He found some opportunities to breathe out the new-found hopes of his soul and the love of Jesus to the prisoners about him. Soon a revival broke out in the prison such as never had been seen before or since, and Jerry was the center of it all. He was pardoned in 1864, but when he got home he had no friends, no money, and he soon fell into bad company, and got to be a worse scoundrel than he ever was before. It was after this he became known as the dangerous East River pirate. He was reclaimed in 1868, and although he fell five times after that during the first eight or nine months, he was finally anchored to Christ.
Do you know that every drunkard uses tobacco? Jerry was no exception. Some faithful friends said to him. "Jerry, give up your tobacco for Jesus' sake," and he gave it up, and then he never fell afterward.
He was afterward married to Maria, his faithful wife, who also was redeemed from a drunkard's life, and in 1872 opened the world-renowned McAuley Mission, at 316 Water Street, down on the East Side, nearly under the Brooklyn Bridge.
He stayed here ten years, and then opened the Cremorne Mission, Thirty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, where he died in 1884, and had the largest funeral of any private citizen who was ever buried in New York.
The writer succeeded Jerry McAuley down there, and the work is going on night and day. Drunkards and thieves come in by the thousand, and, thank God, many of them are saved unto life eternal. The writer is also a convert of Jerry McAuley Mission.—The Life Boat.
OUTSIDE THE PRISON WALLS.
Free, free at last he left the dreary jail, And stepped into the dewy April night; Once more he breathed, untainted, God's pure air, And saw the evening star's sweet trembling light. How strange! how strange! and yet how strangely dear The old familiar turf beneath his feet! How wonderful once more to be alone Unwatched, unguarded, 'neath the sky's broad sweep.
Free! free again—but O, so old and worn— So weary with his wasted, ruined life— Full twenty years the cell, his only home— Full twenty years with hopeless misery rife! His thoughts sped backward till they reached that day When he had entered that grim house, a boy— Naught but a boy in stature and in years, But with a heart all bare of hope and joy.
For in a dreadful moment, crazed with rum, His hand had laid a fellow creature low, And for that glass of brandy in his brain Full twenty years of wretchedness and woe. And now, a gray-haired man, he walked again The very path his boyish feet had pressed So many, many years ago; And now he wandered lonely, seeking rest.
Where should he go? Where now his footsteps turn? No living soul was there to welcome him! No friend of all his youthful days he knew Would greet again this wanderer in sin. Unconsciously, he sought his boyhood's home, The low, white cottage he had held so dear; 'Twas standing in its old accustomed place, But strangers had dwelt there for many a year.