The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

“That meeting is not far,” he is saying, “and it’s warm there. Won’t you go?”

“THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING, “AND IT’S WARM THERE. WON’T YOU GO?”

“Thank you, I will,” is my ready reply, and then he politely points the way down a side street on the left where, he says, a large transparency over the door marks the entrance to the meeting-hall.

The place is crowded with men—workingmen many of them—and many are plainly of that blear-eyed, bedraggled, cowering type which one soon learns to distinguish from the workers. Men pass freely in and out with no disturbance to the meeting, and watching my chance I soon slip into a vacant seat near the great stove that burns red-hot half way up the room. Ah, the luxury of the warmth and the undisputed right to sit in restful comfort! Again and again, in the afternoon I had sat down on the steps of some public building, but from every passing eye had come a shot of questioning suspicion, and once a patrolling officer ordered me to move on with a sharp reminder that “the step of a church was no loafing-place.”

Deeper and deeper I sink into my seat. A warm, seductive ease enfolds me. I dare not fall asleep for fear of being turned into the street. And yet the very hint of going out again into the shelterless night comes over me in the dim sense of fading consciousness as a thought so grotesquely impossible that I nearly laugh aloud. Out from this warmth and light and cover into the pitiless inhospitality of the open town? Oh, no, that is beyond conceiving! And all the while I know—such is the subtlety of our instinctive thinking—that it is the awful fear of this that conquers now the overmastering sleep which woos me.

The men are singing lustily under inspiring leadership and to the accompaniment of a cornet and harmonium. Short prayers are offered, and fervent exhortations, interspersed with hymns, are made, and finally the men are urged to “testify.”

I follow in vague anxiety the change of exercise, but, no clear idea reaches me; for in full possession of my mind is the haunting fear of a benediction which will send us out again. But while the men are speaking in quick succession there begins to pierce to the benumbed seat of thought a sense of something very living. Their speech, in simplest, homeliest phrase, is of things most intimate and real. They speak of life—their own—sunk to deepest degradation. They tell the story of growing drunkenness and vice, of hope fast fading out of life, of faith and honor and self-respect all gone, and at last the outer dark wherein men live to feed their passions and blaspheme until they dare to die, or death anticipates the courage of despair. And then the purport of it all shines clear in what they have to tell of a Divine hand reached out to them, of trembling hope and love reborn, of desire after righteousness breathing anew in a prayer for help.

Now I am all vividly alive and keen, for standing straight not far from where I sit, is a grand figure of a man. He is bronzed, deep-chested, lithe, and in the setting of his shoulders there is splendid strength, which shows again in the broad, clean-cut hands that quiver in their grip upon the seat in front. He has the modest bearing of a gentleman, and his unfaltering voice vibrates with a compelling sense of deep sincerity.

“I haven’t any story different from what you’ve heard to-night, but I, too, want to tell what God has done for me. When I got my growth I went West, and turned cow-puncher. I was young, and I liked the life and the men, and I went over pretty much all the western country, and there ain’t any kind of devilment that cowboys get into that I didn’t have a hand in. I never thought of God nor of my soul. I never cared. I despised religion. I thought that I was strong and master of myself. I drank and swore and gambled, and did worse, and it never troubled me a bit. But a time came when I found that I wasn’t master. There was something in me stronger than me, and that was the love of drink. And, friends, that was the beginning of the end. I began to lose my self-respect, and the end of it was that there ain’t a poor devil in this town that is sunk any lower than what I was. You know what that means. One night, a year and a half ago, I was walking through Harrison Street. I was half-drunk on barrel-house whiskey, and all I was thinking of was how I could get up pluck enough to kill myself. But I stopped in a crowd around some Salvation Army people. A man older than me was telling how he was helped by the power of God out of a life like mine and made a man of again. I liked the way he had, for he seemed straight. I waited for him, and he told me, all to myself, the story of Christ’s power to save lost men, and how He lived and died to save us. It seemed too good to be true. I’d known it in a way, but I never knew it was meant for me. And right away when I began to see that there was hope for me yet, that I could get back my self-respect, and be master of myself, not in my own strength, which had failed me, but in His strength, why, friends, my heart went right out to the Saviour in a prayer for help. And what I want to say most of all is this, that in all the hard fight that I’ve had since, in all the ups and downs of it, He hasn’t failed me once. He’s made my life new to me, and I love Him from my heart, and I know that in His strength I will gain the victory at last. Friends, what the Bible tells us about His ‘saving us from our sins’ is true.”