great care never to break a promise which it may make through any of
its Officers. Thus, if a man in jail is told that his relatives will
be hunted up and communicated with, or that an application will be
made to the Authorities to have him committed to the care of the Army,
or that work will be found for him on his release, and the like, that
undertaking, whatever it may be, is noted in the book which I have
mentioned, and although years may pass before it can be fulfilled, is
in due course carried out to the letter. Now, convicts are shy birds,
who put little faith in promises. But when they find that these are
always kept they gain confidence in the makers of them, and often
learn to trust them entirely.

The second and more potent reason is to be found in the power of that
loving sympathy which the Army extends even to the vilest, to those
from whom the least puritanical of us would shrink. It shows such men
that they are not utterly lost, as these believe; that it, at any
rate, does not mark them with a figurative broad arrow and consign
them to a separate division of society; that it is able to give them
back the self-respect without which mankind is lower than the beast,
and to place them, regenerated, upon a path that, if it be steep and
thorny, still leads to those heights of peace and honour which they
never thought to tread again.

This is done not by physical care and comfort, though, of course,
these help towards the desired end, but by its own spiritual means, or
so it would appear. Its Officers pray with the man; they awake his
conscience, which is never dead in any of us; they pour the blessed
light of hope into the dark places of his soul; they cause him to hate
the past, and to desire to lead a new life. Once this desire is
established, the rest is comparatively simple, for where the heart