THE " CONVERSION " OF CONVICTS.
WE know of few things more unaccountable or unreason- able in popular temper than the indignation and disgust expressed in newspapers at the reported " conversion " of a prisoner under sentence of death. The journalists write as if
the convict, in uttering a few sentences, usually of rather con- ventional piety, or in warning his friends against bad courses, or in expressing a certainty of pardon, which, as a rule, sounds a little like the Etonian's certainty that the birch does not hurt, had outdone all his previous criminality. His confessions are "interesting," his defiances "bold," his conduct on the scaffold "manly," or even "heroic ;" but his piety, when he professes any, is always " sickening ;" and the unhappy chaplain, if he happens to believe in the convict's professions, or even if he states strongly the hope which he is bound by his faith to entertain, is set down privately as a nauseous hypocrite, and publicly as a very injurious kind of fool. We have read scoldings addressed to over-fervid prison chaplains which could hardly have been deserved by criminals of the second degree. Where is the sense of all that irrita- tion? Grant for a moment that a great criminal under sentence of death adds hypocrisy to his other crimes, professes, in the hope of interesting mankind, a faith he does not feel, or in an explosion of that vanity which seems to be the nearly universal foible of such offenders, expresses a certainty of spiritual forgiveness for himself—what has he done, that the world should be so irritated ? He has told one more lie, or acted one more scene, or deceived one more audience, and so far has added to his offences against God; but he has not com- mitted half such an offence as he would in strangling a warder in an effort to escape—which would be considered to his credit, rather than otherwise—and he has not offended man or broken the law at all. The notion that he has injured or insulted religion is, after all, very far-fetched. Nine-tenths of all who read his own description of his state of mind do not believe a word he says, think that he is only deceiving, and are no more moved than they are when a swindler appeals against his sentence because his wife and children will be impoverished by his im- prisonment. Religion is not injured because a hypocrite, in his extremity, thinks that a simulation of faith in it may bring
him some small pity, or even help. The very chaplain who encourages the criminal, and who, it should be remembered, is - exposed to a most terrible strain both upon his intellect and his nerves, does not, except in a very few cases, believe the profes- sions which he must, if he is to do any good at all, treat with a certain distant respect. The officials are utterly unmoved. The terrible work of the Law goes on, unregarding either penitence or repentance, influenced only by the past, and taking no heed of promises, true or false, about the future. Even the remaining one-tenth who do believe, and who, therefore, in the case sup- posed, that of a mere hypocrite, are taken in, are usually very little injured. They are confirmed, no doubt, in an illusion, in the erroneous belief that conversion is always a kind of miracle, that no kind of life, however evil, can prevent it, and that repentance can extinguish the past, as well as govern the future ; but that belief, besides being based upon an ab- stract truth, namely, that if God exists, his action must be free, and guided by rules beyond our ken, and knowledge of which we do not dream, has never in practice been found injurious to mankind. It is but an expression, in inartistic form of Scott's idea of the rieving knight who, "betwixt the saddle and the ground, mercy sought, and mercy found ;" or of the universal conviction of man that God's grace may be instantane- ous, and has repeatedly been noticed among the most saintly of mankind. Those who entertain it are not likely to imitate the criminal, nor can we remember, amid all the bizarre forms which human imbecility has assumed, that any one was ever moved to murder by the piety, real or hypocritical, of a murderer's death. If, indeed, the murderer professes piety in order to gain the attentive hearing which will en- able him to give a new stab to a victim, as we cannot but fear, despite all the charity due to the dying, that Peace did in his statement about Mrs. Dyson, that crowning crimin- ality may well call out an expression of dismay ; but we do not know that the real offence, the vindictive and causeless hatred carried to the grave, is very much deepened by the hypocrisy. It is but the final perjury of an habitual perjurer. In the great majority of cases, the profession of conversion is neither a hypocrisy nor a miracle, but an expression of a mood quite real for the time, upon which the clergyman, if a faithful man, as he often is, eagerly seizes, as the condition in which his exhortations, whatever their value, will have most effect. There are whole classes of men who only first realise their offences in any true sense of realisation when punishment is at hand, when they see how they are abhorred, when they are forced with death before them to consider themselves ; and their repent- ance then, though it may be shallow, is reaL Their terror might, if they have offended chiefly through unrestrained will, which must often be the case with murderers, be an enduring terror, giving to them, as it sometimes gives to the insane, and constantly to children, power over their own wills ; but, as a rule, they would probably fall away again, "conversion "usually being nothing but a resolve to change the character, in itself not suddenly changeable, which resolve may be too weak. It is not always too weak, and conversion, even instantaneous conversion, does occur, however rarely, and however peculiar may be the natures which are its subjects. The Christian cannot doubt that, yet accept as true the story of the thief upon the Cross ; and we do not know how the physicists doubt it, when they see tendencies, like the tendency to drink, which appear rooted in the very constitution—in the very blood of the body and material of the mind—conquered, and conquered finally, by a thought. That has happened within most men's experience, certainly in three separate cases within our own. Still, in the majority of cases, conversion under terror of death must be but a mood ; but it is a better mood than the ordinary one, one in which the man must be better fitted to enter the next stage, in which he must be more accessible, however slightly, to good resolves, to mercy, to self-restraint, and even to religious impressions,—which, be it observed, almost invariably, under such circumstances, take some form familiar to the convict in childhood. We cannot see any ground for irritation in such a mood, still less any ground for attacking the unfortunate clergyman, who, though rarely a man of special gifts or intellectual powers, the prison chaplaincy being seldom an object of desire, is often driven by the circumstances, and the long strain of attendance on the dying, out of himself and into a temporary .exaltation, like that of many a Judge, as after sleepless nights—we are writing on evidence—he pronounces the fatal sentence. The poor spiritual doctor tries to do his best for his patient, welcomes every gleam of returning health, and sometimes, no doubt, is unduly persuaded, partly by the symptoms, partly by. his own unconscious vanity, of the reality of an unreal cure. The physicists have seen such things surely, and do not feel specially bitter about them, and we do not see why they should feel so hard about a prisoxi chaplain's passing exaltation. His confidence in his convict's fate is no worse than the confidence of the priest, esteemed by so many good men all but sublime, who, with the strangest mixture of admiration for an innocent life doomed to a cruel end and reverence for a grand pedigree, said in all sincerity to Louis XVI., "Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven." Why the 'confidences between the convict and the chaplain should be made as public as they are is a different matter,—is, we suppose, in fact part of the publicity rendered necessary by the ignorance of the governing body. It would never do to allow the condemned man to pass from the dock into utter seclusion, to disappear, as it were, into space, for the people would never believe he was delta, and we should have fifty Claimants in a century ; and if any publicity is allowed, the truth of what occurs is safer than
the rumours, sure, in the absence of truth, to be invented and believed. The publicity of prison " conversions " is regrettable, but regrettable mainly because England is not yet civilised.
But this irritation,—what is its cause ? No doubt it proceeds in part from the irritation felt by the cultivated at palpable hypocrisy, the irritation of which dramatists and novelists have so largely availed themselves, and in part from the in- dignation which the very notion of conversion, and particularly of conversion by terror, calls up in sceptical minds ; but there is something beyond this, which we believe to be the instinctive liking of all men for consistency. There is a sort of wish— quite frankly expressed by the populace—that a great criminal should "die game," should be defiant to the last, should face Heaven as he has faced the police of this world, and a latent dis- appointment when the wish is unrealised. The convict who pro- fesses conversion, whether from hypocrisy, or from an experience of a change in his mind, or, as we maintain is the usual case, under the dominion of a mood, does not die "game," as regards supernatural powers at all events, but confesses that he is beaten, and desires to surrender and to be treated as a man who has cried quarter,—and that is a disappointment. It ought not to be one in any man's eyes, whatever his opinions, for if there is a future state, that is the only fitting mood in which a criminal can enter it—or anybody else, for that matter—and if there is not, nevertheless the submission is good for society, which is injured when a murderer suffers as if by a suicide rather than by a sentence ; but that, we are convinced, is in many minds the operating cause of the irritation at criminals' repentance. The instinctive feeling is for consistency in evil, OA in good. Let the good man never slip, or he shall be pro- nounced worse than the debauchee ; and let the criminal die as he lived, the bold, uncompromising enemy of all that is right ; not, as Mrs. Stowe puts it, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "run up a bill with the Devil all his life, and try to bilk him at the end of it." There are more people than Guy Mannering who rather admire Dirck Hatteraick, and it was that side of Peace,—who in reality was Glossin and Hatteraick in one--which struck the popular mind. His conversion was possibly pure hypocrisy, his " argument " for its genuineness being the absurd one that he faced death calmly, as if utterly unrepentant men had not died like wolves, or as if he himself had not been facing death on the gallows all his life ; but we see no reason why his hypocrisy should add to the hatred generated by his crimes. It was at least a con- fession that, in the mind of one of the bravest and wickedest of men, defiance of Heaven in face of death could bring him no advantage. Half England would rather he had been defiant,— but that is but a survival of the wild beast in our still half- savage race.
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