Prisons and Prayer; Or, a Labor of LoveWheaton, Elizabeth Ryder
Religion
Prisons and Prayer; Or, a Labor of Love
Wheaton, Elizabeth Ryder
Evangelistic work; Prisons
The following day, traveling from this prison to another stockade,
sitting near me in the car was an aged gentleman who on seeing my
Bible asked me where I was going. When I had told him, he asked me the
nature of my work and how the prisoners were treated in these places;
also how I was received by the officials of the prisons generally.
Thinking to only entertain a kind old country gentleman, I told him
many things which I probably should not have been so free to mention
had I known who he was. He asked me many questions about the
stockades. I told him that I had never been so cruelly treated as at
a camp on the previous day. "Where," he inquired, "Who did such a
thing?" In answer to his inquiry I told him who it was. Little did I
know that this was God's way of revealing sin.
A MEETING AT DAY DAWN.
Reaching the small station at the foot of the mountain; we had to take
a box car only large enough for six persons. The old gentleman was one
of the passengers also. Going to the house of the captain at the top
of the mountain (such a lonely place), he thought it impossible to
have a meeting with the men, as he said they were so wicked and
unruly, etc., but finally said I might do so at day-break the next
morning. He was very careful, saying, "These men are so wicked and
cruel that never could a woman stand before them." I wept and prayed
most of the night and cried, "Oh God, can you let me fail now?" In
those early years of my labor I traveled much alone but later I
usually had a sister accompany me, or sometimes a sister and her
husband.
Out in the prison yard at break of day I found hundreds of men all
ready to go down into the coal mines. I wondered how to gain their
attention and make them all hear my voice. I asked to have the men
drawn closer together, as they stood in the prison yard. This being
done, I sang a hymn. Oh how I do praise God for the gift of song! I
forgot my weird surroundings and the rough appearance of the men and
their dangerous looks. I saw them as little boys in the old home far
away and then as human souls, hurrying into the presence of God and I
felt that I stood between them and the Judgment. Conceive, if you can,
how this company must have looked to me, bound in companies of perhaps
fifty in a "gang," to a long strong chain to which was fastened a
number of shorter chains; these short chains being fastened to the
men's ankles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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