“So far as the efforts of religious people are concerned in this matter of criminal reformation, I say that their efforts are laudable. They certainly mean well. They devote time and money to the work; but they have no practical experience with criminals, and their efforts count for very little. It is sometimes claimed that, under the influence of prayers and preaching, the criminal’s heart is touched, he sees the error of his ways, he is converted; I do not believe it. As the word ‘reformation’ is ordinarily used, I know there is no such experience among thieves.”
It will not do to dispose of the subject by saying that there must be criminals in the world, and that we pay policemen to take care of them. No police force can entirely suppress crime; there are too many evil-doers to be watched, and each has his own style. Inspector Williams, of New York, an officer almost as widely known as Inspector Byrne, and who has had charge of the most dangerous precincts in the city, wrote recently:
“The general public, who look upon criminals as a class by themselves, are apt to think that one criminal is very much like another. This is not a fact. I have been a policeman for nearly a quarter of a century, and I have never seen two criminals who were very nearly alike in character. A Siamese-twinship in the annals of crime is unknown. When we enter the criminal world and seek to deal with its members from any point of view, we must look upon them individually, not collectively.”
All of which means that the only way to lessen the number of criminals is to see to it that wretchedness of the masses of population in our large cities shall not be allowed to send new recruits to the ranks.
CHAPTER XXI.
RELIGION.
OURS is the most religious country on the face of the earth. There are more churches to the square mile of city and village area than any other part of the world, not excepting the grand old city of Rome. They may not be all of the same denomination, but their attendants worship the same God. They may quarrel a great deal about points of faith, but on essentials they are, if not exactly one, so closely related that there is room for any amount of hope. About baptism and regeneration and sanctification and adoption and perhaps damnation they may differ frightfully; but all of them base their belief upon the Apostles’ Creed, and look for their spiritual inspiration to the law of the Old and New Testament, preferably that of the four gospels.
Religion is a life, whatever else it may or may not be. No person who makes any pretence of being religious declines to admit that his creed is the basis of the life which he would like to lead, whether or not he may succeed in making his practice conform to his principles.
That religion consists in proper life with a view to a life to come, or at least that it is so regarded, is proved by the custom which becomes more and more prevalent of judging men and women according to their religious professions.
There was a time when, if a man assented to a given form of faith, his life might be almost anything he pleased; and some of the most active “Defenders of the Faith,” as they styled themselves, whether they were Catholics, Protestants, Trinitarians or Unitarians, have been found among men who would nowadays not be considered fit to introduce into respectable society. The time when such things were has departed, and shows not the faintest sign of ever returning again. To-day a man’s religious profession is regarded as an assertion by himself of what he would have his life, and what he proposes that his life shall be judged by.
A cheering sign of the earnestness and sincerity of religion in modern times is that there is very little proselyting now. People who smile cheerfully at one another during six days of the week, do not glare and frown at one another on Sunday, as they used to do when meeting on their ways to their respective churches, and from the manners of members of different denominations meeting in business or polite society, no one could imagine or discern to what particular creed any one of those people subscribed. The Methodist, the Baptist, the Catholic, the Episcopalian, meet each other cheerily in business and in society, their families intermarry, they have business relations with each other, and no one in indorsing or cashing a business man’s note ever thinks of asking to what particular church he may belong.