted to be a doctor. Whether of divinity or medicine we didn’t learn. His parents chose the legal profession for him. He had done well in it. He must have made them proud in his success. He had justified their hopes and the money they had spent on him to make their wishes come true. His crucifixion had been slow, leaving room for many acts of genuine charity and mercy, many rich displays of nobler understanding. As a defending lawyer he had shared the happiness his talents had brought to others. Later, as one who judged others, he had shared their miseries. In this latter position, save for his drinking, he had carried his cross with patience and courage.
On the edge of my teens I had my first encounter with the law. This man, then a young lawyer, recently admitted to the bar, defended me. His skill saved me from a trip to Reform School. My victory was followed by a couple of decades in crime, most of which time I spent in one prison or another. Once more we met in a courtroom. I was there to answer for a major crime. This time his role was reversed. He was not present to defend but to condemn me. He performed his duty with the usual gravity, which was supposed to become a man on the bench. After passing sentence, an indeterminate one, my third to a major prison, and my last, he went beyond the requirements of legal duty and added his own personal opinion.
“I know you are sick,” he said solemnly. “And I know that more punishment is not the remedy. There is something wrong in our system dealing with men like you. I don’t know what it is. Your record leaves us powerless. Our helplessness is your hopelessness.”
I know he was sincere in his verdict and opinion. With sadness and reluctance he gave the verdict. As I recall the incident now my thoughts bridge the chasm of two thousand years, and I can see Jesus with His desire to gather wayward Jerusalem as a hen gathereth her brood. And they would not! Could this judge, at this moment, have touched me with the magic hand of healing it would have made him glad. His manner affected me that way. But, like Jerusalem with Jesus, I would have none of his redeeming power. I had not yet suffered enough. My soul was not yet ripe for plucking. The harvest was still green. The winnowing and the screening would come later. I needed more pain, much more. As surely as ignorance rejected the healing power of the Master Healer, I rejected the words of this Judge who, behind his mask, had my best interest genuinely at heart.
I have come to believe in a destiny running through the crazy pattern of my life. In this destiny I have reserved a special place for this particular Trial Judge. For my first infraction of the law he defended me: for my last he sentenced me. He was with me at the beginning of my criminal career: he was with me at the finish. This may be a coincidence. But then again it may not be. If it is not, the good Judge may appear in a future chapter of my story, though his spirit has long ago raced away to that realm where judgment “is mine saith the Lord.” At least I want to believe that this Judge had an influence for good in my life.
Again I am thinking of a certain prison warden. He was a practical penologist, who mixed his severe discipline with a raw meat brand of justice. His ambition was to be uniformly harsh. It infuriated him and outraged his character when he was forced to bow before some political pet in prison, who had been committed to him with a recommendation for special privileges. In other words, for coddling.
He loathed his own stool pigeon system, which he lacked wisdom to correct or eliminate. He detested the weaklings who curried his favour in return for tainted information. He once sent me to the “hole” on secret and doubtful evidence of one of his informers.
“You’ve been snitched on,” he told me bluntly.
“I know it,” was my reply.
“Are you guilty?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Do you mean my stool pigeon is a liar?”
“And a long-tailed rat,” I said, knowing a was sunk anyway.
“In this sewer it takes a rat to trap a rat,” he said caustically. “I’m not in love with either brand, you know.”
“That’s why you’re admired in here, warden,” I replied, honestly.
He looked at me steadily for a moment. “How would you like to know the stool’s name who squawked on you?” he asked.
“You’ve got to depend on your stool pigeons, warden. But you don’t have to become one yourself.”
“That’s a good answer,” he replied. “Because you’ve done well, I’ll give you ten days instead of fifteen. While you’re doing the ten you can hate me all you want. I won’t mind. For I’ll forget you the minute you walk out of here. The hate you’ll wallow in over there will punish you more than the bread and water. I’ll appreciate your co-operation.”
No doubt there is much in the life of a prison official with which the toughest convict may sympathize, for he, too, has been caught in a vicious program of life. For a man with an innate desire to administer fair and impartial treatment, a prison job is no bed of roses. He must seek and accept the favours of men whom his very nature holds in contempt. Such was the character and position of this warden.
For thirty years he had looked steadily upon the faults of others. His own faults had become obscured to him. His most recurrent comment was, “My illusions about the goodness in men are gone.” He always said it as though in self-justification of his betrayed desires. He had made judgment his ideal as well as his duty. And he had come to believe firmly in appearances, the very stuff out of which every convict weaves his false beard, and back of which he hides the perpetual war in his soul.
I hated this warden enormously. However, I could admire his good though futile intentions to treat all prisoners alike. I held him in a morbid sort of respect. This attitude was general. In effect his verdict of me was that my end was certain. Either my criminal career would be stopped in a blaze of violence, or I would wind it up somewhere in a prison cell.
The third man was the chairman of our parole board. He had been made the unwitting victim of a grim lack of destiny. An academic idealist, he was unsuited to a post he owed to one of the periodic waves of newspaper protest against corruption in the parole department. The job threw him out of character and ruined him. He came too soon and left too late. Great was the price he paid for experience. He traded sentiment for cynicism, his ideals for a surface realism, his faith in man for doubt. My record proved to him that I was beyond correction.
And the fourth man was a resident prison psychiatrist. He was popular behind the walls. A young good-looking fellow, his smooth face and fresh vitality gave a lift to jaded appetites. He had come to his position direct from college. His copy-book aura had not yet been tinged with dull professionalism. He became the subject for much prison humour and gossip. There was a story out that he wore a gentleman’s corset, a rumour which, because of the dignity of his official position, he could neither affirm or deny. The convicts referred more often to his figure than to his ability.
By being honest I received an adverse verdict from him. It was on the occasion of his giving me a mental test. Among the questions with which he confronted me was the following: “If you were walking through the woods and you came upon a man hanging from a limb by the neck, what would you do?”
“I’d first go through his pockets,” I replied. “Then I’d make my get-away.” He was displeased with my answer, telling me that it was not only incorrect but facetious.
“The first thing you would do,” he explained, “would be to ascertain whether the man was still alive or dead. If alive you would take him down. If dead you would leave him hanging. In either case you would go speedily to notify the proper authorities.”
He was unable to appreciate the convict point of view. I was unable to appreciate the official point of view. Between these two extremes was a connecting link, but neither of us knew what it was. I maintained that such an act on my part would be inconsistent; that no real criminal would go to the authorities on his own free will; that I had always made the authorities come to me; and that there could be no point in my ascertaining life or death in the hanging man. For this defence of my point of view, he wrote behind my name and number; “A chronic recidivist. Criminal insanity present. Perhaps a borderline case.” A convict friend of mine in the parole office told me about the damaging notation. I got an audience with the young mental expert, flattered him a little, told him I had pondered the test question, and could now see that I was wrong and he was right. The notation was altered to read: “Anti-social personality. Conduct and behaviour unpredictable.” This was less menacing. He had changed the phrasing without destroying his passion for words.
Perhaps the real difficulty confronting prison psychiatry is a matter of penetration. It may yet be discovered that the basic cause of crime is a problem for the soul surgeon rather than the mental scientist.
At any rate, as it turned out, all these authorities were wrong. Their verdicts were justified, but not vindicated. To them the ways of God were not considered. For my ultimate correction society is not indebted to man, but to Providence.
CHAPTER III
IN DEFENCE OF MAN’S VERDICT
A FRIEND, after reading this chapter in manuscript, reproved me on the ground that the material was morbid. He said the psychology was too personal and too heavy. The reader, he thought, might accuse me of unnecessarily exploiting very delicate personal matters for the sake of building up sensational effects.
“Why stretch yourself upon a cross?” he asked.
“I have no desire for sensational effects,” I replied, “but I have a deep conviction that my readers have a right to know my background, my past attitude, and through me the viewpoint of the confirmed criminal. My authority to speak is experience and not scholarship. My sins of commission have purpose. Omission of them in a document of this nature would defeat that purpose, cheat the reader of clarifying information, and thus reduce me to a literary burglar; the last estate being little better than the first.”
Because I have faith in the tolerance and judgment of anyone who has read this far, I will present a compact record of the man whom the prison system failed to correct.
My earliest memory is that of fear; three fears, and the greatest of these was sin. As a child my nature was painfully religious. I quailed before sin in others. My own sins would torture me for days on end. The other two fears to which I had been heir were likewise of the sort which are endured alone, for to confide them was to court ridicule. I feared the very mention of death. The thought of going to sleep was unbearable because it was haunted by the fear of never waking. And I had a horrifying fear of finding myself locked in, with no way of escape from the dangers my vivid imagination would conjure up.
From this latter fear I suffered through all of my criminal career. Though I spent many years behind locked doors, the persistence of this fear remained active behind my mask and would often recur to torment my nights.
My early childhood was compensated, however, by beautiful spiritual dreams. In these Jesus walked and talked. These dreams were most vivid and captivating when my fear of going to sleep was most intense. They seemed to visit me as a sort of balancing grace, a reassurance concerning the sleep state, as though they were trying to tell me that there was nothing to fear.
I didn’t get very far in school. The fifth grade stopped education. My interest was vague. My power of concentration was poor, and I had a deplorable memory. This latter fault had much to do with my later life. In my schooldays we had monthly recitations, which were stumbling blocks for me, since memorizing the lines was difficult.
When I was eight, the thing happened which so adversely affected my future. For three weeks my sister had laboured to pound a four-verse poem into my head before recitation day. When the time came I felt confident. The school room was crowded with visitors, mostly the mothers of those who would speak their pieces. I am sure I felt a little pang of disappointment because no one was there to support me with a reassuring smile, no one to take pride in my histrionic talents, or to share my triumph. That is, no one from my own family. There was a stepmother, but she was too busy to come. My father was at work. I recall distinctly that I wished for the face of my own mother among the others.
By and by when my turn came I arose and walked boldly to the platform. I faced the audience proudly and began with assurance. But at midway I forgot the key line. I fidgeted awkwardly, trying to remember. It was no use. My face was burning with embarrassment. Then some child giggled. In an instant the whole room filled with laughter which the teacher tried to stem, while choking back her own impulse to laugh. I ran from the room as one mortally wounded, terribly ashamed. My first fight came as a result of this fiasco.
I have pondered this childhood situation in the light of another exactly like it which came in adulthood. I ran away from it in exactly the same way, feeling the same cutting sense of embarrassment and shame. The first situation was not conquered by running. Neither was the second. And the thought has often come to me that there are certain tests in our lives, problems, which recur again and again, perhaps in a little different garb, until we face them and conquer them in the right way. Then the experience disappears to make room for a higher and better experience.
The outcome of my running away from this childhood test or experience, and the effort to conquer the after-effects by violence, planted my young feet on the path that was to lead me into crime. It caused me to dislike boys of my own age, and to seek the society of older boys. This abnormal process kept up until at twelve I had left the world of boyhood and had attached myself to the world of men. I was but a boy with a man’s mind. The virtues of men had not developed in me; but I found it comparatively easy to win their fellowship by simply copying their vices. This, of course, was dangerous, since the vices of men were motivated by passion, while organically I was still a child of innocence. Later on, after I had advanced deeply into manhood, I was a creature of intensity still acting upon the impulses of innocence.
This is the twist in character that makes the criminal. It is one thing to act in an anti-social way while still on the childhood side of puberty. Society is prone to be patient with a child’s impulses. The same acts, however, committed with passion, become criminal. And most confirmed criminals are men who act upon the impulses of their early childhood.
The vices I copied were chiefly gambling, pool-playing, drinking. I was twelve when I took my first drink. At thirteen I had my first alcoholic baptism. After that the liquor road was easy. The next step led me into stealing.
In my early teens I was a major criminal. In the hide-outs and jungle-camps of the country I fraternized with thieves and fugitives, whose records were long and whose deeds were as black as a Stygian Hell. With eagerness I looked forward to the day when my record, too, would be long and black; when I would have a reputation among my kind as a dangerous man; when the police would refer to me with a shudder, and when the deadliest criminal would pay me the respect that cowardice pays to physical pain. Mine was the left-handed ambition of the budding outlaw.
I soon became adapted to the underworld. Thoroughly inured to its vulgarity and shameless profanity, its merciless philosophy, I moved from crime to crime and from jail to jail, always ready to adopt the worst and to repulse the best in human nature.
There were many who sought to help me; good men and women, reaching toward me with a selfless hand. But they were naive in their proffered kindness, untrained in the subtle psychology of the criminal mind. There were officers of the law who, being disarmed by my apparent innocence and youthfulness, by my acting and my gift of clever deception, many times sacrificed duty to indulgence, permitting me to go scot-free to repeat my offences and to ply my trade. They thought they were giving me a chance to make good. They were, in fact, contributing to my weakness and not to my latent strength. Too, there were juvenile authorities who listened to my penitential tales. By misplaced mercy they betrayed the society who looked to them for protection and who buttered their daily bread.
And there were the voluntary, unskilled social workers who mistook a maudlin sentimentalism for a divine mission. They were called “sob sisters.” As a usual thing they were frustrated and inhibited in their emotional parts. They had no well-defined theory concerning the correction of wayward boys, as they referred to them. As for wayward women, for some unknown reasons, they seemed to have little interest. Many of them had mothering complexes, which “the boys” were inclined to play up to, calling them Mother So-and-So. I am sure they did some good, if for no other reason than the fact that the prison officials resented their missionary labours. Of course, they were taken advantage of on occasion and were used to “square a rap,” in the jargon of crime, when a guilty criminal, through their influence, had his case dismissed. I always knew I should have them for my friends if, perchance, my crime and arrest were sufficiently notorious to merit headlines. If there were no other reason, this fact alone would keep me charitably disposed toward the so-called “sob sisters.” When the whole world is belching out venom against a man it takes at least courage to speak out on his behalf.
But despite the laudable intentions of all these good people I am compelled to say that they fed my criminal ego rather than my sleeping soul.
Prisons, jails, penal farms, chain-gangs, the third degrees of the police world-the whole sordid and futile programme of punishment did its best to straighten out my twisted character. And it failed, Instead of theocentric it made me increasingly egocentric. All for the simple reason that I didn’t want to be corrected! Only God can help the man who has no desire to help himself.
Neither did the more modern prison experiments help me any. I was in the world to take advantage of society, to exploit those whom I considered my natural enemies. If an attempt at kindness was shown me it released two responses: first, I looked upon every such gesture with suspicion, as something spurious, a counterfeit with a selfish motive behind it, a trick of some kind; second, I held it my duty to turn the tables and to outwit such persons to my own benefit. With this attitude I naturally defeated every effort intended as an aid to my best interest.
As the old prison system of contract labour and unqualified brutality gave way to the modern trend of experimental penology, the resident prison psychiatrist became an official cog in the new wheel. He, too, tried to bring a glimmer of light into my dark skull. Did he succeed where others had failed? Not at all. My reaction to him was that of every confirmed criminal, most uncharitable. His tedious rigmarole of case histories was looked upon as a smokescreen hiding a soft and lucrative job, and an attempt to dignify with the air of science a new kind of racket. I resented his question-and-answer system. I considered it an impudent piece of probing into my private affairs. I figured that he was using me to deceive a gullible tax-paying public, who had been awed into believing that science could correct criminals and solve the crime problem. I was nauseated by his professional atmosphere. I loathed what I thought to be his expressed and unexpressed judgment of me, and used his unconvincing effort at friendliness to hold him up to ridicule before all the impressionable first offenders. I could have been greatly helped by several prison psychiatrists if I had had one decent brain cell working. I can see that now, but then I was crime-blinded. Intelligent self-interest had no place in my life.
The day came when the harsh disciplines of the old prison system yielded to the modern trend toward laxity as a corrective device in the New Penology. It had no good effect on my cynical and case-hardened character. On the contrary I hated it, because it made conversation and mixing among convicts too easy. It came as a boon to those who gathered information and peddled it to the officials in return for favours. It simplified the news-gathering tactics of the stool pigeons, and worked against those who preferred silence and secrecy. I could have been helped in many constructive ways by this more humane method if I had had any desire for self-improvement, but with my attitude it only served to open up new fields of iniquity in an already degraded personality.
Then there was the new device of occupational therapy, which was calculated to stimulate pride in workmanship, release incentive, and stir up ambition. Also, it was intended to prepare us for a life of honest industry after our prison terms had expired. But crime was my incentive and ambition. The old habituals were busy preparing themselves for their next crime; not for an honest position in the outside world. I could have been greatly assisted by this method if I had wanted to receive the opportunity it offered. But it had no salutary effect in my life.
I was tortured, cajoled, persuaded, and I continued a criminal in thought and feeling and action.
Not even the splendid, though indulgent, love of my father had any good effect on the kind of life I had chosen to lead. For years he spent time and energy and money trying to keep me out of jail. Because of me he lost his reputation for being a man of sound judgment and robust good sense. Because of me his sacrificed his friends; he became a laughing stock, an object of pity, but he kept his faith in me.
It now appears significant that as a young man my father had been called to the ministry, and that he had refused to heed that call. He had tried vainly to let it go. But at no time in his life had it let him go. He had to learn by bitter experience that to act contrary to the guidance of intuition was to take the pain-path of compulsion instead of the path of grace and gladness. All his laborious escape efforts were made the more blistering by their utter inability to stifle that “still, small voice” of his deeper and finer self. The last sad touch to this self-produced tragedy was a sense of guilt. He was convinced that by his example he had become an accessory to my crimes. He, too, had travelled a side road. He, too, had carried the wrong cross.
I remember a long and miserable tussle he had with liquor, another of his escape devices that would not work: long hours and even days of remorse, anxiety, self-condemnation, feelings of helplessness and impotence, the incessant struggle against the example he was setting, the misery of repeated failures, of resolutions made and defeated. And finally there was the conquest of drink by the frightful force of a desperate will, which left him still unsatisfied with his victory. This caused him a lingering suspicion that though suppressed, the habit had not been correctly or wholly conquered. There was the subtle but real fear that in some future crisis the bottle would once more offer him the way out, that he would first indulge and then succumb. His victory had not been gained the God way.
But because of his faith in me my father went about among the influential politicians pleading for help to get me out of prison, begging them to write letters of recommendation. Always his persistence was rewarded by the furthering of my weakness. It was this rewarded on the occasion of my next to last prison sentence. I was released prematurely because of it. He came all the way to prison to meet me and to share my joy of freedom. As we rode away together he spoke quietly of his faith in my future. He related on of the principle reasons for this-my mother.
My mother had been a beautiful woman with a sensitive nature and a tender conscience. God was ever her delight and fortress. She lived in His presence. Within a few weeks after the light of my life began to shine, that of my mother was extinguished. My father mentioned that I was a sacrificial child. I know he wanted to impress me with this fact, to arouse in me a sense of appreciation of it. He went on to say that my mother believed there was a good destiny in store for me because of her sacrifice in giving me birth. Hence, at her death-bed and as her last request, I was to have my chance.
Without even an accent of preachment my father said to me as we journeyed along: “So you see, son, I want you to make good. Not for my sake, but to realize the faith your mother had in you.:
And while he talked I was meditating upon my next crime.
To add to his disappointment, I went to the little town of my birth to commit this crime. Here my sister lived with her husband and children. Already the shadow of my disgrace had fallen across their world. This final blow emphasized the extent of my perfidious indifference to others, my crass and wholly indefensible selfishness. In this village I was caught red-handed burglarizing a store.
The next morning my father heard the news. He came immediately to the jail. He had aged twenty years in two hours. His great heart was at last broken. But not his faith! It still burned in his dim, tear-misted eyes, now glazed with a nameless, measureless pain. He put his hands through the bars and held mine. His own felt dry and hot and withered. He could not trust himself to speak for a long time. He just stood there in muted agony, his head half-bowed, his eyes avoiding mine, his body bent as though beneath an impossible cross. He had to suffer in silence. Out of it emerged no word of condemnation. He was alone with his own and my suffering, two diametrically opposite kinds of pain, the one unselfish, Christ-like, the other generated by self-accusation and self-resentment for getting caught. When the jailer called to him that his time was up, he spoke briefly, “It’s all right, son. I’ll not cover up my own blame. Somewhere, in some way, it will all be made right, maybe.” With this he turned away.
He came to the depot to bid me a last farewell as, handcuffed, I boarded the train to begin what was destined to be my final prison sentence-a destiny as strange and unexpected as it was beautiful. He had no perception of the wonderful grace I was approaching, nor of the terrifying torture. Yet he spoke prophetically. “I’ll not live to see you again. As a young man I was called to the ministry. I ignored my calling. I hope you won’t miss yours.”
* * * * * * * * *
I never saw my father again, but I believe with all my heart that he entered a new and finer dimension of life. And I want to believe that he is glad because he kept the faith when only one other person on earth believed in my recovery. I want to believe that both my father and mother are rejoicing in my struggle along the dusty, rough road that is leading back toward God.
However, I was returned to prison the same old hate-bitten criminal. Only now I was obsessed with a consuming passion, a mad and sinister purpose.
C H A P T E R I V
THE PROBLEM OF THE OLD OFFENDERS
A FEW years ago one of America’s foremost penologists made an astonishing confession in print. In effect he said: “We are interested in the first offenders. Nothing can be done for the old habitual criminals anyway.”
His words are astonishing because of their hopeless pessimism and utter futility. It is generally conceded among the authorities that the old offenders constitute the major menace of crime. If nothing can be done by the prison system toward correcting them, then society is indeed in an unfortunate position, and is faced with the danger of eventual criminal rule. For the ranks of the old offenders, if not decreased by the prison system, must inevitably increase in spite of it-if not because of it.
The percentage of corrections among first offenders is not available, but this is certain: every first offender who is not corrected by the prison system becomes an old offender. Personal experience and observation have revealed to me that a year in prison, the most abnormal environment in the world, is just as likely to confirm as it is to heal the beginning criminal. If he has sufficient strength of character, nothing the prison can do for or against him will make much difference. He will check off his months, go out, and return no more. But if his conscience is blunted and his character weak, everything connected with prison life, both good and bad, is likely to contribute to his further degradation, convince him that he was born to crime, and thus furnish him with an excuse for anti-social conduct rather than with an incentive to strive, struggle, and believe in his inherent possibilities and essential goodness.
I agree with the penologist, however, that nothing can be done for the old offender-by the prison system alone. In fact, my experience of many years in prison contains no record of a single confirmed criminal who was corrected only by punitive methods. On the other hand, my memory is crowded with confirmed criminals who were healed while in prison. In every case this was accomplished through the power of religion.
I have often wondered how different it would be if Christ were warden, or even if our prisons were supplied with chaplains who really understood the psychology of the convict mind and were helped by official co-operation rather than hindered by interference toward the establishment of a genuine prison religion, framed to fit the special need of those who live in a different world. A gospel calculated to feed conventional and socially-minded people could hardly be expected to find much favour among those who are unconventional and anti-social.
Prison religion is the square peg in a round hole.
But in spite of the fact that most chaplains are untrained and inadequate, and that prison religion speaks to convicts in an unknown tongue, it is the one and only power behind prison walls which can and does redeem the hardened old offender.
But let us return to that cell house we recently inspected. There is a long, straight path of boards, flanked on the outside by an iron railing and on the inside by a stone face in which has been left a string of square holes and barred doors. It is the second of four tiers up. Its name: “Receiving gallery.”
Behind one of these barred doors is an almost barren cell. Here is where the convict begins his stretch. The impressionable first offender may be made or broken during the two or three days he is confined in one of these receiving cells.
I should say that the greatest opportunity offered the prison system to make a lasting impression on the life of a first offender is to be found on this receiving gallery. Alone in one of these drab, bare cells the unhardened new arrival is certain to become pensive and reflective. The conscience pricks him into shame and grief. Thoughts of his crime press in upon him. He thinks of his parents, friends, relatives, and of the disgrace and sorrow his misdeed has brought to these dear ones. Still tender and responsive to the finer sentiments, he is likewise pervious to constructive sympathy and wise understanding. If ever the touch of Christ was needed in the life of a first offender it is when he finds himself in a cell on the receiving gallery-along with his thoughts and feelings in a strange, abnormal environment-face to face with his conscience on the one hand and the threatening terrors of prison life on the other, both of which he is apt to magnify out of all proportion.
Vividly I recall this situation in my career of crime. I am convinced now, and always have been, that my criminal activities, even with the start I had, could have been ended on the first day and night I spent in the cell of a major prison. Had I heard the right voice then, I am certain that society would have been saved a mountainous toll, and I many years of bitterness and wasted life.
But whose was the first voice to reach me? A stupid guard who jeered at my fear and grief; a keeper who leaned against my cell door and taunted and mocked and menaced me; a free man who sought to wear away my self-control; a paid attendant who tried to infuriate me into an act of insolence, so that he might have an excuse for reporting me and thus getting me started off on the wrong foot. He did arouse my anger and hatred, but he failed to topple my self-control. The hate he invoked in me was so violent that it absorbed all my fears and griefs, along with all my good impulses and intentions.
The next voice I heard was that of a convict who was in charge of this, the most important of all the galleries from the standpoint of official opportunity. But who was this fellow in charge? And how could such a man secure this kind of job? The receiving gallery being the least populated, it became at once the softest of all cell house jobs. Favours have to be shown and special privileges given to stool pigeons, the lowest and foulest of men who feed upon the misfortunes of their own kind. And this fellow, a stool pigeon and degenerate, had thus been favoured with a resultant cost to society in bloodshed, rape, and money beyond any possible computation.
He was a five-time loser to prison; was utterly without conscience or a sense of responsibility. He, too, made sordid pastime out of my predicament, and sought to influence me in all the pernicious ways familiar to him. In bland, confidential tones he told me how to “do” time-but not a word of how to “use” time. During my stay on the receiving gallery this man gave me a thorough education in the deadly convict philosophy of life. I swallowed it. And there was not a word of it which was not aimed at my destruction at society’s expense.
On a blustery February afternoon I was in a cell on the receiving gallery. I was now booked as a habitual criminal, facing the maximum of a twenty year sentence. Hatred, dissipation, poor liquor, and prison punishment had written their raw history in my body. My vital organs were shot. My nervous system was at the point of collapse. Already a prematurely old man as I sat in my cell that afternoon and night, my thoughts were not of shame and disgrace, for I had been divorced from conscience. Rather I was filled and seared with a crimson hatred and black rebellion. I hated everything and everybody, including myself.
Looking down the calendar of those penalizing years, and measuring them against my physical condition, I found three courses open to me: first, I could try to maintain a good prison record with the vague hope of outliving the devastating term; second, I could take the way of self-destruction; third, I could set my mind and ingenuity on escape.
After a moment’s reflection, the first course was promptly rejected. What sort of wreck would I be at the end of this long stretch? A feeble, worn-out prison lag; a silly old stir bug going about muttering ineffectually to myself; a broken, quacking member of the prison’s crank gang. I would be released an impotent old “has been” with no stamina left to commit a decent crime. And I would wind up either a bloodless and spineless bread-and-butter beggar, or would deliberately let myself be caught in the act of committing some cheap offence and come whimpering back to end my days in prison, to pledge my bones to the prison graveyard.
The second course, suicide, had its appeal. It was counteracted, however, by the inherent logic of the third course, and by the remark of a fellow convict. He had called it the coward’s way out. It took courage to face the music; none to knife the fiddler!
In escape there was nothing to lose. There was freedom to gain. At that time I knew nothing of freedom, of what it was or what it meant. Just to be on the other side of prison walls was what I took to be freedom. A fugitive from justice, slinking through the shadows, dodging the eyes of my natural enemies, hunted by day and hounded by night-this was the grand prize for which I would make my bid and stake my life! I therefore made my resolution. I would try. If I failed I would pay the fierce price and try it again. Again, again, and again I would try. I would stop trying only at the point where my mind was shattered and my body was broken.
Now that I had cut my knots and was firmly resolved upon my future course of action, the plan began to take form in my twisted brain and bitter heart. Had I known what was ahead of me I could not have faced it. I was to press my life into the last black niche of hell on earth.
Against this ebon background an unearthly light was to break on my consciousness, and I was to know the full joy and meaning concealed in the sublime word, FREEDOM.
C H A P T E R V
OFF THE RECORD
I MADE three desperate bids for freedom, or what I then thought to be freedom. Two of these attempts were of the “lone wolf” variety. The third involved group action, destruction of property, and physical violence.
After four days on the receiving gallery, I was assigned to work as a shovel man in the rock quarry. My warder was an old-timer in prison work who was best known as “Hawk Eye.” His lack of education and his inability to govern men by intelligence had kept him from advancing. He had an unending desire to assert his superior place as master and to make the convict realize his inferior place as slave. Outside of a few pets he heartily disliked all prisoners, and this sentiment was just as heartily reciprocated.
I knew of Hawk Eye and of his reputation. He knew of me and mine. I had never before taken his orders, for I had always managed to keep out of his gang. Now that I was assigned to his quarry I decided to use diplomacy and a strong willed patience. I would rigorously choke back protest and revolt and guard myself against being trapped by him into a rash display of insolence, with its consequent trip to solitary for a period on bread and water.
He was gloating when I reported myself for duty. “Well, well,” he said, chuckling, “if it ain’t the old prison-born baby come back. So you couldn’t make it outside, eh? Got hungry for some more of our good stew. Well, you won’t have to go hungry for a long time. You’ll get the works this trip. That might be a temptation to you, eh? It might make you want to take a chance. I wouldn’t do it if I was you. It might not be safe even to play with the idea.”
His warning was plain enough. The word had gone out to keep an eye on me, and his was a sharp eye.
I ignored Hawk Eye’s advice about playing with idea. I began to do a lot of thinking, but not out loud. The first thing I thought about was the prison’s weakest spot. The second thing had to do with the human equation. How far could I go alone? In whom could I confide? In whom could I trust after I had reached the end of my own resources?
One thing was certain: I was committed to the purpose of escape. The plan began to take form when I asked myself: “How?” The time of my escape was easily decided upon. It would be at night when the encircling walls were free of guards. I would cut my way into the prison yard and scale the wall under the cover of darkness. This involved the matter of obtaining a hacksaw blade, and it was at this point where I must seek the aid of confederates. I decided, however, to run the risk. And this brought me to the next step in my march to liberty, that of place.
Here I had a choice between the cell house and the prison hospital. Having to choose the point of least resistance, the cell house with its double-barred protection and vigilant night watch was ruled out promptly. Obviously the hospital with an outside window to every sick room, with its three floors, and with only one warder and night nurse on duty, was the weak spot in the prison. It was, in fact, more difficult for me to get into it than to get out of it.
Mentally I went over the list of my prison pals in search of the one who could be trusted to aid me. There was Fighting Jack Donovan, and old underworld friend of mine. There was Smiler Wallace, and an old buddy called Tommy Gun. There was Dago John and Yorkie and the Denver Wop. Pickhandle Charlie Gibson was there. And finally there was Long Shot Jim Harmer.
I had done a number of favours for Jim. I could trust him, too. He would have money if it were needed, for besides being the best money-making tinkerer in the place he was an expert gambler. I confided my need of a hacksaw to him one day on the recreation ground.
“That’s a cinch,” he said. “If a brier was all that stood between me and the street I’d ‘a’ been out of this joint long ago. Curly Morgan’s over there in the pipe shop, you know. Curly and me’s just like that.” He held up two closely pressed fingers. “Cell house?” he asked.
“Hospital,” I replied.
“Don’t make me laugh,” he cut back. “You’ll never get inside that joint until they’re ready to wash you for your last suit and a free ride out the back gate.”
“Can you get the brier to me if I do make it?” I asked.
“Sure,” he affirmed. “If you can get in I’ll do the rest. What’s the dodge, a phony fit?”
“Soap,” I replied.
He looked at me with unbelief in his gaze. “That’s slow suicide. Remember Bugs Allen? He took that route, you know. He’s up there in the bone yard now. He got in the hospital, all right, when he was half dead. And he didn’t come out until they lugged him out. An ounce of this con soap would croak a mule.”
That evening I began my soap diet, taking a very small amount at first, with the view of effecting a gradual decline. In a few days I started to haunt the morning sick-call complaining to the doctor of stomach trouble. And each morning I would get a dose of salts or a packet of pills. As I increased the amount of soap taken, its corrosive effects became more violent, and I began to suffer the proverbial agonies of the damned. It seemed as though my whole insides were on fire. My stomach was inflamed, and a red-hot ball of fire lay at its pit. I was suffering repeated attacks of terrifying nausea. But the nearest I came to getting into the hospital was the morning I fell out standing in the sick-call line. The doctor called the Captain of the Guard to one side and conversed with him about me. The result was not the hospital-but undisturbed confinement in my cell, alone!
When the deputy warden came down to see me I protested.
“You’re not kidding anybody,” was his reply.
“You may get away with this and you may not,” I said. “I still have people on the outside, you know. They might get curious and cause an investigation some day. Even though you keep them away from me now, the books will tell this story.” I was bluffing but he did not know it.
“We’ll be ready for it when it comes. From now on you’re off the record. We keep a punishment record to show the parole board. We don’t need to bother with that in your case. You’ll do all your time, anyway. And as far as the prison record goes, it will show you always at your work. Never, never under punishment.”
If I had entertained any doubts about being marked for close observation and unusual punishment, they vanished with the deputy’s words.
My plan had failed. That was certain. My hope now was to regain a sufficient measure of my health to warrant my being released from cell isolation. This was a slow and excruciating process. I sought for every sort of means to divert my attention from the pains which constantly burned in my vitals, often doubling me up, like a jackknife, at which times my mouth would fill with hot and brackish water.
One day while steeling my will against what seemed to be an unbearable spasm of agony, my mental machinery became disorganized and I sank into a swoon-like condition. From physical pain I passed into a state of mental and emotional terror. I dreamed while I seemed wide awake. It was like a scroll or motion picture film, which began to unroll slowly before my vision. And the only pictures on it were the pictures of people I had injured. It seemed there would be no end to it. A vast number of these people I knew or had seen. Then there were hundreds I had never seen. These were people who had been indirectly injured by me. The minute history of my long criminal career was thus relived by me, plus all the small injuries I had inflicted unconsciously by my thoughtless words and looks and omissions. Apparently nothing was omitted in this nightmare of injuries, but the most terrifying thing about it was that every pang of suffering I had caused others was now felt by me as the scroll unwound itself.
Then there came the horror of having to go through this experience again. It developed into a fear which became a definite phobia, and which undoubtedly brought the thing I feared upon me. For this dream occurred to me no less than a dozen times during the next few weeks, in exactly the same way, and in the same detailed manner.
One morning I woke with a sense of well-being, quite free from pain and from fear. I had a feeling I would recover. From this time on my confinement was in the nature of convalescence. I did a great deal of thinking on the mysteries and vagaries of the human mind. This was prompted by the experience I had passed through. Almost as though it were in response to this new interest, a book, which ordinarily would have held no interest for me, was tilted between the bars of my door by a fellow prisoner. It had been written by an oriental magician.
A chapter that seemed to grip me with a curious fascination dealt with the subject of being buried alive, and it described in detail just how the state was produced which made this feat possible. The state itself was arrested or suspended animation, a condition of a coma, but much deeper than ordinary coma. It was produced by will power, preceded by a technical treatment of autosuggestion. This latter had to do with impressing upon the subconscious the exact time one wanted the state to end.
Perhaps I wasn't defeated after all in my purpose to get into the hospital. If, by practice and experiment, I could produce this coma, I had no doubt but that I would come to in a hospital bed. I did not succeed in my desire, but I did get myself into a mental state that was infinitely worse than the one I had previously been in. I was harassed by the continuous onslaughts of every fearsome creature and situation a distorted imagination was able to conjure up. This condition’s nearest counterpart was delirium tremens, the result of protracted drinking.
When I was again in my right mind, I was still in my cell. I made no further attempts to gain admission to the hospital.
I spent four months in this isolation cell. I am grateful for that experience now, because it was a shadow cast before coming events; a dark shadow heralding a rosy new dawn! Here I discovered little-known continents in the human mind, mental outposts and frontiers, suggesting a land of indescribable promise beyond the desert of hate and fear and lust and greed. I was destined to reach this land, to experiment in the laboratory of the mind and spirit, to discover an area of unspeakable love, tranquility, and a sanity so great and so simple as to cause one to wonder how poor bewildered and befuddled humanity could possibly have missed the way. It was indeed the kingdom of heaven at hand. And there was no conceit and futility in it. Truly, my isolation experience was but the muddled forecast of the freedom I sought as one who seeks amiss.
I was never returned to my job in the rock quarry. I was face to face with the scourge of every self-respecting convict, “assigned to the crank gang.” So I had come to this! How many times I had laughed and sneered at these warped, half-crazy old prison lags, with their ceaseless whining, their futile whimpering, their childish displays of temper, idle gossip, and useless tantrums! The butt of crude jokes; caricatures of God’s choicest creatures in whose presence even the foulest stool pigeon would sicken! Though a disciple of crime and an apostle of the convict philosophy of hate, I had arrived here, a member of the most detested and contempt-smeared body of men inside prison walls.
I was more determined than ever to escape. By now my hatred had overcome good judgment. I no longer shunned or feared violence. In the following months the plot grew. A dozen well-placed key men with a passion for liberty could turn the trick. To these key men the word was massed, and a three weeks’ programme of agitation was under way.
The idea was to foment trouble among the impressionable and disgruntled convicts. The one raw spot in the penitentiary was the mess hall. Prison food was a constant source of suppressed discontent. Always it rankled beneath the surface of prison life. It was, in fact, the powder keg waiting for the wild-eyed maniac with a lighted match, This became our subject for agitation.
The plan was to excite the convicts into a grumbling protest, to set their nerves taut and on edge, to create an atmosphere of discontent, an air of sullen, brooding revolt and foreboding expectation. At the appointed time, which would be at the supper meal, this pent-up emotional dynamite would be touched off. An angry voice would cry out, a pan would bang the table, and in an instant the mob demon would be loosed in all its blind fury, ready to burn and kill and tear the prison to pieces. In the pandemonium those of us behind the plot would seize the deputy warden as a shield and hostage, menace him to the gate, and under threats of death force him to give the order that would swing the big gate open.
Something like a week had passed. Progress was being made by the spirit of agitation. Then suddenly the mumblings ceased. I, the leading actor in the plot, found myself in prison court to answer to a purely fictitious charge. I had been reported for an infraction of prison rules. I was told to state my case. I was not guilty, and I said so. This, of course, made a liar of the warder who had signed the report. It was understood that a warder was never wrong, and that the accused convict was never right.
As I faced my judge, the deputy warden, a prison man of the old school, an iron man whose illusions about convicts had vanished years before, I was filled with bitterness. First of all because my plot had been betrayed and thwarted by some stool pigeon who had exposed me at the leading spirit behind the agitation. And second because they had used this cheap means of disposing of me, an obvious frame-up. My hatred overbalanced reason and caused me to play into the deputy warden’s hands. By refusing to admit my guilt I have him the needed excuse for committing me to the dungeon. Once more I was “off the record.” Whatever happened to me would never be read in black and white. I alone could tell the story-if I lived to give the details. But the record would prove my story a lie. It would show that during the time mentioned I was going serenely about my work in the prison “crank gang.”
In committing me to the dungeon, the deputy added the following grim punch: “When I let you out you’ll crawl to me on your knees and whine like a dog. And while you’re in there eating bread and water, I’ll be living on ham and eggs and sleeping in a good, warm bed.”
I knew the warden meant what he said. On the other hand I knew I should never admit being guilty of this trumped-up charge. And above all, I knew that I would suffer death rather than crawl on my hands and knees, whining for release from the dungeon. What settled my fate, apparently, was the clashing of two human wills, unbreakable and uncompromising. It was a grim bargain. If outward appearances were to be considered and future possibilities ignored, I surely took the bad end of the deal. It is my present opinion that this crisis marked the ending of the first act of a soul’s curious drama unfolded on the stage of destiny, and that the curtain was about to go up on the second act.
C H A P T E R V I
GLORIFIED DARKNESS
OUT of the darkness a sense of destiny was born. I believe all men have a destiny, which is meaningless until it has emerged from the sub-nature and has become a motivating power in the super-nature. Further, I believe that all great men, men who have achieved vast things in a single lifetime, either for good or bad report, have been men who were ever aware of a driving destiny in their lives-men caught in the grip of a compelling and impelling power that would at no time let them go-and that their achievements have been commensurate with the feeling of destiny operating in their subjective lives.
When a man feels a sense of destiny in his life he manifests a courage and a spirit of adventure impossible to other men. What he undertakes he does with daring. He becomes a gambler who faces long odds with a feeling of inner assurance and protection. Self-consciousness and the pull of timidity, strong forces acting against success, are either overcome or nullified. He rises to opposition like a game fish to the fly, for instinctively he knows that his organic, mental and spiritual powers are released in direct proportion to the strength of the opposing force. Kagawa, the Japanese Christian, became aware of his destiny. He has sought and has overcome numerous oppositions in his own nature and environment, and he has called himself “A gambler for God.” The pages of history are replete with destiny-minded men and women, both as wreckers and builders on the world’s stage.
I am prepared to state boldly that man will never determine his origin by looking backward, or by seeking his origin, but that he will find and know his origin only by looking forward, or by seeking his destiny.
In the light of the experience I shall soon recount, I can see the hand of destiny. Great was the opposition; great the power which overcame it. Without this light my life would remain a useless, senseless muddle with neither rhyme nor reason. If I have overcome the tug of habitual criminality during these eleven years in the outside world, I am indebted for that sustaining grace to the sense of destiny which was born in me at the point where I had fallen into the darkest pit of consciousness, into the lowest hell earth had to offer.
THE PRESENT
It is a square, solid structure, fashioned of dark grey limestone. Even to the casual visitor who is guided to its location there is a feeling of foreboding, as though the sombre stones are crying out against the outrages within.
Inside is a bare hall, save for an old desk and a tall pot-bellied heating stove, which oozes smoke and exhales the fumes of coal sulphur, and which, when shaken and cleaned, sends out and up a dense barrage of fine, acrid ashes. The stove is there to keep the guard warm, for feeble, indeed, is its attempt to heat the dank, frost-bitten building it occupies.
On each side of the enclosure are two rows of cells, one above the other. In front of each cell is a solid wooden door, in the centre of which is a covered peephole. Just behind this door is an inner one made of case-hardened steel bars. The only light that filters into the cell comes from a small window set high in the outer wall, which is heavily barred on the inside, and which is covered by a thick iron grating on the outside. In one corner is a foul-smelling and battered waste bucket. This, with a quart tin cup, comprised the furnishings. In these dungeon cells the penalty is paid by him who dares to break the prison law.
It is winter time. The cells are cold and seeping moisture. The stone floor is damp and icy. The air has a dank density, like the interior of an old-fashioned ice box. I enter the place to begin my sentence in this black hell, wrought by man, God’s choicest creature. The ironical mockery of it does not penetrate my fog-bound consciousness.
I have a premonition that is undefined and which is overshadowed by a cruder feeling that my sentence will end in death. But beneath both of these is an extremely delicate sense of something whose importance eludes me. This I know; I shall never weaken to the point where I beg like a dog for my release. I am equally sure that the deputy warden will hold fast to his promise. Not by the widest stretch of my imagination can I conceive that he would suddenly go soft, become chicken-hearted, weaken his resolve to break my spirit and to make me whine for mercy. Such an event would throw him completely out of character. No, I feel doomed as I enter, a determined feeling that I am embracing a self-willed death, slow and paralysing, and indescribably painful.
The keeper of the “hole” is a stolid, thick-bellied, lumbering giant of a man, with a short, heavy neck, a massive, coarse face, and a closely-cropped, low-browed head. Set deeply in a pair of pouches are two small, piggish eyes, which remain dull even when his great hulking body is shaken with anger. To the convicts the keeper of “the hole” is known as “The Bull.”
He takes an instant dislike to me, a sentiment which I return full measure, pressed down and running over. After I am stripped of my clothing he searches them. Then he turns his attention to my nude body, peers into my mouth, and examines me with frank suspicion, as he paws me with vulgar, ham-like hands, hoping to find some small instrument that could effect my escape, or suicide.
Defeated in this exploration, he gives me a thin, filthy blanket, a pair of unwashed cotton socks, an old pair of overalls, filled with the stench of their former victims, and a torn and faded shirt whose last wearer must have gone mad in a foaming fit, so stiff is the shirt’s front.
Wearing these, I enter the dungeon. The Bull locks the steel door, and orders me to put my hands through the bars. I elevate them to a crossbar just above my head and obey his order, leaving an upright bar between my arms. The Bull clamps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. With a parting curse he bangs shut the solid door. I begin my suicidal defiance of the deputy’s iron will.
I know, of course, what this is going to mean. Each morning at six I am going to be chained up in this manner, after having been permitted to partake of a piece of bread and another cup of water. At six in the evening they will let me down for the night, when there will be another piece of bread and another cup of water. In the meantime, I shall have suffered the torments of suppressed bodily functions, or the loathsomeness of having had to exercise them.
I know that the maximum length of time for strong men in the cuffs is fifteen days; for the average, ten; and for the weakling, five. At the end of fifteen days the arms and legs are blue and swollen, the veins and arteries are enlarged and tight, while the bottoms of the feet are puffed and black with congealed blood. By this time the arms and legs are lifeless during the period in the cuffs. In its effort to pump blood into these dead members the heart becomes dangerously weakened. So the doctor will order me down at the end of the maximum sentence. Or so I think.
But this period comes and goes. I lose track of time. I hang my last day in the cuffs, for have have lost the power to stand. They lift me up to put me in them this morning. After this day-for many weeks after this- I just lie on the icy floor, emaciated and unspeakable filthy. They keep me alive with additional nourishment now. Death must not defeat the deputy’s will. But I no longer feel hunger. To the cold I am inured, insensate. Each morning the deputy opens my solid door, pauses silently, tempting me to crawl to him and accede to his wishes. My only reaction is hatred for the man. I am now sustained by hate. The darkest curtain imaginable veils the future to the human consciousness.
THE FUTURE
How was I to know that the deputy warden would release me voluntarily? That he would permit the doctor to put me in the hospital from which I had planned to escape? How was I to know that even “The Bull” would become friendly, and the doctor alarmed about my condition? How was I to know that I would be trusted in one of the most responsible positions inside of prison walls, that of night nurse with its opportunity to traffic in all sorts of contraband, to say nothing of the opportunities it offered in aiding convicts to escape? How was I to know that one day I would be a respected member of society, honest and industrious? How was I to know that God’s healing power would flow through me to others? That my prison doors would swing open five years in advance of the time set for my release? That a helpmate would be waiting outside for me to assist in the reconstruction of my broken life?
But I shall tell you how it all began.
WONDERMENT
A curious new thought eddied across my brain as I lay there with my hate and misery. Suddenly I became aware that all my life I had been a dynamo of energy. It had been years since I had entertained a constructive train of thought. Hence, this was a new and strange experience. It slipped up on me, so to speak, as a sense of wonderment, I began to wonder about my past life and what it would now be like if I had employed my energies and will power toward self-improvement and a genuine self-interest.
What followed is rather difficult to catch in the pattern of words. There were subtleties of feeling in it, elusive overtones too remote for external description. Adequately to apprehend such purely mystical sentiments one would have to experience them. I might describe the state as a gradual approach to that condition of consciousness wherein there seems to be a complete vacuum, a suspension of all volition. The drift toward the state was characterized by a mild, dreamy sort of delirium in which I seemed to live half awake and half asleep.
That I was approaching what is commonly called mystical experience, I now know, but did not know at the time. At the point I have described as a vacuum, I was keenly aware of a revolutionary change taking place in my life. It was as though I were being reversed; or having been upside-down, was now being set a-right. For a long time I dwelt in an indescribable sense of awareness.
Then I began to dream in a confused and pointless way. Fragments of my life’s experience, with neither beginning nor end, drifted mist-like across my mind. They seemed neither good nor bad-or at least my reactions to them were indifferent. This type of mental activity went on for several days and nights.
Finally and quite suddenly the form and content of these dreams changed. They now began to reveal consistency and continuity. They became rational and logical in form and sequence. Too, they were highly sane and beautiful in form and essence, filled with meaning and implied purpose. Then into my memory came the fact that I had known these dreams before-when I was a child. I became aware that I was dreaming of the man I had been trying to avoid for many years, Jesus the Christ.
The day came when he appeared to me as in a garden. And I remembered that this had been a childhood dream repeated in my subjective experience many times over. It was all so similar! His physical appearance, the quiet and vivid clarity of it, the thematic details, the rapturous feelings and the exalted thoughts it gave me! And now it seemed to be so purposeful!
He came toward me, his lips moving, but not vocally. He paused near my side and looked down, deep down into my eyes, as though through them he were trying to penetrate my soul. In all my life I had never seen or felt such love in the human eye as now glowed and radiated in his eyes. Nor had I ever felt myself so utterly helpless in the captivity of love. By some mysterious faculty of perception which operated in the midst of my dream, I seemed to know clearly that I was submerged in Reality; that I was seeing and feeling something that would influence my life throughout all eternity.
The scene faded out casually, like some finer substance undergoing alteration, and becoming a formless mist which curled and drifted, eventually forming itself into one word of gossamer, irregular letters. The word was LOVE. This, too, vanished, leaving me for what seemed an age enveloped in an unspeakable state of mental clarity. As I had previously felt myself receiving love, I now had the joyous sense of bestowing love. It poured from me in gratitude and blissful tears. I loved all men. I hated only the evil conditions they imposed upon each other and upon themselves. I loved the world. I loved God. Then I dreamed again.
Once more the form of the dream was like a scroll or a motion picture film being unwound. There was no pain in it this time; it was all elation, ecstasy. All the people I had injured directly and indirectly came before me again and this time I gave them love, which seemed to soothe and heal their hurts. Then all the people who had injured me appeared. One by one I began to help them and love them. It was all exceedingly vivid. Out of the scroll a great auditorium took form. There was a huge audience. They were all the people I had injured and who had injured me. I spoke to them concerning love as one who had the right to speak with authority. I was aware that my diction was positively flawless, my enunciation matchless. So vivid was this, I found myself entertaining a parallel train of thought in which I seemed to be assuring myself that I was not dreaming, that I was surely awake, and that I would never forget these words which were flowing over my lips in such incomparable cadences of love and conviction.
Thus, as a recipient of love, I became a transmitter of it. It seemed to rise from within me and flow outward, as though generated from some interior source. The joy and bliss and gratitude I felt was past articulation, and was wholly uncontainable. In the midst of such a feeling I knew I must either be changed or I would die.
I was grateful not for any particular thing, but for all good, for life itself. I had no discernment apart from this nameless clarity of thought and perception, this boundless enchantment of universal love and reality. I knew that I had transcended all personal and bodily limitations of habit and environment which had bound me through the years. I had no sense of my prison walls, but my thoughts roamed the imponderable Universe far and clear. The measurements of Time and Space vanished out of my consciousness. I was free. I knew I was free. I had found the Reality within the actuality, the breath within the breath, the consciousness within the consciousness, the soul within the form. And above all, I knew that I was being what theologians call “reborn”.
To this day I am not positively certain as to why this experience became a new and different chapter in the book of my life. Nor am I sure as to just how it was brought about. A few men and women who claim knowledge of such things have told me that it was due to my mother’s pronounced religious impulse, which was also harboured secretly by my father. This, they claim, was inherited by me. The intense outer conflict with the forces of law and order had acted to compress my true character until, in a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion, a rock-bottom crisis was reached, those finer energies were released, and the soul burst through the weakened barriers and swept upward and onward into a new order of expression.
If this be so, if the self-willed suffering of my life had anything to do with it, I can only say that I did not suffer in vain. For a single second in which Reality is known is worth a lifetime of misery.
I do not propose, however, to offer an explanation of the experience. If an explanation or defence were needed I feel now, as I have always felt, that it would have been given me at the time.
I am intensely interested in superphysical experience as an experientialist. I have read quite widely on the subject from the works of those who have themselves passed this way. This range of reading has given me much information of a biographical nature. It has shown me an assortment of widely different personalities and temperaments, who for an instant found the veil removed from ordinary vision, permitting them to catch a glimpse of the wider world and a more distant horizon. Possessing the literary gift, they have been able to relate their experiences with some measure of accuracy, but as to why and how they join the union of silence.
William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience attempts the psychological explanation of such experiences in others. But of his own Adirondack experience his explanation is pitifully inadequate. Here he admits that he did not know what it was or why it was. He is content to refer to it briefly and without meaning as “a boulder of impression.”
In my prologue I have put down other psychological explanations. Apparently that which is superconscious transcends and thus defies the ordinary processes of conscious transmission.
When I consciously returned to my dungeon environment the state of my mind was no longer the same. It had power to give me joy but not pain. The cell was illumined with a new kind of light, the light of my own redeemed eye. It was the same dark, cold place; but now it was warm and congenial. It became the reflector of my glowing inner self. My imagination was exceptionally keen. I began to experiment with it immediately. I decorated the barren damp walls with things of beauty and quality. I appointed the cell with a fireplace and a mantel, with rugs and tables and deep chairs. When I had finished I had done the job well. The colour scheme was harmonious and the placements correct. Everything was in good taste.
Next I invited guests. I still wonder if they were mere figments of my imagination. They were always the same. I willed it, and they appeared. Did I imagine them or did they take advantage of an opportunity I offered? Can any great literary genius affirm that the powerful characters moving through the pages are his creations? My characters were men, each a composite figure in his own orbit. They all moved in an aura of allegory. They stood for Love, Wisdom and Faith. Taking their seats before my imaginary fire they would engage in a sort of exalted symposium, quite oblivious of me sitting in the foreground, a one-man audience. The things they discussed are etched upon my memory today-things that would no doubt tax a reader’s credulity, but that have never ceased to act as a beneficial influence in my life.
In this experience my old fears vanished, but a new one, which was born out of the experience, appeared. This was the fear that I would be released from the dungeon, and thus, perhaps, in different surroundings, might become divorced from my joy and serenity. I greatly preferred to remain apart, hugging to myself the raptures of my newly-found freedom. I was, however, protected even from this elevated temptation, this exalted suicide, which inevitably leads to selfishness and in the end to spiritual bankruptcy. Jesus had turned away from this course, preferring to share rather than to clutch to himself this heavenly estate.
Before this experience I was an ingrained and calloused criminal. After it I was as completely healed of my criminal tendencies as anyone could be healed. Too, this healing has given me a certain reach and practical utility, the like of which I could not have attained otherwise.
The experience left me with an energy which is felt as a sense of assurance and ability. It may be more precisely called faith, the common meaning of which Professor Glenn Clark describes in his “Fishers of Men,” and which weaves like a strong thread through his finer work, “The Soul’s Sincere Desire.” In reading these volumes one has a definite sense of faith as a practical as well as a spiritual energy, which is applicable even in the training of athletes-an energy that can be consciously applied to business, trade, profession, and in fact, to any practical and needful services of the world.
To cite an example of the application of this energy: At the time of the experience, while not entirely illiterate, I was, nevertheless, inarticulate from the standpoint of ordinary education. I could read cheap literature after a fashion, and I could manage a legible note or brief letter.
Following the experience, I was strongly drawn to the parables of Jesus and whatever jokes I could secure from Lincoln. For in these latter I seemed to perceive the content of the parable. In other words, out of my experience I was left with a curious but persistent interest in the parabolic writings.
Two parables of Jesus in particular interested me, “The Prodigal Son,” and “The Parable of the Vine.” After reading the former a number of times, I felt the vastness of its theme and the matchless perfection of its literary quality. I seemed almost impelled to write a short story after the manner of the parable. What is more, despite my limitations, I felt that I could do it.
Finally, annoyed by the urge, I secured some wrapping paper and began the task. I named my story, “There’s another Law,” which dealt with the theme of retribution. The finished story missed the pattern of the parable by a million miles, but I got permission to send it outside to a friend, who in turn sent it to Detective Story. The editor liked it, bought it, and wrote me a letter asking for more. I was elated over this bit of success and decided thereupon to make a career of story writing. Later I obtained a correspondence course in the art, studied it diligently, and began to bombard my friendly editor. All my other efforts missed the mark. They came back with an unbroken regularity. I might have done better if I had remained true to my first model.
THE MIRACLE WORKER
There was in my experience an instant which, for want of a better name, I have called a vacuum. The actual miracle of healing happened in this instant. What went before was but a prologue. What followed was but an epilogue. The miracle-working power was love. Of that I am convinced. Of its mystery I know less as I learn more. Through the years which have followed the evidence has piled up. There is miracle magic in love. I do not know what love is. I gather examples of its workability. I know it has a practical utility, as well as a spiritual glory. I know it never fails to change the thing it touches. Out of disorder it brings order, out of chaos harmony. The examples of this crowd my life and the files of my personal mail. No revelations as wo what love is come through, save that it is Reality, that it is greater than man’s power to define. It fills all space, and without it nothing could survive, no planet could wheel, no insect flit, no plant grow-nothing could be born, and nothing could be reborn, except for the miracle work of love.
I have learned something of its ways. This for instance: The miracles wrought by love power are seldom obvious. Love works quietly, like an artist at his task, an inventor at his bench, a scientist in his den of wonders. There are many major similarities between love and science, love and art, love and invention. Science, art, and invention are content to do the thing, to act and to let the result happen. Too, they allow their fruits to preach for them. In the heart of an artist, scientist, inventor, there is little desire to reform the world or anybody in it. Their motive is to achieve. This is their drive. If this is done the world will benefit.
But there is a major difference. The fruits of science, art, and invention can be turned against humanity. Love heals the wound it does not make. There is a selfish emotion that hurts. It has often been called love. It is but the shadow of the miracle worker.
Just as science, art, and invention do not desire to reform anybody, neither does love. By not wanting to reform others it transforms them. By setting others free, love binds them. A friend is a lover. He does not preach, find fault, condemn. He frees; and the thing he frees he binds. You cannot have the thing you will not give away. You cannot be free of the thing you hold. To hold on is to belong to the thing held, a bond. What you set free belongs to you. You do not belong to it, for you belong to love. To be in bondage to love-this is the needful thing, for then all good belongs to you. To belong to less than love is to be the slave and not the master. To belong to love is to have life and life abundantly, for then life belongs to you. To belong to life is to be in bondage to Time and Space. All things below love encircle and squeeze. They press and inflict and hurt. Love is Reality, the liberator, the miracle worker. By making others glad, love brings them the foretaste of heaven on earth.
Jesus knew the great miracle-working secret. He didn’t preach to the multitudes. He went about telling stories and loving people. Simply by loving them he healed them. His love excited their love, and in love they were set free, their lives changed. Always this happens where the well-springs of love are unloosed. No one with love ever fails. No one without it ever succeeds. Love does not force a thing to happen. It lets the thing happen. The next thing is always the best thing for the compassionate. A forced success puts one in bondage to work. The end is tension and boredom. One must maintain by force that which is born out of time by force. The lover plays at his task. No motion is lost. He achieves more in an hour than the forcer achieves in a day. The latter is bound by his achievement. In his achievement the former is set free.
Our files are filled with voluntary testimonies; to our living-room they come as verbal witnesses. A woman told of her ruined home. Her husband drank and gambled. The psychologists, she said, went limp before her problem. Her pastor fidgeted, glanced often at his watch, and quoted Jesus.
It was a tragic story, a stimulation to love. Her sixteen year-old daughter laughed at her good advice and accused her of habitual nagging. Her nineteen-year-old son affected a condescending air of tolerance towards her and drifted on in the footsteps of his father. She filled weekly engagements before the women’s clubs, speaking on domestic science and child psychology.
“I’m well equipped,” she said, giving a thumbnail history of her academic background. “And God knows I’ve tried hard enough to change them,” she added hopelessly, “but I’ve failed. They resist everything I say and do.”
There was a pause. Into it we dropped a seed. “Love is not trying. It is ceasing to try.”
“I do love them,” she affirmed. “But maybe not in the right way. I don’t know how to love any differently.”
“Are you willing to admit failure, that you can do nothing about it?” we asked.
She nodded wearily, genuinely contrite, humble.
“Then you’re in the most powerful position in all the world,” we told her. A new hope came to her sad eyes and grew as we talked. “All you have to do is stop trying to change them. Turn them over to God with a confession that you’re helpless in the matter. And turn yourself over with them. Tell Him that you have given them back to Him with no strings attached, and with no compromises or bargains. Tell Him frankly and honestly that you don’t care what He does with them, if anything, or when or how He does it. Tell them they are His. That you’re completely free of them. But then add that you will do, to the best of your ability, the two things He has given you power to do in the matter: you will love them without self-seeking and without possessiveness, and you will do every direct and indirect thing you can as a contribution to their happiness.”
Even as we talked, invisible fingers went to work in her household. Nearly every day she had a new report to make over the phone. All of a sudden her husband began to display his old acts of thoughtfulness and considerateness towards her. His old interest in the home was renewed. His interest in the tavern and the pin-ball machines and the dice tables vanished. Her daughter began to seek her for counsel, to confide her adolescent problems, and to share in the household duties as though she loved to do it. Her son’s superficial air of tolerance towards her changed to one of genuine affection. Finally she wrote from a mountain resort, where they had all gone for a family vacation. The letter closed with the following sentences: “You wrote about the Seattle woman as the happiest woman in the world. If she is any happier than I am, then she is in heaven. That is all I have to say.”
Do I know the mystery of love, the liberator, the life-giver, the joy-maker? No. I know of its fruits. For the present I am content with this. To ponder love philosophically is fascinating, no doubt. But I’d rather see it work, actually. My friends, who like to speculate upon abstract theories, may smile at this, But it is as far as I’ve gone. The philosophical “why” of love may come later. In the meantime I’ll continue to gather evidence and pass out reports.
There is surely miracle magic in love. And love does things so naturally and simply. You have to pause and think about it before you can see the miracle in the result, so well does love hide its handiwork. It is rarely sensational, obviously phenomenal, spectacular. Love just laughs and plays at the game of life. Where love is, work is play, and play is always creative work. Wherever love caresses, confusion and disorder vanish, boredom, the great vice, melts, inertia dies, inharmony is swallowed up, old fears fade out, old wounds are healed, leaving no scar tissue, resentments and grudges are impossible, cheap gossip and tawdry fault-finding disappear: joy and health are established, life becomes gladness, optimism and good-will, the sufferings of others and shared and released. Love gives freedom to all without in the slightest degree allowing freedom to be twisted into licence.
Love never plucks a soul prematurely. It is content to aid the ripening process and do the plucking in time and season. Nor does it force the ripening with undue persuasion or play upon fearful emotions concerning the wraths and judgments of God. Love knows that God is tender and merciful, that man is judged by his own judgment, condemned by his own condemnation, impoverished by his own greed and mass selfishness. Love waits for man to come to himself, to weary of his self-willed futility, arrogance, and suffering, to tire of the darkness that condemns himself and generations yet unborn. Love knows and waits for opportunities to act. No opportunity is offered which love does not seize. It reaches twice as far as man is willing to reach. The creature’s failure is love’s chance.
It was so in my case.
Nor does love ever seek to amend itself with reason, logic, common sense. Love is the supreme reason, the matchless logic, the robust common sense. Love makes the ordinary things extraordinary, the common things uncommon, the weak things strong, the little things huge, the low things high.
Love knows that like attracts like, that love excites love, and to love the neighbour is to excite one’s love for God. “To love is always to know; but to know is not always to love.” The love that knows is spiritual. The other love is intellectual. In the former love redemption is present, release for the soul. The latter love has light without warmth. Spiritual love is the sun, both light and warmth. Intellectual love is the moon, a reflector of light, but not a generator of heat. Spiritual love is the Son of God. Intellectual love is the son of man, who has not yet dreamed what manner of man he is to be. Spiritual love is Christ-centric. Intellectual love is egocentric.
Intellectual love, therefore, cannot equal the power in spiritual love. But by the persistent and purposeful practice of intellectual love, spiritual love can be excited. At the point where the love thought fuses with the love feeling the miracle happens, healing takes place, order appears, the soul unfolds her wings.
Hence the needful thing is to love. There is no prison door visible or invisible, which love cannot open, no prison stripe which love cannot melt. There is no fear or worry which love cannot use to good advantage, not by forcing the fear out, but by transforming into lifting power the energy which fear and worry generate.
What, then, happens when the force of sin meets the power of compassion? Both the sinner and the compassionate are lifted up to the heavenly consciousness. “I am kept in heaven by the energy of sin,” said a saintly man to me one day. With bright, twinkling eyes, a glow of gratitude upon his face, he explained the process:
“The Lord sends the sinners to me. I sit down with them and do nothing but love them and listen to their troubles. They are filled with negative energy, which they pour out to me. My love for them transforms that energy as fast as they release it. Pretty soon they are empty. A peace has come. Because of their trouble we have both found heaven on earth. Being in heaven they are healed, and I am blest. We have served each other: the sinner serving most.”
Oh yes, there is miracle magic in the power of love.
THE INNER RADIANCE
Light and Love, the mind and the heart of God. Within every man the light shineth, though it be in darkness. God delays for man but He does not desert him. And “God is Light.” So proclaims the Scriptures: “This then is the message which we have heard of Him. and declare unto you, that God is Light.” (I John 5.)
In the darkness, both of my life and environment, I found that inner light that discovers God to man. This light dwells within every human being and is separated from the darkness, which is also within him. It says to the darkness, “Thus far and no farther.” In a lighted house we have an illustration of the eternal separation of the light and the dark. When the light comes in, the dark goes out, and when the dark comes in, the light goes out. The two cannot abide in the same place at the same time. The dark fears and hates the light, as evil fears and hates the good.
Locked up in the tissues of man’s brain and nervous system is this inner light the brightness of which completely swallows up the ordinary light of his intelligence. Many, by seeking the inner radiance, have found it. Once it has been loosed in a man he can never be the same. Thereafter he must give himself to it or suffer.
This inner light is the light of the awakened soul. Once awake she will never rest or sleep again until she has attained her complete emancipation. There is no suffering to equal that of the man who, having experienced the soul’s radiance, denies her dream of permanent releasement, and who refuses to co-operate with
