Chapter XXIX

THE STORY OF THE MIDNIGHT MISSION.

After many days and weeks of united prayer, that God would interpose against the destruction of young girls and young men in the shameful resorts of Chicago, I asked Miss Ella N. Rudy, on an August afternoon in 1904, at a meeting at 441 South Clark street, if she would come the next night, with a view to holding a meeting in Custom House Place, which at that time had half a hundred vile resorts peopled with about seven hundred ruined girls. Miss Rudy is a woman of strong and earnest Christian character, and I appealed to her because I knew that she would surely come if she promised. She hesitated a moment and promised to come. I then announced to the score of persons present that such as would like to join us should come the next night at eight o'clock for prayer and at ten we would go to the street. The announcement was received with intense interest. Pastor Boynton, who was chairman of the meeting, immediately asked permission to preach the first sermon, which was gladly granted. Fifteen devoted people stood with him when he came to preach.

Miss Rudy is now a missionary at Ping Nam, Kwang Sai Province, South China. On December 7, 1908, she wrote me:

"Yesterday the little Prayer Advocate came and in it I noticed your request for prayer for The Midnight Mission and I was reminded of the beginning of this most blessed work. I think I could point to the spot where you said, after telling the need so earnestly, 'Miss Rudy, will you stand with me, for the Lord says where two agree He will do what they ask?' I said, 'I will,' and we did pray fervently, for, having come in contact with Beulah Home and other refuges, I had seen the great need of going out to seek the lost. I remember our first night, when we hardly knew who would go with us. I put the permit near so if an officer came we could show it. I do praise God for the way He has blessed you in this work. I have never ceased praying for this work and have always held it up to others for prayer, as I have gone from place to place in evangelistic service. I was so sorry to leave Chicago, but God's call lay in another direction. I know I never was missed, for so many rose to their privilege in Jesus. But I would have been missed had I not come to China for we are so few in number here."

Before she went to China, Miss Rudy was at one time holding a gospel meeting in Pennsylvania, when a man came up to her and said: "You do not know me, but I know you. I heard you speak at midnight in Custom House Place in Chicago, and I have been a Christian man since that midnight."

As I was a missionary in India and Miss Rudy is a missionary in China, and as we constantly minister at midnight in the streets of Chicago to Chinese, Japanese, an occasional Persian, Hindu or Arab, French, Polish, Russians, Germans, Italians, Jews, and almost every nationality under heaven, The Midnight Mission has some features of a foreign missionary society.

A THOUSAND WITNESSES FOR CHRIST.

From the very beginning of this unique work many earnest people came to help us. During the five years past nearly a thousand persons have taken part with us—pastors, professors, deaconesses, foreign missionaries on furlough, evangelists, judges, lawyers, physicians, "Gideons" and other business men, and many good women. All these, with breaking hearts, have shared our midnight toil and peril, snatching the lost from the fire in the very vestibule of hell. Among the well known ministers, professors and physicians who have come to help in the meetings are: Rev. Dr. Cain, moderator of the Presbytery of Chicago; Rev. Robert H. Beattie, the recent moderator; Rev. Dr. John Balcom Shaw, pastor of the Second Presbyterian church; Rev. Dr. A. C. Dixon, pastor of the Moody church; Professor Graham Taylor, Professor Solon C. Bronson, Professor Woelfkin, of Rochester, New York; Professor G. H. Trever, of Atlanta, Georgia; Drs. Linnell, Pollack and Van Dyke—the last a lecturer in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which is the medical department of the University of Illinois.

Rev. A. H. Harnly, now an evangelist for the Baptist State Association of Illinois, has preached many times with exceptional power in our midnight meetings. Rev. C. A. Kelley, Rev. Ralph Waller Hobbs and Rev. W. E. Hopkins, formerly a missionary in India, have labored much in this cause. Scores of pastors of Baptist, Christian, Congregational, Episcopalian, Methodist and Presbyterian churches have preached from the little box which is our only pulpit, except when now and then a good friend brings his automobile and lets us use it for a pulpit.

Mr. Rufus S. Simmons, a lawyer, a personal friend of President Taft, is president of the mission since it was organized at the end of 1906; for more than two years there was no organization. Mr. Simmons very often attends the meetings and takes part. His partner, Mr. S. C. Irving, comes occasionally and speaks. Judge Scott of Paris, Texas, spent one night with us, and former Judge Devlin labors diligently.

Mr. C. E. Homan, president of the Chicago camp of "Gideons," an organization of Christian commercial traveling men, and many members of that order have steadily helped in this work.

Deaconess Lucy A. Hall, Miss Helma Sutherland, Miss Florence Mabel Dedrick, missionary of the Moody church, Miss Mary F. Turnbull and scores of good women have toiled with us in the night. No speaker is more interesting and alarming to young men than Miss Turnbull, who was formerly a nurse in an asylum for the insane in New York and knows why many of the patients are there.

One of the best addresses ever given in our meetings was by a young Jew, Mr. Nathan, a reporter, who asked leave to speak. For about forty minutes he spoke with the earnestness of a prophet, though he spoke more of temporal than eternal considerations. The sweat poured down his face as he reasoned of righteousness and temperance, with some reference to judgment to come.

Another friendly Jew, Mr. Richard L. Schindler, has come scores of times to our meetings, not to speak, but to use his influence to help protect us and otherwise encourage our work.

Still another friendly son of Abraham gave me information when enemies were plotting against me. He warned them that he would expose them if they did me any harm.

A HUNDRED THOUSAND FOOLISH YOUNG MEN.

Pastors and church people usually have no idea of the multitudes of men and youths from avenues, boulevards and suburbs, who swarm by the ten thousands through the vice districts of great cities on Saturday and Sunday nights, and by hundreds or thousands every other night. Fathers and mothers, sisters, sweethearts and neighbors are ignorant of the ruinous folly of several million American young men. I have counted them passing one street corner in the center of Chicago's red light district—red with the heart's blood of mothers, wives and babies—at the rate of 3,500 an hour. These are the young men of whom we read, "void of understanding" as the book of Proverbs fitly describes them. They gather by troops at the harlots' houses and throng the streets of shame without a blush. They are even ready to give reasons why they should support these slaughter houses, not knowing that "the dead are there and her guests are in the depths of hell."

One night I dreamed that I saw a young man stepping carelessly on and off a railway track, near a curve around which the express train might come thundering and screaming at any moment. Whether on the track or off it, the young man was indifferent to danger and wanton in his movements. But as I looked I saw in my dream, that there was nothing whatever above his coat collar—he had no head. This explained his recklessness. A hundred times I have told this dream to crowds of young men, to illustrate the folly of men who have heads and do not use them—"void of understanding." We have warned probably one hundred thousand of these foolish young men.

The Bible is always with us and always foremost. But some who would pay no regard to an open Bible in the street preacher's hand, instantly give heed when they see the Revised Statutes of Illinois open at the criminal code, and they listen carefully to the section which pronounces them criminal if they patronize an evil resort.

We quote to them the great utterance of Judge Newcomer, spoken before the Methodist Preachers' Meeting of Chicago, September 17, 1906, when he said:

THE CRIMES OF YOUNG MEN.

"The great majority of criminals now are young men—an appalling crop of them year by year. After seven and a half years' experience in the state's attorney's office, during which I have dealt with six thousand criminal cases, sending seven to the gallows and hundreds to the penitentiary and reformatory, I believe that the chief causes of crime among young men are: 1, Liquor; 2, Lust; 3, Drugs; 4, Bad associates. Of these, liquor, bad as it is, is not the chief cause of crime among young men. The chief cause is that next after liquor. The welfare of the city, of the commonwealth, of society as a whole, of the national life itself, is menaced, to a degree exceeding any other cause, by the social evil."

We have never hesitated to warn our hearers by the prisons, by the gallows, by the most tremendous issues of life, death and eternity.

INSANITY, SURGERY, BLINDNESS.

Some who are willing to harden themselves against the laws of God and man alike, lay to heart the evidence of a standard medical treatise on insanity when it is opened and read to them in the street. The description of the brain of a dead lunatic, who lost his mind and his life as the wages of the sin upon which they are bent, brings a pallor over the faces of crowds that seem nailed down to the pavement and unable to move away. Others heed the medical testimony concerning the fearful suffering likely to come upon their present or future wives in consequence of their iniquity. Modern surgeons attribute 25 per cent of surgical operations upon women—mostly innocent wives—to these sins against chastity. Statistics of the German Empire, Austria, Denmark, and Holland show that 40.25 per cent of the blind in the asylums of those countries owe their blindness, usually dating from earliest infancy, to one of the diseases associated with prostitution—not the disease commonly most dreaded.

We distribute leaflets specially prepared and attractively printed in two colors, telling plainly the criminality of vice and the ruin that it brings upon the body and brain and character of transgressors. We have printed more than 150,000 tracts and cards, which are eagerly taken by many thousands of young men, to the anger and loss of the keepers of the criminal resorts. The work of tract distribution is carried on in all weather, often when street meetings are impossible.

This educational work is carried on in friendly co-operation with The Chicago Society of Social Hygiene—organized by the Chicago Medical Society—which supplies us with circulars for this purpose. This feature of our work led to an invitation to our superintendent to address The Physicians' Club concerning the work of The Midnight Mission. Dr. Archibald Church, editor of The Chicago Medical Recorder, has asked for and accepted an article on this work for his paper.

IN RAIN AND SNOW.

"I respect you," said a divekeeper who with others has since abandoned his loathsome business, "because you work in the rain and you work in the cold." I find it equally blessed to be Christ's witness by the Martyrs' Memorial in classic Oxford, on the hot sand beneath the palm trees of Ceylon and India, and on a snowbank among Chicago's red lights. Everywhere large audiences stand eagerly listening to the messengers of God. Our midnight street meetings continue three, four, five, and even six hours at one place, in the summer.

CONVERSIONS—AND BETTER.

Several women have repented and have been cared for or restored to their relatives. But our effort has been chiefly directed toward the thousands of men and youths whose money supports the institutions that destroy manhood and womanhood alike. Hundreds of repentant men and boys have knelt in the dust of Custom House Place, Peoria Street, and Armour Avenue. In social and business position they range from a wholesale merchant and a fallen minister to gamblers and wrecks.

But what can be better than conversions—that make glad the heart of God? Nothing, except preventing the children of God from plunging into deadly sin. If the only good accomplished by our midnight cry were the prevention of the ruin of a dozen youths in a year, it would be gloriously worth while to keep on crying. But hundreds have turned back from the brink of perdition, including university students and Church members. With outstretched hands and glad gratitude, they say to us: "We thank you; you have kept us from sin tonight!" When we recall Dr. Prince A. Morrow's estimate, quoted by Dr. Howard A. Kelly in a paper read before the American Medical Association, that 450,000 American young men make the plunge into the moral sewer every year, we see what an enormous field there is for this preventive work.

One Sunday night a young husband from Racine, Wisconsin, whose wife was in poor health, listened to our plain words and turned back from the sin he intended. He had never been warned and he was very thankful; he told me he was a Catholic and had never gone wrong. Another evening a very handsome young man, twenty-eight years old, listened to the words of warning and then came to me quietly and said: "I am a Christian and a church member and I have never gone wrong, but I was just about to go into one of these houses of shame, while waiting for a train which is late, when I saw your gospel meeting and have been kept back from sin by your message. Most men would be ashamed to tell you, but I tell you for your encouragement."

IF THIS WERE YOUR SON.

Among the hundreds of repentant men and youths who have knelt in the dust of Chicago's most infamous streets, in the open air meetings of The Midnight Mission, is one whom we will call Joe.

One Saturday night Joe came to our meeting and told us that he was a gambler, a pickpocket, a drunkard, a libertine and worse—enticing girls from their homes and placing them in houses of infamy. He asked us to pray for him, which of course we did. Joe disappeared for an hour or so, but returned at midnight to our meeting, and at half-past twelve knelt in the street, with another repentant young man, confessing his ruinous and shameful sin.

For four years since that night we have kept in touch with Joe. We were obliged to advise his father—living in another state, an elder in the Presbyterian church, who never suspected anything wrong in his son—to take more interest in Joe, and not to take less interest in the class of other men's sons that he was teaching in Sunday School. On his own motion Joe told his father the whole heart-breaking truth. Unspeakably humiliated, the father proved himself a father indeed, and did everything in his power to restore the young man to a right life, at great cost to himself.

Joe now has his own home and his own business. He is a respected citizen, instead of—God knows what—most likely a despicable white slave trader in Chicago or Detroit or New York. He is one of hundreds who have heeded our midnight protest against terrible sin, our midnight testimony for the Lamb of God, who takes away sin.

ANTAGONISM—PROTECTION—TRIUMPH.

At the beginning of our work the keepers of evil resorts were respectful and to a degree friendly. During the second summer, 1905, the meetings increased very greatly in power. Sometimes we continued preaching from ten o'clock at night till three in the morning. Workers reached their homes after daylight, with hearts almost bursting for gladness because many sinners had repented. As many as fifty workers were engaged in the same block at once, holding four simultaneous meetings. All were working voluntarily and without pay. I myself was earning my expenses with my pen.

Thousands of misguided men had their attention called to the cross of Christ and the holy life every week. The revenues of the resorts were seriously diminished. One manager, who had been misled in his boyhood and genuinely regretted the loathsome life he was leading, said to me, "If you Christian people keep coming, we've got to go." The Christian people kept coming. That man has since quit his awful business.

With our increasing spiritual power, keepers of saloons and resorts became alarmed for their revenues and began to offer resistance. They hired express men to drive into our meetings and organ grinders to disturb us with their noise. On one occasion a cab driver was paid to drive at high speed into our meeting, where deaconesses and many Christian women were assisting. Many times automobiles were stationed near us and made as noisy as possible in order to harass us. They wasted some nice fresh eggs on us, and a melon. As we were proceeding lawfully, under legal permits from the police department, we called upon the police for complete protection. While an American patrolman was on the beat we had no trouble, but a foreign-born officer showed us considerable disfavor. We had our own opinion of the source of his ill-will. Chief Collins was entirely just and friendly and took all necessary measures for our protection.

At length, managers of resorts, saloons and gambling dens in notorious Custom House Place calculated that each hour we worked they lost $250, and they determined to give us "the worst of it" even if they had to hire thugs to slug me. We kept steadily calling upon God and faithfully preaching His truth. At length, near the end of October, such representations were made to Chief Collins that he ordered our meetings stopped at ten o'clock—when they began—on the ground that we were disturbing the sleep of lodgers in hotels two blocks away!

Thereupon, accompanied by Mr. Arthur Burrage Farwell, Miss Lucy Page Gaston, Deaconess Lucy A. Hall, Miss Eva Marshall Shonts and others, eleven in all, we called upon the chief of police, explained our surprise at being stopped in our work, which was entirely lawful, and requested him to cleanse that street of resorts which were entirely unlawful. This he immediately promised to do, on condition that we would not stir the newspapers or arouse public sentiment to compel him to do it. We accepted his word and awaited fulfillment. Two months later—namely, at Christmas, 1905, he notified the resorts, and published in the newspapers, that they must vacate on the first of May, 1906.

THE DIVES OFFER A BRIBE OF $50,000.

During the intervening months the white slave traders, gamblers, keepers of the worst disorderly saloons and some property owners and real estate agents who made money out of that precinct of perdition, raised a slush fund, employed an attorney and used every device in their power to gain a continuance of their nefarious traffic in the heart of Chicago—for they were between the Federal building containing the post office, and the Dearborn passenger station, used by the Erie, Grand Trunk, Santa Fe and Monon railways.

Mayor Dunne told Pastor Boynton and myself, at the Sherman House on the evening of March 15, 1907, when his political enemies were accusing him falsely of being the friend of vice, that the divekeepers offered him $50,000 if he would allow them to remain four months more in Custom House Place. Mayor Dunne, a man of the highest character, attested this statement by an appeal to God. Chief Collins had previously told me that the dives had made this offer but he had replied to them, "If you had Marshall Field's money you cannot stay there after the first of May, if I am chief of police, so help me God." No political or other influence could induce him to waver or to reverse his order, and when the first of May came he drove them out with a mailed fist.

Mayor Dunne told us that while he was on the bench the case of a Polish girl came before him, which had prepared his mind to act against the resorts if he should ever have power. This innocent immigrant girl had arrived at the Dearborn station and had been lured into one of the adjacent dens, her clothes taken from her, and herself made a white slave.

ON THE WEST SIDE.

In 1906 we worked principally on the vice-ridden streets of the West Side. After the earthquake in San Francisco many depraved women, with their parasites, took refuge in Chicago. These were very brazen women, and the vile young men who lived on their shameful earnings were cunning in thwarting the police. Conditions became insufferable. So wide open was the district that a secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association in walking four blocks on the sidewalk was solicited by sixty-two women from their open doors and windows. A police court justice was accused of assessing petty fines against these offenders when the police brought them into court.

We steadily preached the word and prayed to God to abolish those frightful traps for boys. We learned of one boy, a choir boy in a Methodist church, who was dragged forcibly into one of those dens, and infected with a disease from which he soon died.

Captain Barcal, of the Desplaines street police station, in plain clothes and unknown to the evangelists, visited our midnight gospel meeting in Peoria street at the corner of Randolph, Saturday night, September 15. Several repentant young men were on their knees in the dust, surrounded by missionaries working with them and praying for them. The captain said to Alexander Cleland, one of the secretaries of the Central Young Men's Christian Association: "I will not tolerate any interference with this good work."

One Sunday afternoon as we were working on Sangamon street a beautiful, sinful Jewess insulted me and justified herself by saying with a strong Jewish accent, "You spoil our business." The next Sunday or so a young Jew parasite succeeded in breaking up our meeting. Captain Barcal was indignant and took better care of us than ever. One Sunday a Jew said to me, "The girls say you have spoiled their business." Soon afterward a police order and the new municipal courts utterly transformed that region. Business interest were weary of such outrageous conditions and demanded a decisive change. Some months afterward a policeman remarked upon the transformation and explained, "The Lord's time came to work and He has been working." There is still very much to be done there, but the former flagrancy of vice has been abolished.

Mr. Henry De Vries, Mr. and Mrs. F. J. Macdonald and Mr. R. M. Hawkins worked with me during our conflict on the West Side. Mr. Macdonald was killed the next year by a train.

AT TWENTY-SECOND STREET.

For the last three years since our mission was organized, chiefly through the efforts of the Rev. Dr. John Balcom Shaw, we have labored mostly in the great vice district and white slave market at Twenty-second street. Of course we had no very glad welcome, after the preceding conflicts. I have been assaulted three times in that district and several who have worked with us have been roughly handled. Vile drugs have been thrown into our meetings and on our clothes—assafoetida and hydrogen sulphide. Viler words have been hurled into our ears. One French trader threatened to break me to pieces and send me to a hospital if it cost him a mint of money, but he afterward became friendly and finally quit his loathsome business.

Objection was made to our scientific teaching and circulars. Even the police captains, who have always taken splendid care of us, were influenced by our adversaries to object to our telling the young men about the diseases that are on sale in the resorts. Our circulars and the circulars of the Chicago Society of Social Hygiene were referred by the chief of police to the corporation counsel who promptly approved them. He said we were like the Knights of the Garter and our circulars not immoral but highly moral. We have circulated nearly a million pages of these circulars. Young men hear us gladly and accept the circulars with thanks. I have counted two hundred men listening at once to Evangelist J. R. Beveridge, who is very plain speaking, while he was working with us.

OTHER WORKERS IN THE NIGHT.

The Salvation Army and the Volunteers of America do not hold meetings in the vice districts of Chicago, but women officers of those societies do visit the resorts selling papers. At times both Salvationists and Volunteers have taken part in our midnight meetings. Many people passing our meetings suppose that we are from the Salvation Army, as it is believed to do such work. The Army has rescue and maternity homes and does much good work for the fallen, but the preaching in the vice districts is done by our own and similar recent organizations.

Rev. V. A. M. Mortensen, a Lutheran minister, has organized The Rescue League, which looks for support chiefly to the Lutheran churches. Mr. Mortensen preaches in the night, chiefly on the West Side. He is much interested in the work against the white slave trade. Through his agency Jennie Moulton was sent to Joliet under a sentence of twenty years for procuring young girls for some degraded Greeks. Mr. Mortensen has also been very diligent against dealers in obscene pictures and postcards.

Rev. N. K. Clarkson has worked part of the time with The Midnight Mission and part of the time independently. He has organized The White Cross Midnight Missionary Association, which is very diligent, preaching sometimes almost all night and never ceasing for rain or snow. This heroic work compels respect.

Dan Martin works Saturday nights in the vice district with a large company of devoted people. Hundreds of men and youths have knelt in the dust, confessing their sins, in Mr. Martin's meetings.

JUSTICE

E. A. B.