After the singing, on that first morning of Mrs. Booth's visit, she asked those convicts who wanted to lead a better life to stand up. About seventy men out of the five or six hundred arose, and the others remained seated. I was not among those who stood up. I never met anybody who could touch me in that way. I don't believe in instantaneous Christianity. I knew half a dozen of the men who stood up, and they were not very strong mentally. I often wondered what the motives were that moved the men in that manner. Man is a social animal, and Mrs. Booth was a magnetic woman. After I had heard her speak once, I knew that. She had a good personal appearance and one other requisite that appealed strongly to those who were in our predicament--her sex. Who could entirely resist the pleadings of a pretty woman with large black eyes? Certainly I was moved by this sincere and attractive woman, but my own early religious training had made me suspicious of the whole business. Whenever anybody tried to reform me through Christianity I always thought of that powerful Celt who used to rush at me in Sunday school with a hickory stick and shout "Who made you?" And I don't think that most of the men who profess religion in prison are sincere. They usually want to curry favor with the authorities, or get "staked" after they leave stir. One convict, whom I used to call "The Great American Identifier," because he used to graft by claiming to be a relative of everybody that died, from California to Maine and weeping over the dead body, was the worst hypocrite I ever saw--a regular Uriah Heep. He was one of Mrs. Booth's converts and stood up in chapel. After she went away he said to me: "What a blessing has been poured into my soul since I heard Mrs. Booth." Another hypocrite said to me on the same occasion: "I don't know what I would do only for Mrs. Booth. She has lightened my weary burdens." Now, I would not trust either of those men with a box of matches; and so I said to the Great American Identifier: "You are the meanest, most despicable thief in the whole stir. I'd respect you if you had the nerve to rob a live man, but you always stole from a cadaver." He was horrified at my language and began to talk of a favorite subject with him--his wealthy relatives. Some of these converts were not hypocrites, but I don't think even they received any good from their conversion. Some people go to religion because they have nothing else to distract their thoughts, and the subject sometimes is a mania with them. The doctors say that there is only one incurable mental disease--religious insanity. In the eyes of the reformers Mrs. Booth does a great thing by making some of us converts, but experts in mental diseases declare that it is very bad to excite convicts to such a pitch. Many of the weak-minded among them lose their balance and become insane through these violent religious emotions.