RELIGION WITH THE DEFECTIVE DELINQUENT
I venture to take the two following short articles from the November numbers of 1913 of the Survey, the most valuable weekly magazine which comes to my desk on all social questions:
“WHAT ABOUT JEFF?”
“Jeff is a white boy sixteen years old. I am estimating this, as Jeff says he doesn't know how old he is and doesn't know his surname. He has every appearance of being a little less than half witted.
“I found Jeff this morning working, with two other white boys and ten or twelve Negro boys, as an inmate of the County Workhouse. He was carrying stone on a public hitch-lot. One of the white boys and two of the Negro boys were in chains.
“Jeff has been in the workhouse for sixty days. He was placed there for beating a ride on a railroad train. Next Monday Jeff will be released. He will have not a cent to his name, not very good clothes, not a relative in the country, no place to sleep and nothing to eat.
“I have put this predicament before our city inter-church organization, and we have seen no solution. About the best thing we can see for this half-witted boy is that he will do something that will again bring him within the clutches of the law in order that he may be immediately sent back to the workhouse. At the age of sixteen he is a human derelict, yet he has capacity to work, to love, to respect, to enjoy, and to feel sorrow.
“There is another mentally weak boy in this same gang. If we knew what to do with Jeff we might be able to do more for the other one. What do you suggest?”—W. H. Swift, Greensboro, N. C.
“SUE AND JEFF”
“'What about Jeff?' was shown to a New York settlement worker. 'Print it,' he said, 'in the hope that someone may stir up the inter-church organizations of Greensboro to find another solution. The question is: What about that organization? rather than poor Jeff. He is a victim of wrong social conditions, plus his weak head; but if there is no one in his neighborhood who can see any other solution than the workhouse for a lad who has the “capacity to work, to love, to respect, to enjoy and to feel sorrow,” then I suggest that the community is worse off, a good deal, than poor Jeff. To begin with, why don't the inter-church organization take him under its own wing?'
“Now, it would be very easy for the inter-church organization of Greensboro to take care of Jeff if there were only one of him. Unfortunately, there are many hundreds of him. How many of the boys of sixteen sent to the island from the New York City courts are of Jeff's class? Nobody knows for certain, because nobody tries to find out. Those of us who have lived for years among defectives and have visited reform schools know that the number is large. Yet the inter-church organizations of New York City do not take them under their wings.
“The proportion of the feeble-minded Jeffs in various reformatories has been to range from twenty to fifty per cent of all the inmates. Every intelligent worker with prisoners knows there are many weak-minded among them; yet the usual method of treating the defective-delinquent (and every defective is a potential delinquent) throughout the United States is to do with them just what our Greensboro friend hopes to do with Jeff—send him to the workhouse as soon as he commits his next petty crime. And we keep on doing it over and over and over again.
“Meanwhile the proper method with the Jeffs and the Sues is so simple and plain, so patently economical in this generation, and so tremendously profitable for the next, that its very simplicity makes it neglected. The colony at Templeton, Mass.; the one just organized at Menantico, N. J.; the farm colonies at Fort Wayne, Ind.; Lincoln, Ill.; Faribault, Minn.; Columbus, Ohio; and Letchworth Village, N. Y., all point the way with greater or less success.
“Yet Letchworth Village was enacted by the legislature of New York nearly five years ago. Its first commission reported 29,000 suitable inmates pressing for care. To-day it has only 100 inmates; and the Inter-church Federation says nothing.
“It is not worth while to get all stirred up and excited about Jeffs in North Carolina. What have we to say about the defectives in jails, workhouses, penitentiaries, reformatories, and prisons under our noses in New York? Is our beam so big that we cannot see it?”—Alexander Johnson, Director Department of Extension, Vineland, N. J.
Now, that was the churches' opportunity. Federation work should see that a religious school should be started in each community for its Jeffs and Sues. A city rescue mission could easily find work for Jeff.
I saw a Jeff come into the Sunday school of my own church. He was a great lumbering chap of eighteen years of age, he was not quite clean, there was the odor of the unwashed about him. He immediately went to the class of about thirty young men of his own age. I was gratified to see that youth seek the society of the church people rather than the saloon, but he was not welcome with the young men. The teacher visited his home, there was no help to be expected from the home, so the teacher, or the class, whether by actual request or by treatment, caused Jeff to stay away. Now, in the great day of accounts, of whom will that soul be required? If the defective intellect, what there is of it, can be turned to believe God, the defective is prevented from becoming a criminal. We have them at the Gospel Mission. The very first thing is to have the physician talk to Jeff of the sacredness of his own body to absolutely prevent all secret habits which injure the body and brain, and the motive of self-restraint both for physical habits and for drink must be that these things offend a loving Saviour who walks with each one of us.
Each year I meet Dr. H. M. Freas, of Philadelphia, at Northfield. His work as a physician frequently takes him to the asylum for the insane. He feels most keenly that these institutions should be in the hands of Christian people only. Many a brilliant intellect could be restored to perfect sanity if the loving care of some saintly Protestant sisterhood or brotherhood were in charge to bring the human love, which even the sanest of us need, to bear on the tottering brain. These human deficients are found in the public schools; as soon as discovered they should be transferred to a religious school where they can be scientifically studied, what intellect they have developed, and the religious side of each one fostered. If then they are found permanently deficient, especially in the moral sense, or in physical self-control, then they should be segregated on farms for the sake of the race. People of deficient brains become fanatics; now, if these unbalanced people become filled with an enthusiasm of righteousness they absolutely do much good. They constitute three-fourths of the street preachers, and they reach many a soul who never enters a church. Religion prevents insanity. There is no doubt that fanaticism run riot leads to the asylum. We had one man who was insufficiently fed, badly clothed, who spent the entire night in prayer, two or three nights of the week. Of course, he was brought up in the insane asylum, but when he had food enough at the asylum where he was not permitted to pray aloud, he soon became normal, and was set free. It taught him a needed lesson.
But religion sustains us through the breaking ties of life, through the loss of fortune, through the defection of friends, through blasted hopes, through the anguish of children going wrong, and their punishment by the State which follows.
Religion holds many a woman whose son is a wanderer, either criminal or otherwise, from insanity. I know a woman who has not looked into the face of her wandering son for six years. She stands up and sings with radiant face, “I am going through whatever others do, I am going through with Jesus,” and in spite of what looks an unbearable sorrow, leads a useful and apparently happy life. A mission is a blessed thing for enthusiasts. It sends them with flowers and literature to hospitals and jails, it sends food to private families in need, it gives the enthusiasts tracts to distribute, it puts musical instruments into their hands and says, “Praise the Lord with pleasant sounds,” it sets women to repairing clothing for the poor, to caring for little children, while mothers earn money for food. As we do these things we talk religion, we tell of Jesus, the friend of sinners, we make a steady effort in very many directions to have each soul brought into harmony with God. In almost every instance where sorrow in a family has been the result of sin; and Jesus is allowed to become to each of them a personal Saviour; the home is electrified by a new enthusiasm; the parents become efficient, self-supporting, happy; the children become self-respecting; are taken from the class needing help; and become helpers. Religion eases the burden of life and heals the welts of adversity.
We have in Washington a club known as “The Monday Evening Club,” a clearing house for all forms of philanthropy. At the different banquets and at their monthly meetings all forms of reforms, from purely a humanitarian standpoint, are discussed, but we, who go at the open sores of the world with the only sure cure earth has yet received, the religion of Jesus Christ, we receive no recognition, we are given no hearing at banquets, and are never spoken of as part of the city's force for betterment, yet we comfort the prisoner, we bring hope to the hopeless, and we are the real protection of the city. No hungry man is turned from our door unsatisfied. A hungry man is a danger, a man with a hungry family is a menace. He will get food even if it costs a life to obtain it. Like Him whom we serve we are rejected of men. We work amid the social dynamite of a great city. Unless the religious part of this nation assumes its rightful place as arbiter in all labor troubles, saying to the rich man, “Thou shalt not defraud,” and to the poor man, “Thou shalt do no violence”; unless Christian people see to it that remunerative labor can be had by every person willing to work; unless Christian people close the saloons (the author of seventy-five per cent of the sufferings of the poor), on some sad day our great cities will be systematically dynamited. As Christians we must go down among them and make the broken man feel that he is only temporarily sidetracked from the great highway of success. That the grace of God and his own will can and will bring him back to the great highway of prosperity.
The Church is waking up to its full duty in social service. Bishop Simpson, even in his day, eloquently described the mission of the Church in the world: “The Church must grope her way into the alleys and courts and purlieus of the city, and up the broken staircase, and into the bare room and beside the loathsome sufferer; she must go down into the pit with the miner, into the forecastle with the sailor, into the tent with the soldier, into the shop with the mechanic, into the factory with the operative, into the field with the farmer, into the counting-room with the merchant. Like the air, the Church must press equally on all the surfaces of society; like the sea, flow into every nook of the shoreline of humanity, and, like the sun, shine on things foul and low, as well as fair and high, for she was organized, commissioned and equipped for the moral renovation of the world.”
In closing this chapter we cannot do better than to quote from the fourth volume of the Jewish Encyclopedia, which pays this remarkable tribute to Christianity:
“Christianity, following the matchless ideals of its Christ, redeemed the despised and outcast, and ennobled suffering. It checked infanticide, and founded asylums for the young. It removed the curse of slavery by making the humblest bondsmen proud of being a child of God. It fought against the cruelties of the arena, it invested the home with purity and proclaimed the value of each human soul as a treasure in the eyes of God, and it so leavens the great masses of the empire as to render the cross of Christ the sign of victory for its legions in place of the Roman eagle.
“The Galilean entered the world as a conqueror. The Church became the educator of pagan nations; and one race after another was brought under her tutorship. The Latin races were followed by the Celt, the Teuton and the Slav. The same burning enthusiasm which sent forth the first Apostles, also set the missionaries aglow, and brought all Europe and Africa, and finally the American continent, under the scepter of an omnipotent Church. Christianity is not an end, but the means to an end, the establishment of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.”
CHAPTER XI
Hereditary Sin
It was an exceedingly cold night when Jake Grossman burst into the mission, having on the apparel of a hotel cook. He did not take a seat, but marched to the front and prostrated himself at the altar, crying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” In such cases, no difference what we are doing, all formal program is suspended and we go at once to prayer. Jake was in deep earnest, men and women acquainted with God kneeled all about him, presenting his case to the Saviour of men. We did not then know his special need, but a soul in the depth of conviction wanted God, not for one sin, but he needed cleansing from all the sins of his past life. It must have been an hour before that soul received light. The choir had sung softly, “I'm coming home to-night,” and like melodies; others had come to the altar, been forgiven and gone to their seats, when Jake Grossman rose to his feet and rejoiced that he had found peace and pardon through the blood of Christ.
We found afterwards that Grossman was the son of the great Swiss engineer, who had planned the great tunnel through the Alps, whose genius had built bridges over roaring, impassable canyons, who had planned the electric roads in all parts of Switzerland, until he was wined and dined by scientists not only in his own country but in many countries, so that he had acquired the alcoholic habit, after which his brain became sluggish and at last he fell from his high estate, became a common drunkard and died poor. The memory of the wicked shall perish.
While he was yet prosperous, using expensive wines, his only legitimate son was born. The mother noticed that, as a child of six or seven, Jake wanted a sip every time wine was used on the table; by twelve he could drink a large glass of wine and not show drunkenness. By his twentieth year Jake was a drunkard, the father dead, the mother poor and heart-broken. Friends and relatives all advised sending Jake to America, where wine is not used on the table, and also to get Jake away from old companions.
He came with letters to good people, but alcoholism is not baffled by change of location. His money gave out, the people to whom he had been introduced refused to receive him. Fortunately his mother had taught him to cook, so he obtained a place as an assistant cook in a Washington hotel; later he developed into a first-class chef. When he came to the Mission he had been discharged for drunkenness, and now, being a redeemed man, he went back to the hotel, gave up his white clothing, gathered up his belongings, and sought other work.
That was five years ago. Jake has often been asked by the hotels of this city to cook for them at a salary of $100 or more a month, but Jake daily prays, “Lead us not into temptation,” and he does not knowingly walk into it. He shovels coal at a wage of $10 per week. He says, “You see, it keeps me in the open air; I do not have to taste wine or smell it; I get black on the outside, but I keep white within, which was more than I did as a cook.”
All the heroes are not in high places. “He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city.” We believe God cleansed Jake Grossman from inherited sin.