Dreamers Rise: Tracts (2): Jerry McAuley's Story

Saturday, June 24, 2017

Tracts (2): Jerry McAuley's Story

Me father was a counterfeiter, and ran away from justice before I can remember him. There was a lot of us, and they put me with me grandmother. She was old an' a devout Romanist, an' many's the time when she was tellin' her beads an' kissing the floor for penance I'd shy things at her just to hear her curse an' swear, an' then she'd back to her knees. I'd got well beyond her or anybody by the time I was thirteen. They let me run loose.

I've posted a bit at various times about New York City's Water Street Mission, founded by ex-convict Jerry McAuley. This little leaflet was published some years after his death in 1884 by the Free Tract Society of Los Angeles, which, like the Water Street Mission, apparently still exists. The Free Tract Society was founded in 1897, and this copy bears a handwritten date of 7-11-45.

The text of the tract loosely follows the narrative of McAuley's colorful story that was published in versions issued while he was still alive, but the wording and punctuation seem closer to the text published by Helen Campbell as "Light in Dark Places: Jerry McAuley's Water Street Mission" (Methodist Magazine 1893) and in a book entitled Darkness and Daylight. Campbell claimed to have received the narrative verbatim from McAuley, and it's quite possible that he could recite it from memory. Below, for comparison, is the corresponding passage from McAuley's own Transformed, Or, the History of a River Thief: Briefly Told, "published by himself" in 1876. This "original" version (below) doesn't play up McAuley's dialect, although it preserves the convert's anti-Catholicism.

I was born in Ireland. Our family was broken up by sin, for my father was a counterfeiter, and left home to escape the law, before I knew him. I was placed at a very early age in the family of my grandmother, who was a devout Romanist. My first recollections of her are of her counting her beads, and kissing the floor for penance. I would take the opportunity while she was prostrated upon her face, to throw things at her head, in my mischievous play, and when she rose from her knees, it was to curse and swear at me. At such times I can distinctly remember thinking, though I could not have formed the thought into words, "What sort of religion is this that requires such foolish worship, and allows such sinful ways?" I can trace my infidelity to Rome to just these incidents.

In the margins of the page above are a few printed lines of unattributed verse, noteworthy for a pungent rhyme of "illy clad" and "will he had." (From other sources I gather that the versifier responsible was one Francis S. Smith.)

Poisoned by alcohol, blear eyed and illy clad,
Cursing his fate as he shuffles along;
Crushed and bereft of the once earnest will he had,
Penniless, homeless, jeered by the throng.
Friends have assisted him, pastors have prayed o'er him,
He has been rescued and lost o'er and o'er;
Oh, do not give him up,
Pull from his lips the cup,
Tell him of Jesus and try him once more!

The margins between the last two pages bear this plea:

Don't let this tract die, pass it on.
All Tracts Free, as the Lord permits, as this work is
Conducted on the Free-Will Offering Plan
Free Tract Society (Inc.)
746 Crocker St., Los Angeles, Cal., U. S. A.