“I do not think a chaplain ought to be required to inspect and pass upon the incoming and outgoing mail of prisoners. In the first place his training and education unfit him to read between the lines of letters that need inspection, while the mental drudgery imposed upon him, if he carefully reads all outgoing and incoming letters in a prison of ordinary size, unfits him for the proper work of his office. Besides, the knowledge that he has read all their correspondence prejudices against him many prisoners and renders his efforts to help them vain. “I doubt the wisdom of placing him in charge of the library in a large prison, save as a general adviser and aid to the prisoners in enabling them to select helpful books to read, and this work can be done during his visits to the prisoners in their cells and dormitories. This visitation is the most important work that he can do in the prison, and should on no account be omitted. The preaching service that he renders will be far more helpful and acceptable--as will also his Sunday-school instruction--if it grows out of and is tempered by his experience in cell visitation. A pastor who wishes to become helpfully acquainted with the inner life of his parishioners does not summon them one by one to his office for interviews and see them nowhere else. No more can the chaplain follow that plan and hope to succeed with his parishioners. “Sometimes a warden deems it his duty to apply certain portions of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians to his chaplain and require him to ‘bear all things, believe all things, hope all things and endure all things’; therefore it behooves the chaplain to be at all times as ‘wise as a serpent,’ and sometimes ‘as harmless as a dove’; but where the occasion arises (which fortunately is but seldom) for the chaplain to use the language of rebuke, it calls for the highest quality of courage, and the chaplain who then shirks or quails stamps himself as unfit for his high office. “If the prophet Nathan, when he sought that interview with Israel’s king, had hesitatingly remarked that he had a very unpleasant matter to talk about, which might get into the newspapers and create a royal scandal, etc., the proud monarch would probably have kicked him downstairs. But the fate of a great nation depended upon his courage and when he said, ‘Thou art the man,’ his shaft of truth pierced the joints of the royal armor and brought the monarch to his knees. Comparing small things with great, even so may the fate of a public institution sometimes depend upon the fidelity to duty of one who esteems himself the least among all its officials, and when his word is backed by high courage and a consistent and blameless life, it may prove more potent for good than the utterances of wardens or commissioners or governors.